# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S217
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lucas Osiander on the Right Way of Preaching to the Simple. 217

-prior transformation, taken with him into heaven. What then is left for
the beloved city and the camp of the saints? And further, one must
consider that the resurrection stands in intimate connection with the
"new birth," with the renewal of the earth which the Lord announces,
and that one does not see why, if heaven is the fitting abode for the
resurrection, it should not follow at once upon the passage into the life
beyond; further, that it is scarcely conceivable how, after so mighty an
intervention of the world beyond into the course of history, the utterly
severed thread of that history should ever be tied together again;
finally, that the whole hypothesis is plainly nothing but a shift born of
embarrassment, since neither Christ's descent to earth nor his return
with the risen and transformed is indicated by so much as a word. — The
Apocalypse passes very quickly over the thousand years, because the
state which they bring, though more satisfying than the one before, is
nevertheless by no means an absolutely satisfying one. John hastens on
to the new heaven and the new earth and to the new Jerusalem, which
comes down from heaven adorned as a bride for her husband. The
thousand years cut a rather bare figure in the Apocalypse, especially
when the seat of the risen is placed in heaven. This want the friends of
the millennial kingdom have felt; they seek to fill it out with fictions,
but only make it the more conspicuous thereby. Pastor Flörke, for
instance, supposes that during the thousand years the glory of the Lord
will be visible in the opened heaven — not, to be sure, over the whole
earth, but only "in that Palestine of the will of God which reaches from
the Euphrates and Lebanon to Egypt." Under the immediate direction
and blessing of this "glory in the opened heaven," the natural world too
is to stand. To this are added manifold visible appearances of Christ
and his angels and of the risen, in the midst of the believers. But this
sits ill with the further claim that the world, nonetheless, is still to be
"no wonder-like transformed one," but rather "a world such as it is
today, of sinners and children of death, who sin greatly every day." It
is a mixing of the incompatible undertaken wholly on one's own
authority, an objectionable encroachment upon the territory of the new
heaven and the new earth. Churchly theology, which disdained such
things, has, among other things, the further advantage of the sharper
thinking."
(To be continued.)

———

Lucas Osiander on the Right Way

of Preaching to the Simple.
(From W. Beste, The Most Distinguished Pulpit Orators, etc.)

Lucas Osiander, abbot at Adelsberg and general superintendent from
1596 to 1598, writes in the preface to his Bauernpostille, among other
things, as fol-