# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S169
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Question of the Ministry and Its Consequences. 169

naturally without the latter's defects ... According to this doctrine the
millennial men receive their comfort from the beholding and visible descent of
the Christ glorified before their eyes, not from beholding his cross and his
wounds, nor through word and sacrament. What conclusion lies nearer than
this: therefore Christ's suffering and dying have only a temporal meaning?
.. Christ in the clouds does away with Christ the crucified, and with him
certainly ... the whole doctrine of justification. There we should be
standing in the midst of rationalism again ... And in what sense will faith
still be able to be spoken of there? Surely only in a very outward one. Is
not faith a sure confidence of that which one hopes, and doubts not of that
which one does not see? And does not faith come from preaching? But here the
millennial Christianity comes from the sight of miracles. That is no longer
faith according to the Scriptures. What, then, is the finest assurance to
comfort us with, that in this millennium the doctrine of justification will
still hold good? No — if this millennium has truth and reality, then the
whole Reformation and all its doctrine have come to nothing. It is out of
despair of that Reformation that this whole view of the people and of the
Scriptures first grew up ... As a proof of the close connection between the
pietistic-fanatical character of chiliasm and the Romanizing spirit of church
government in neo-Lutheranism .. nationality .. is of high importance ...
Formerly Paul declared: in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek nor
Scythian; but now men teach ... that nationality, state, law and the like ...
are being prepared and ripened for eternal glory. („„Nationality as such is
redeemed and preserved for eternity; Christianity cannot be consummated
otherwise; the church in its perfection is a great world-state; therefore it
is even now essentially in outward institutions, within Christian states, and
it cannot be otherwise; the historical church is the true church of Christ,
and everywhere, therefore, alongside the order of salvation stands the church
order as equally divine and holy.““) With this it also agrees that in many
places men now praise as churchly what Luther condemned as soul-destroying
routine and idolatry — namely churchgoing for its own sake, even to false
teachers *), and everything bound up with such a dead church system ... For
this reason the law counts for so much in the church — not the ten
commandments (for that, rightly understood, would be a fine thing), but
church statute and what is now called church government, from which Luther,
in his own view, had at least freed us in conscience .. We hold that chiliasm
is the child of Pharisaism, and if we take it in we have death from it, and
the last little flame on the hearth goes out ... Pastor Ehlers .. desires an
open declaration whether we .. could hold sacramental fellowship with
chiliasts or not ... We concede to chiliasm no right in the

*) Men would also have those acknowledged as praiseworthy preachers who unfurl on
their banner the words "God, virtue and immortality."