# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S170
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

170 On the Question of the Ministry and Its Consequences.

Lutheran church; but with individual persons who do not yet clearly perceive
the danger of chiliasm for our whole confession, and who cannot yet come to
terms with certain passages of Scripture, we are willing to deal in brotherly
love and patience ... We have not attacked the chiliasts who have long been
going about among us more or less veiled; rather .. after Löhe's well-known
sermon had been recommended to our congregations — the one in which he gave
out his gross chiliasm for divine revelation and portrayed his opponents as
ossified people and stiff-necked enemies of divine wisdom — we were surely
bound in conscience to defend ourselves ... Where chiliasm has become a
matter of the heart, it permeates all doctrines and brings forth a wholly
different care of souls and a different congregational life than what springs
from Lutheran doctrine, however much a man may assure us at the same time that
he stands perfectly upon the Confessions. That assurance rests on
self-deception. If we will hold sacramental fellowship with such men, then we
bring our church, that is, the last remnant of the old Lutheran church, into
the Union as well. We are not relieved of the Union merely by titling
ourselves evangelical-Lutheran and protesting against the unions between all
sorts of differing doctrines made by princely church governments. The Union
sits in the flesh and blood of us all [i.e. it has entered into us
thoroughly], and if we mistake flesh for spirit, we make a new, voluntary
union, which before God will be no better than the enforced one. What, then,
do we want? I think, above all things, the truth in love. If the one truth no
longer binds us together, what is our fellowship then worth? ... Or shall we
give up our brethren from the outset as incurable and quietly let them run on
with their chiliasm in the church? Is that to be evangelical love? Well, that
too seems to us unionist, but not Lutheran. Did Christ institute his sacrament
so that untruth should be covered over with it and left to rest undisturbed
under such a lid? So the Union has done hitherto ... If we no longer have the
strength of soul to contend by God's word for the pure truth amid the scorn of
the whole world, then we ought quite calmly to return under the cloak of the
Union, or better, of the Roman bishops. No, the truth is worth a man's living
wholly for it and suffering for it too, if it must be. Do we then risk less in
this struggle than the chiliasts? I think much more; for they will truly have
the whole swarm of the pietistically, methodistically and carnally minded to
stand by them. The spirit of the age fights for them, as it is embodied in the
worldly-religious. Therefore we reject the church-government wisdom of this
age, which wants first an assurance of outward peace (a lying peace), and then
at most a comfortable dispute over a cup of coffee. The whispering and
muttering we condemn just as much; and likewise the demand that we recognize
as Lutheran the man who bows to the cover and title of the Book of Concord and
yet wants to give out an entirely different doctrine as God's truth. With
open, honest people, on the other hand, who for God's sake and conscience'
sake believe they must contend for