# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1861_S203
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Guide to Chiliasm. 203

this world, My servants would fight for it; condemned is the doctrine that
the congregation of the saints is to set itself in worldly power and erect a
worldly kingdom, or a theocracy, for the extermination of all the ungodly, be
it by conversion or by the sword or by mere outward subjection. At the bottom
of this lies the false doctrine that the Church should make flesh its arm and
exchange the sword of the Spirit for the iron sword, or make it effective by
it. With this false doctrine fanaticism has cast off its mask and let its
real face be seen. However high it pretends to fly, and however
super-spiritual it seems to be, it nevertheless springs from the flesh and
lusts after what is of the flesh. The appointed means of grace are never
enough for it; God's Word is to it the letter, the sacraments taste to it of
creature-worship. Spirit, spirit! it juggles and raves; and because the
Spirit will not present Himself at its command without Word and Sacrament,
the flesh must do its best in order to help a little onto its feet the Spirit,
who of Himself is far too helpless and who, throughout the whole time of the
Church from the apostles onward, has never yet been able to accomplish
anything solid or complete. Precisely for this reason the chiliasts of purest
water do not wait until Christ comes and sets up the theocracy; they go on
ahead of Him and order the lodging. Chr. Hoffmann moves to the promised land,
Joh. Bockhold to Münster, the Mormons to Utah, in order to set up the madhouse
in advance:

Given this fleshly nature of chiliasm in all its shapes and families, it
cannot surprise us that in so-called gross chiliasm it appears completely
fleshly. This is the oldest chiliasm, as it was first taught by Cerinthus,
and it will also be the last, as the Mormons show. If one wants to know how
it conceives the thousand-year kingdom, let one picture a Mohammedan paradise
with a thousand pleasures and joys, where there is everything that titillates
the senses and satisfies the lusts, where man's highest purpose is to enjoy
life and to drain the cup of joy to the last drop without its ever being
drained. To this chiliasm, to be sure, probably only the Mormons now pay
homage. But I do not doubt at all that the terrifying dominion of chiliasm in
our time is connected with the dominion of materialism and of material
interests. Chiliasm is the materialistic keynote of believing Christendom,
which it now likes to call realism, according to Oetinger's well-known and
curious saying: "Bodiliness is the end of the ways of God."

The future of chiliasm. Chiliasm is the formation of the Church, or of
the state of God, on the soil (out of the principle) of fanaticism. This
exactly fitting definition needs only a few additions. More or less, all the
sects already rest on this soil, and the Roman church quite especially. But
because the latter long ago reached the completion of its chiliastic
formation,