# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S46
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

46 Preface to Volume 1860.

fellow believers in the faith to pray daily and confess: "And at the Last Day will raise up me and all the dead." These words no gross chiliast, who believes in a particular resurrection unto the thousand-year kingdom, can make his own confession without a Jesuitical reservatio mentalis, unless he were, strangely enough, certain that he himself would be excluded from the thousand-year kingdom! But why do we cite individual passages of our confession? Have not all believers, and especially all the holy martyrs, as long as there has been a Christian Church — the gross chiliasts alone excepted — in life as in death, in speech, prayers, and hymns, confessed aloud as with one voice, down to this very hour, the certain hope of their future resurrection on the Last Day, so that there is scarcely a single orthodox book of doctrine, devotion, preaching, prayer, or hymnody that would not have to be altered in many places if the chiliasts' dream of a particular resurrection before a still-future thousand-year kingdom and before the resurrection on the Last Day were true.

The same holds true also of all the other characteristic marks of gross chiliasm given in the resolution of our Synod — namely, that by it there is contradicted, in part, the article concerning the nature of the kingdom of Christ in the world as an invisible kingdom of faith and of the cross; in part, the article concerning the Last Day as an event to be expected by the Christian at every moment; and in part, the article concerning Christ's visible return as an appearing to be expected only for the execution of judgment upon the living and the dead.

To keep peace, then, and pull in one yoke with those who, by their new pseudo-articles of faith founded on their private interpretation of prophetic passages, overturn — or at least render uncertain, wavering, and vacillating — those theoretically and practically so highly important old articles of faith of the whole holy Christian Church: that we will not, that we cannot do. No; however great the enjoyment our poor heart would feel, especially in these latter, troubled times, in peaceful fellowship with all who profess to be Christians and Lutherans, and however heavy, indeed truly dreadful a cross it is for us to have to separate ourselves from so many otherwise lovable persons — God's truth, and the salvation of mankind built upon it alone, stands higher with us. The multiplying of rifts and separations cannot hold us back, for where there is no unity of doctrine, the rift and the separation have already occurred, and it is not the orthodox but the heterodox who is responsible for it. What good does it do us to have a large, outwardly assembled Lutheran Church at which the worm of spiritual disunity gnaws? Such a church we leave to the Unionists. Let, then, an ever greater number of those whom we