# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1861_S204
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

204 A Guide to Chiliasm.

it rejects chiliasm insofar as it is to refer to the future. The Roman church
would call itself in question if it wished only to hope from the future what
it already claims to possess now. It is otherwise with the sects. They are
laid out and constituted chiliastically, but given their outward impotence,
their continuing fragmentation, their frequent decay, they fall far short of
the archetype of their chiliastic thoughts and are therefore compelled to
transfer it into the future. The chief passage of Scripture for chiliasm,
Revelation 20:1-8, has in this a subordinate significance, inasmuch as it
really only furnishes the frame into which pictures from the Old Testament
are inserted at will, after these have been chiliastically distorted. But
since the sect spirit — and that not merely among the sects, but throughout
the whole domain of Protestantism — has come again to life and consciousness,
it sees all the more painfully and clearly how deep the churchly decay is
alongside it, and how very dreary the times are in spite of all revivals.
Hence its fanatical fancy hurries off into the distance and seeks the lost
and not-yet-recovered paradise on earth. Everything that is called a sect,
and everything that goes visiting among the sects or has a sectarian vein, is
chiliastic in our day. Chiliasm is the great chief and fundamental confession
which binds and makes brothers of all fanatics — gross, fine and finest — in
all churches and communions, however great their doctrinal differences may
otherwise be. The denier of the Trinity gives his hand over chiliasm to the
one who confesses it, the Anabaptist to the Lutheran, the man of the state
church to the free-churchman, the Pietist to the mediating theologian,
America to Europe, and the majority cherish chiliasm like a firstborn son. A
veritable giddiness seems to have been poured out over Christendom, and in
many places one dare not say that one is no chiliast, or one is stared at
like a man who denies the existence of God. This is especially the case in
America, the hothouse of fanaticism and of materialism. Here too the
experiment with fanatical revivals has been most successful, and I do not
doubt that these in their turn have again given nourishment to chiliasm.

Let one therefore drop the error of supposing that chiliasm is a mere
doctrine. It lies in the air; it is a pestilential breath that passes through
the air, or it belongs to the evil spirits that rule in the air, and its
dominion is terrifyingly great. To all appearance it has at least among us
not yet reached its high point; but in spite of the unexpected resistance
which it has met in the Lutheran Church, it seems still to be rising until it
shall have fulfilled its destinies. Its dreams it will indeed never see
realized; they are a Fata Morgana that displays castles in the air and lures
into the sand. But its spirit, its principles will work devastation, and the
self-dissolution of Protestantism, which in recent times has made such
enormous progress, will be hastened thereby, as decay is by the heat of the
sun.