# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S52
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

52 Conversion of the Jews and the Thousand-Year Kingdom.

fanciful traits, and moreover a temporary punishment of those not fully proved*) lasting until the second resurrection. The many aberrations that arbitrary and fantastic interpretations of the Apocalypse have brought about should surely have made the author wary of grounding a doctrine — one that, if it were well-founded, would certainly belong among the most important of all Christian articles of faith — upon a single, and after all doubtful, interpretation of the Apocalypse. But he closes the whole with the words: "'These are the outlines of the Christian doctrine of hope according to Holy Scripture. Whoever does not have this hope, and does not have it fully, also does not have full and living faith, and cannot be full and living in love either.'" If one relates this "fully" — as indeed one hardly can do otherwise — also to the author's own peculiar doctrines set forth above, this would amount to a formal anathema against the relevant article of the Augustana. Our confessional writings have been under attack for a century from enemies of evangelical Christianity; Christian believing souls ought therefore in fairness to consider carefully before helping, for the sake of a few poorly grounded notions, to spread contempt for our confessions among the people." — The second chiliastic writing reviewed in Reuter's Repertorium at the place cited is: "H. Karsten, Superintendent in Schwerin, The Last Things. Hamburg, 1857." In it, according to the review, the following is set forth among other things: "The thousand-year kingdom is from the outset not merely the final, but the actual and exclusive purpose of the work of redemption; whatever lies between the founding of the Church and this return of Christ is not a real and essential component of the divine plan of salvation, but is a delay in its execution for which we are answerable. Pious interest, the reviewer adds, must accordingly direct itself away from the history of the Church toward its future, miraculous breaking-through. The thousand-year kingdom, according to Karsten, will have its reality here on earth, namely at Jerusalem and in the Holy Land, whither believers will be called from all regions of the earth. Nature will accordingly be transfigured, though not as a whole, but only a part of it, namely Jerusalem and Palestine. The organization of this kingdom is not a worldly one, not like the present state or the present church; the whole congregation, blessed in the vision of God, has a priestly character; there is no distinction of rank or estate; the power of the love of Christ is the sole ruling will. Hence there is no worldly government; yet there is also a real dominion present, namely on the part of the children of this kingdom over those outside it on earth

*) This is a kind of purgatory, though Lessing does not want this word used.