# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S210
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

210 The So-Called Millennial Kingdom.

sentatives of chiliasm wrongly place so much weight on these ancient witnesses for it. Men such as Justin Martyr and Tertullian are of high significance for all ages of the church through their vigorous, primal faith. But to bind theology to their authority would be utterly wrong. They belong, despite so many bright spots, still to the childhood state of theology, altogether, and quite especially with regard to the interpretation of Scripture. Holy Scripture stems from above; there the perfect stands at the beginning of the development and as its condition. Theology, by contrast, is a human science, and must necessarily develop itself, little by little, out of meager beginnings. How slight these beginnings still were at that time can be shown quite clearly precisely from the statements made about this doctrine itself. The two men on whose authority chiliasm especially relies, Justin Martyr and Tertullian, are still so little oriented that they draw together into one what the Apocalypse distinguishes so strictly — the thousand years and the new Jerusalem — without paying any attention to the fact that between the two lies the great apostasy and the storming of Gog and Magog against the beloved city. Tertullian says (in the work against Marcion, Bk. 3, Ch. 25): "We confess that a kingdom is promised to us on earth before we come into heaven, in a new condition, namely for a thousand years after the resurrection, in the divinely built city of Jerusalem, which will let itself down from heaven." According to Justin, the pious spend the thousand years "in Jerusalem, which is rebuilt, adorned, and enlarged." It is furthermore not to be overlooked that such chiliastic doctrine was never the generally acknowledged one in the church. Justin expressly says that many, even among God-fearing and rightly believing Christians, do not agree with this view*), although he cannot refrain from afterward still insinuating that adherence to this point also belongs to complete orthodoxy. In the letters of Clement of Rome, of Ignatius and Polycarp, in the apologetic writings of Tatian, Athenagoras, and Theophilus of Antioch, no trace of chiliastic opinions is found. The aversion to chiliasm was in several so lively that they were thereby induced to reject the authenticity and canonical standing of the Revelation of John, whose understanding was at that time still in a state of infancy, and whose offense they were not yet able to remove by way of interpretation. That was a heroic remedy, but one can hardly blame its application, given how matters stood at the time. Chiliasm has so decisively the sayings of the Lord in the Gospels, and the rest of the books of the New Testament, against it, that when one or the other had to go, it was better to reject the Apocalypse than, on its basis, to acknowledge chiliasm and thereby draw down a glaring

*) "Moreover, I have signified to you that many even of those Christians who are of pure and pious mind do not recognize this."