# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S214
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

214 The So-Called Millennial Kingdom.

-virgins. Unlike Spener, Petersen taught a double coming of Christ, a
double judgment, and a double resurrection. Before the thousand years,
Christ would descend with the trumpet of God and the voice of the
archangel; all those who had believed in him from the beginning of the
Christian Church would rise and, in glorified bodies, hold judgment and
reign with him; the believers still living would be transformed and caught
up with him into the air. With all this, however, a remnant of the wicked
would still remain, who would be judged after the end of the thousand
years. These views were defended by Petersen and his wife in a veritable
flood of writings.

Churchly orthodoxy offered decided resistance to Chiliasm for a
considerable time. Petersen was — after even a responsum of the
theological faculty at Helmstädt, which represented a freer tendency,
had in the year 1692 come out to the effect that he, "since he would not
desist from spreading Chiliasm, should be removed" — deposed by
judgment of the consistory from his office as superintendent in Lüneburg.
His autobiography relates the interesting proceedings, in which he lists
a long series of cases in which opponents of Chiliasm are said to have
been struck by sudden death, loss of eyesight, withering of the arm, and
other grave bodily afflictions. It gave him great satisfaction when, immediately
after his removal, he received a letter from the Court President,
Herr von Knyphausen, in Berlin, with the news that the Elector invited
him to take up residence in his lands and was granting him a pension;
the President himself had recognized the divinity of the Asseburg
testimonies and wished to add something further on his own account. In
the quiet and obscure seclusion in which he built his little estate at
Niederdodeleben near Magdeburg, he consoled himself with the thought
that the Lord would set him over ten cities in the millennial kingdom.
Worse still than Petersen fared a pastor named Stier, in the region of
Frankfurt am Main. He came under suspicion of having composed an
anonymously published, fanatically chiliastic tract in the year 1724, and
was for that reason imprisoned. After he had proven that Petersen was
the author of the tract and that he himself had only had it brought to
print, he was indeed released, but was nevertheless obliged to make public
apology.*) What a firm stand churchly orthodoxy maintained against
Chiliasm, even on theological ground, is shown by the Timotheus Verinus
of the devout opponent of Pietism, the Dresden chief court preacher
Löscher. As the chief ground against Chiliasm, he urges — as had Jo.
Gerhard before him — the objectionable confounding of the present and
future world, of which it makes itself guilty, and the alteration of the
doctrine of Scripture and of the Christian confession concerning the
resurrection. He also points out, further, "that one despairs of the
present constitution of the Church, and regards all improvement made
to it as nothing but useless patchwork

*) Walch, Religious Controversies within [the Lutheran Church], etc., vol. 2, p. 614.