# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1860_S247
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The So-Called Thousand-Year Kingdom. 247

but rather in the first instance toward the bright heights of heaven, where the perfected righteous are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple, where they shall hunger and thirst no more, neither shall the sun nor any heat fall upon them, and then toward the new Jerusalem with its pure river of living water, clear as crystal. The establishment of a paradisal state, a transfiguration of nature, is accordingly not to be thought of within the thousand years. They belong to the domain of the "former things," Isaiah 65:17, Apocalypse 21:4, not to the domain of eschatology, of the last things, into which Chiliasm would gladly transpose them. Hand in hand with the greatness of the sufferings goes the greatness and gravity of the sins. The sufferings are, as it were, the echo of the sins, the divine answer to them.

Of the most decisive importance, however, is the answering of the question what is to be understood by the woman who sits upon many waters — that is, has great resources — in chapter 17:1, and by the Babylon the Great identified with her, by everyone's admission, in chapter 14:8 and 18:10. That this woman, this new Babel, is Rome is acknowledged almost universally. Some, however, understand by it the old Rome, others the papal Rome, either by itself alone or as the chief representative of the degenerate church. As soon as the former view proves to be the correct one, the thousand years must necessarily belong to the past. For they begin immediately with the Christianizing of the nations who hate the woman and lay her waste, who destroy Babel the great city."

Hereupon Hengstenberg gives the grounds that lead him to hold this woman to be the old Rome. They are, in brief, the following: 1. The immediate purpose of the book is to comfort and strengthen the believers in the bloody persecution that proceeded from the old Rome. 2. The whole of church antiquity, under the dominion of Rome itself and in the course of its fulfillment, has understood by the woman and Babylon the old Rome. So Tertullian, Lactantius, Jerome, Orosius, Irenaeus, Augustine. 3. Heathen Rome is also elsewhere in Holy Scripture designated by the name Babylon. So Zechariah 5:5–11, 1 Peter 5:13. "For that it is this new Babylon that is to be thought of, and not the old one, is clear, apart from many other reasons, from the fact that early Christian tradition attests Peter's sojourn in Rome, whereas it knows nothing whatever of a sojourn in the ancient Babylon, long since lying in ruins and fallen prey to wild beasts." 4. "From the very name Babel one will at first think of a purely political, and indeed a heathen, greatness. For that is what the old Babel was. In keeping with this name, the character of Babel and of the woman upon the many waters is, throughout the Apocalypse, everywhere a purely worldly one." 5. Revelation 17:18 says of the city that every one of the first readers would immediately have thought of: she has dominion in the time of the seer. 6.

According to Revelation 18:20, God avenges the apostles upon Babel. "Only the old Rome had anything to do with the apostles." 7. According to Revelation 16:19, Babylon can