# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1860_S242
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

242 The So-Called Thousand-Year Kingdom.

worldly state, consisting of rulers and subjects, those who command and those who obey — this view "strikes him as so foreign" that he expressly asks not to be confused with the Missourians, which is hereby also conscientiously done on our part.
(To be continued.)

The So-Called Thousand-Year Kingdom.

(Continuation.)

"We now wish to give an overview of the view opposed to Chiliasm, the opinion according to which the thousand years already belong to the past, according to which we live in the time in which Satan has again been loosed from his prison, in which reawakened heathendom storms anew against the church, and whose end is the resurrection, the Last Judgment, and the new heaven and the new earth.

The Revelation of John is no anticipated compendium of church history. So far as it relates at all to particular individual events of the future, it confines itself to indicating a few great turning points, namely those which stand in relation to the historical point of departure of the book: a severe and bloody persecution by the beast, the heathen world-power, and specifically the Roman phase of it. Ranke* says: "From whatever point one may seek to grasp the development of the new centuries, almost every time one is led back to the Roman Empire, which, in subjugating the old world and being overwhelmed by the new, forms a center for the whole of history." At this decisive point the Apocalypse also begins. The first world-historical point prophesied in it is the judgment upon the woman who sits upon many waters, the new Babel, which holds dominion over the kings of the earth — Rome. As the instruments of this judgment, ten kings are named, who hate the woman and lay her waste. These kings, or kingdoms, realms — for that is what the kings mean in the usage of the Apocalypse — at first pay homage, like the woman, to the beast; they are devoted to heathendom, but it is not long before they are conquered by the Lamb. In the principal description of this Victor in chapter 19:11–21, everything points to the fact that the mission of Christ here is at first one of wrath and of judgment. But that this judgment, carried out through the bloody struggles that arose among the destroyers of Roman dominion, is only meant to prepare the way for grace and to crush the hardness of the kings, so that they take upon themselves the gentle yoke of Christ, so that it falls under the saying: we must enter the kingdom of God through much tribulation — this is made plain from an earlier passage, chapter 17:14, where, with reference to the ten k-

* The Serbian Revolution, p. 1.