# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S212
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

212 The So-Called Millennial Kingdom.

our Lord Jesus Christ will come at the Last Day, to judge, and will raise
all the dead, will give the believing and elect eternal life and eternal joy,
but will condemn the godless people and the devils to hell and eternal
punishment." Hence the objectionable thing in Chiliasm lies in this, that
it overturns the boundaries set by Scripture between the two worlds, the
old and the new, in that it teaches a resurrection before the resurrection,
a kingdom of glory before the Last Day. But that much it has in common
with the cruder Chiliasm even in its refined form. It can hardly be meant
in earnest when it has been said*): "Our doctrine of the millennial kingdom
is not the Chiliasm condemned by the Augustana, for the latter places the
thousand years before the resurrection, whereas we place them after the
resurrection." It is plain that the resurrection meant in the Augsburg
Confession is the general resurrection at the Last Day known to the
Church. We are not of the opinion that with this clarification of our
Church's basic confession against Chiliasm the matter is settled for good.
But this much seems clear to us: that the zeal with which Chiliasm is now
not infrequently brought into the pulpit in southern and western Germany
oversteps the bounds of a legitimate churchly freedom and thus works
toward the dissolution of the Church. The minister will always be bound,
in the exercise of his office, to respect the confession of the Church so
long as the Church itself has not altered it. But let us pursue further the
course of history. In the further course of the sixteenth century and to
the end of the seventeenth, the doctrine of the millennial kingdom found
favor in the Lutheran territories only among a series of otherwise notorious
false teachers and fanatics — so with the Arian Joh. Erasmi, with the
melancholy enthusiast Ezechiel Meth, with the Rosicrucians. Even in the
Reformed Church it remained an isolated occurrence when a noted
theologian, Joh. Piscator, the author of the most widely used German
Reformed translation of the Bible, maintained that "the martyrs alone
would rise before the general resurrection and reign a thousand years with
Christ in heaven."

The matter took a new turn when Spener, in the year 1692, published his
"Assertion of the Hope of Better Times." In it he professed himself a
Chiliast, but after his own fashion, in a more refined form, and in such a
way that he blunted it as much as possible and sought to take away its
offensiveness. He confined himself to maintaining that the thousand years
of the Apocalypse were still future and that a glorious state of the Church
was to be hoped for — an assertion for which churchly theology offered a
significant handle, inasmuch as it still held fast to the view that the
Babylon of the Apocalypse, the woman who sits upon many waters, was
papal Rome. If this is so, then the ten kings who destroy the woman must
still be future, and likewise the thousand years which follow only upon
Christ's victory over the ten kings. (?) This consequence, to which churchly
theo-