# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1861_S205
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Guide to Chiliasm. 205

Chiliasm will finally arrive at one and the same goal as the tendency of the
age; it will run out into materialism and thereby help to build
Antichristianity.

It is therefore our duty to break wholly and decisively with this fanaticism,
and that in all its shapes, colors, kinds and families. For it is all one
bundle, cut from the same upas wood and permeated by the same saps. Even the
finest chiliasm hides the fine and the gross within itself; it is the egg
that encloses the basilisk brood. We crush the eggs wherever they are found,
and cut down the basilisks wherever they stir. Nor can we lend ourselves to
declaring chiliastic opinions in the Church, especially in the teaching
office, harmless so long as they are not asserted and taught as articles of
faith. It is indeed possible that someone may conceive of the better times to
come without any fanaticism and without any impairment of the Word of God,
though that is seldom the case, since then the doctrine has neither
significance nor attractive power and ought no longer to be called chiliasm
at all. It is also possible that someone has the good foundation of doctrine
and builds chiliastic stubble upon it, as Irenaeus did in former times. Yet
chiliasm remains dangerous in this case also. Above all, the connection with
our fanatical age is not to be overlooked, by which even the weaker germs of
chiliasm that are scattered here and there acquire significance and force;
just as the spirit of revolution, once it has been poured out, sweeps along
with it everything that has any vein of it at all. In this connection even
the otherwise present good foundation of faith is made to totter or is
overthrown. But theologians who have a consciousness of their faith and work
all their thinking into a unity should be the last to say that they could
hold chiliastic opinions without harm to the soundness of their faith. For
they might just as well say that one could, without harm to justification by
faith alone, hold the opinion of becoming righteous through works. So far as
chiliasm is fanaticism, so far it resists the Holy Spirit; the two are
against each other, and no theological science will reconcile them.

I can therefore only approve that the Lutheran Missourians in America have
come forward so earnestly against chiliasm and have granted it no toleration.
Whoever knows even a little of the sultry, thundery chiliastic atmosphere in
America will understand what trouble the Missourians have with it, and how
hard it is for them to bring their congregations into anything like healthy
air. If they were willing to be lenient toward chiliasm, they would put their
whole church at stake. For chiliasm is not only subversive of the foundation;
it is a whole tangle of false doctrines and must necessarily exert its
confusing influence upon the entire doctrine of salvation. Add to this that
in America there is less speculation than in Germany. People want to see the
practical results of everything and