# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S200
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

200 The Struggle within the Prussian Lutheran Church.

might perhaps hold it against us that we speak openly about this matter; yet we do not belong to ourselves, and have no secrets to keep here either, where it is openly taught this way and that from the housetops. Ehlers, too, has long since written about it, and the other direction is generally known under Pistorius's name. So we are not saying secret things. Both sides quite openly claim, each, to represent the true Lutheranism. Ehlers has already, it seems, charged us in advance with separatism, if we do not conduct ourselves toward chiliasm just as laxly as he himself does. The other direction, now, can indeed bear a great deal as long as one keeps still about it, but all the less once its ""organism"" is touched. Here we come, to speak figuratively, between two stones, of which the one seems hard and is soft, while the other seems soft and is hard. Our opinion, to be sure, is not to fold our hands in our lap, or even to issue decrees in part and swallow them in part. Christ has called none of us to that, and so we have not come to that either; but we think that all three of us can and should deal with one another as brothers, if only we are willing to be candid. The matters are truly important enough, and we are obliged to take a clear stand before everyone, and especially before our brethren. What good does all our labor and toil do us, if in the meantime truth and unity in the truth slip away from us? Should one, then, still act secretly and speak in riddles and say hush, hush?!" "It was indeed a bad thing that there were always chiliasts among us; at bottom they even held the mastery, only not under that name — now what was hidden comes to light. Now we can and must not keep silent. It is too late to hush it up, since the fire is already breaking out through the roof, and what has hitherto ruled under a veiled name in our synodical union now wants, under the name of the long-condemned Anabaptist chiliasm, to gain open recognition among us and thereby undisputed mastery. And how remarkable — the actual chiliasts do not stir themselves in the matter at all; it is Ehlers (who at every opportunity eagerly assures us that he is not one, yet has recently not concealed his wish that someone might succeed in showing this doctrine to be ""grounded in Scripture,"" Kirchenblatt of this year, p. 31 below) who seeks to fight for their entry without a mask."

Further, Pastor J. Diedrich writes: "It is not only recently that the contradiction has struck me, in which the principles underlying our synodical resolutions stand against Lutheran doctrine; rather, already before my withdrawal from the Union I pointed to it publicly in Guericke's and Rudelbach's journal, and I have never concealed my position since, having become Lutheran, I joined our synodical association. At that time my objections were not disputed, and I was consoled with the synods that recur every four years, at which people would surely always make improvements. So I have taken all pains, but can, unfortunately, hope less and less that anything sufficient will be accomplished there in the three weeks of the