# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1860_S147
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Against Chiliasm. 147

By this means their own deviations from the general Christian doctrine are justified and legalized. Indeed, its own standpoint — the general loosening of the confession — becomes itself the one publicly valid in the church. The church no longer stands upon the confession, but upon that shifting scholarship which is forever remaking itself out of Scripture and philosophy. Thus the Union is to it the condition of its existence, and is to it the means of its dominance. In no other circle of believing Christians, therefore, is zeal for the Union so great — indeed so stormy — as in this school." For this very reason, however, the mediating theology's interest in the Union also goes far beyond what the concept of the Union, what the Reformed and Pietist interest in the Union, actually is — namely the reduction to indifference of the distinguishing doctrines between the Lutheran and Reformed churches — and aims instead at a reduction to indifference running through the whole confession of the church, so that every doctrine hitherto held would lose its fixed form and meaning, would be "set into flux," and then the manifold, opposing presentations of the same would be granted equal warrant within the church." Stahl then shows how this is done by the very school of Schleiermacher, and how the mediating theology does it. The latter, in the theory of confession held by Julius Müller.

Against Chiliasm.

Thus writes Hengstenberg in this year's preface to the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung: "In the interest of expecting the thousand-year kingdom as something still future, men seek to depreciate as much as possible what took place in the eighteen centuries of the Christian church. . . By such depreciatory judgments a man robs himself of the firm ground for hope in what is to come, and comes into conflict with the promises of Christ, that he would be with his own always, to the end of the world, and that the gates of hell would not overpower his church. One comes dangerously close to Judaism with its doctrine of a Messiah still to come. Men go so far as to wish to apply the name "kingdom of God" only to that imagined thousand-year kingdom, while designating the whole earlier age by the supposedly lower name of "church." That such a setting of church against the kingdom of God is unbiblical lies plainly in view. That the church is for all time, that she belongs not only to this world but also to the world to come, follows simply already from her being designated the body of Christ, Eph. 1:22, 5:23. If the head is eternal, then eternal duration must also belong to the body. The eternity of the church is expressly asserted in Ephesians 3:21, according to which Christ is to be honored in his church throughout all ages. A reaching-over of the church into the world to come is also attested — even if by "church" here one understands the church of this present world — by Hebrews 12:23, where mention is made of the church of the firstborn, who are enrolled in heaven. For if even the church of this present world has its own proper