# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S171
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Question of the Ministry and Its Consequences. 171

chiliasm, we are gladly willing to deal again and again .. We greatly fear
that some would make of the Lutheran church a free association of people of
all sorts of pietistic and otherwise fanatical mind, whose only quarrel with
the Union is its excessive broad-heartedness toward rationalists and the like
... It is unintelligible to us when it is said: „„Christendom is truly rent
enough already; why should we Lutherans make still more rents?““ Against whom
is the reproach .. to be made? Against the dear God, against the Lutherans, or
against the heretical? Was Christendom in the year 1517, or in 1834, not also
rent enough? The rending began with the rushing wind of Pentecost and will
probably not cease until the last day. Who has a right to think that for us it
is not rent enough? The Lutherans, we think, have never rent it, and they
certainly will not do so today either. But if certain unlutheran men turn away
from the truth, then they will tear themselves loose; probably, however, they
will not want to give up the name Lutheran along with it, and will then entitle
those unlutheran and unchurchly who wish to abide by the old truth. And these
latter will then, besides their other sufferings, have to suffer this as well,
and be mocked into the bargain. It will then perhaps be declared the most
unlutheran thing of all to remain faithful to Lutheran doctrine. The beginnings
are already here, and this too will probably yet come. Further it is said: so
long as the non-chiliasts do not give an interpretation of Revelation 20 that
can appear acceptable to an unprejudiced mind, one must simply let chiliasm
stand. We ask: who has the unprejudiced mind? The chiliasts hold themselves to
be the unprejudiced. Or have certain people perhaps the promise of representing
impartiality, so that we might safely take counsel of them? ... If a man will
let himself in for such indefinite impartiality standing above the parties, ..
then we are wholly lost — not only in the struggle against chiliasm, but in the
struggle against unionists, Reformed and Anabaptists; for they all likewise
suppose that we have as yet given no explanation acceptable to an unprejudiced
mind of the passages which they falsely adduce for their false doctrine. But
chiliasm too is nothing else than unionist, Reformed and Baptist stuff. What is
further said about the resurrection .. is only one corner of chiliasm .. The
question is not whether individuals .. rise before the last day; but whether
the glory of Christianity must reveal itself and culminate in a thousand-year
kingdom, outwardly glorious in the world, in which Christ, palpably visible,
with the risen righteous and at the same time with the poor believing sinners
on earth, shall triumph over the rest of mankind. Of our Christ and our kingdom
of heaven we deny this, and the chiliasts assert it of theirs. These are truly
no trifles, nor merely matters of the future; rather the whole of Christianity
is here conceived differently. To us the kingdom of heaven is completely