# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S45
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to Volume 1860. 45

to hate an error with the whole heart. This at once robs the eye of the keenness needed to distinguish truth and error precisely.

Ehlers finds the article of a general resurrection of the dead on the Last Day — which the gross chiliasts undeniably offend against with their so-called first resurrection of the body — neither in Scripture nor in our church confession. As for Scripture first of all, we need only point to John 6:39, 40, 44, 54, where the Lord, four times in succession in a single discourse, promises all who believe in Him that He will raise them up "on the Last Day." Whoever demands still clearer sayings for our article of faith, we gladly confess that clearer ones do not exist; but we must add that whoever finds such sayings not clear enough cannot be captured by the Bible at all, but can, with regard to all Christian articles of faith, deny that they are contained in the Bible. Ehlers does indeed appeal to Enoch, Elijah, and those who, after Christ's resurrection, already went forth from their graves (Matthew 27:52 and 53); but evidently with great injustice. These are individual, actual exceptions, which confirm the rule rather than abolish it; whereas the assumption that either all believers, or at least all martyrs, will rise bodily more than a thousand years before the general resurrection of the righteous and the unrighteous, does not concern individual exceptions, but is something quite manifestly self-contradictory, and abolishes entirely the very concept and doctrine of a general resurrection. That this article is also contained in our confession can, we think, only be missed by one who has already taken sides so decidedly for the opposite that he overlooks what actually stands written. The Augsburg Confession, Article 17, plainly says: "It is also taught that our Lord Jesus Christ will come at the Last Day to judge, and will raise up all the dead, will give eternal life and eternal joy to the believing and elect, but will condemn ungodly men and the devils to hell and eternal punishment." Rechenberg, therefore, gives in the appendix to his well-known edition of the symbolical books, as the characteristic mark of the gross chiliasts condemned in the 17th article, their assumption of a particular resurrection; he writes that the 17th article of the Augsburg Confession is directed "against the gross chiliasts, Anabaptists, Rosicrucian Brethren, Paracelsists, who assume, before the general resurrection, a particular resurrection of believers, which they call the first."*) Yet it is not necessary to go as far as the Augsburg Confession; already in the children's Bible, in the beloved little Catechism, Luther teaches every Lutheran, for himself and for all his

*) "Contra Chiliastas crassos, Anabaptistas, Fratres roseae crucis, Paracelsistas, ante universalem resurrectionem particularem quandam fidelium statuentes, quam primam vocant." [Against the gross Chiliasts, Anabaptists, the Brethren of the Rosy Cross, and the Paracelsists, who posit a certain particular resurrection of the faithful before the universal resurrection, which they call the first.] See Appendix tripart. isag. Ed. 5, p. 186.