# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1861_S230
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

230 What Is Reported of Us, True and False.

faith live and move — people who, against all the clear doctrinal passages of Holy Scripture,
out of obscure passages into which they read their delusion and conceit, set between
the kingdom of grace and the kingdom of glory a kingdom which
has no truth and no reality, but has its origin and seat only in their half-converted and falsely converted,
cross-shunning, sentimentally self-indulgent, seemingly spiritual but lustful, restlessly pietistic hearts and in their fanatical heads.

It is truly no occasion for joy, but rather earnestly
to be lamented, that from no side of the Prussian Lutherans has a decided
protest been made against that compromise of the synod with chiliasm.
The dear habit of human accommodation was evidently present at the synod too, and once again
love has been confused with faith; for in
matters of faith and of the confession there is no respect of persons,
no yielding and giving way; there even the younger men should not
shrink from raising their testimony, as humbly as frankly, even against their elders, should these
err or accommodate men.

But this is the sad thing, that among the Prussian Lutherans even
the most decided opponents of chiliasm and of the doctrine of their legal
church government — as for example Pastors Diederich and Räthjen together with
their adherents — do not themselves stand in the middle
of the sound evangelical truth in the doctrine of church government, nor upon the confession of the Lutheran church founded thereon. They too lack the evangelical,
that is, the Lutheran fundamental view of the essence of the church as the congregation
of the truly believing and holy, to whom in Christ, together with the gospel,
the office of the keys is also given without any intermediary, that through their servants
they may have the means of grace publicly administered on behalf of the fellowship.
For in contradiction to this they set up a pastoral regime which is
essentially nothing other and nothing better — indeed, much more dangerous — than the
present church government of their Upper Church Council which they combat;
and from this it would follow consistently that under a Lutheran appearance there would grow up as many separate
little popes as there are, by name, Lutheran pastors.

It is therefore beyond doubt true and clear that among the Lutherans in
Germany even those who claim for themselves the honor of fidelity to the confession
either flirt with chiliasm in a fanciful way,
like Löhe and his people, or else take a fairly lax position toward
it, like the synod of the Lutheran church in Prussia. So much the
more comforting is it, then, also to meet with testimonies which, like the one cited above from
Münkel, express an honest and sincere Lutheran hatred
against "subversive chiliasm," which "is a whole web
of false doctrines and must necessarily exert its confusing influence upon
the whole doctrine of salvation." For it is clear and manifest that
this delusion and dream, this iridescent chameleon, runs counter to the clear doctrines
of the one general resurrection on the last day and of the
kingdom of God; it also decidedly denies that the return