# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S262
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

262 The So-Called Thousand-Year Kingdom.

sion of the church, instead of grounding it on the utterances of God.

10) It is folly to deny the decision of Scripture, when the decision of the church has not yet taken place.

11) Whoever acknowledges no orthodoxy prior to the symbolic establishment of the articles of Christian doctrine declares collier's faith to be the only correct one.

12) The demand which the defenders of open questions make upon Christendom is godless, for it demands, in effect, equal rights in the church for the contradiction against the heavenly doctrine of the truth as for that doctrine itself. Of two mutually contradictory doctrines, only one can be the right one; the other must be false doctrine, a lie, and error.

13) It is a temptation of Satan when those who have rightly recognized the truth from God's Word are called upon to put this truth in doubt.

14) It is a grave sin and a great blindness to despise the light long since given to the church by God, in the expectation of obtaining a better light from the confused theology of the nineteenth century, a theology itself "impoverished even in ordinary human understanding."

15) Scripture calls those men of deranged minds who are ever learning and never come to the knowledge of the truth — and who for that reason wait upon the decision of the church.

16) To turn articles of faith into open questions is heathen, papist, and unionistic all at once. For by it revealed truths are turned into problems, the church is set in the place of Scripture, and the distinction between truth and error is abolished in parts of the Christian faith.

The So-Called Thousand-Year Kingdom.

(Continued.)

In refutation of the arguments raised against him, Hengstenberg advances the following. Since Rev. 18:2 announces the downfall of the city which, according to Rev. 17:18, holds dominion over the kings of the earth, and since this heathen, world-ruling Rome has indeed vanished down to the last trace, it cannot be objected that Rome still stands, and that therefore the Christian Rome must be understood in Rev. 18:2. — The claim that the expression "harlot," throughout the whole Old and New Testament, designates the apostate congregation of God is refuted by the fact that the expression is also used, in Isaiah 23:15–18 and Nahum 3:4, of worldly cities, namely of Tyre and Nineveh, and that the Apocalypse alludes precisely to these passages. "There is a twofold figurative