# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S173
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Question of the Ministry and Its Consequences. 173

things that are already condemned in the seventeenth article of the Augsburg
Confession ... The matter concerns, as is afterward admitted as well, a wholly
different conception of Holy Scripture, particularly of the prophetic word. It
concerns two fundamentally different kinds of Christianity. For to interpret
the prophets .. on fundamentally different principles yields a different
Christ; for Christ is, by his own declaration, precisely the fulfillment of the
prophets. Now the chiliasts read out a wholly different Christ from our poor
one of Nazareth; they get one with great splendor and high power outwardly
already in this world, and him we reject as a false Christ ... In that essay
the chiliasts claim true progress for themselves over against our false
stability, and exhort us to the modesty of harboring mistrust against what we
call pure doctrine ... They think we have the fathers (tradition) for us, while
they have biblical Christianity. Extraordinarily modest .. In our opinion our
forefathers rejected chiliasm precisely on the ground of Scripture. But the
chiliasts speak against us and our forefathers just as contemptuously as the
rationalists once did .. Let our opponents only not act as though they were the
biblical ones and a certain Luther had simply not known the Bible aright ...
Löhe calls our old doctrine an old homespun faith, says that in sickness the
Spirit gave him new illuminations which the others have not had; speaks of a
new outpouring of the Spirit against which we harden ourselves; preaches a
Christ with whom Jew and Greek count for something, indeed one who is yet first
to bring the true glory — far beyond that in the word of truth — by an
appearing within this world-order; preaches a church that is to have her glory
in wondrous appearances and outward forms, and her highest beauty in the Jewish
nation. We ask him for God's sake, is that merely a different tendency? And
what is a different tendency in the church of Christ? .. We trust to Löhe's
human honorableness that he will acknowledge the fact along with us, that we
are going different ways („„as we have just heard from a sure source, Löhe has
affirmed this as self-evident““), that we form and lead souls in divergent
directions if we both go on as we are .. No, it is not toleration from us that
the chiliasts desire, as they pretend, but unconditional dominion over us. We
can tolerate them, and have done so for many a year. Now they demand in God's
name that their spiritual inspirations be acknowledged as high progress ... Our
opponents say openly that they mean to improve the inherited Lutheranism by
chiliasm; and we maintain that by this they entirely overturn it — far more,
indeed, than if someone brought in old Reformed or Roman matter. Ehlers thinks
... the chiliasts do after all expressly accept the Confessions, so we should
have to recognize them that far. Here it comes to light with what right he
reproaches us with being doctrinaires who cling slavishly to the old. And are
the whole Confessions worth nothing if a man accepts them outwardly and in a