# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1861_S265
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Chiliasm. 265

but rather to link, in all gentleness, my own experiences to them. What Flörke says and what he means, what he merely hints at and lets shine through between the lines, where the millennial shoe pinches him and how he seeks to relieve the pressure — all of that I understand completely, because I have gone through it myself. For a long time I occupied myself, in whole-hearted love and devotion, with the most distinguished adherents of the thousand-year kingdom — with Bengel, Magnus Fr. Roos (Interpretation of Daniel's Prophecies), Joh. Fr. Burscher (in whose commentary on the prophet Jeremiah, Leipzig 1756, and on the prophets Hosea and Joel, ibid. 1757, chiliasm appears in its simplest, almost formless manner), and others; I lived my way into their world of ideas, and made their hopes and the exegetical grounding of them my own spiritual property — in a word: I believed, thought, and understood Scripture exactly as they did. And what was, for me, the final result of this long and deeply searching labor? None other than that "dilemma" mentioned by Flörke, in which "no Lutheran may be in doubt." I was left with only the choice between total renunciation of millennial thinking and — the total desiccation of my evangelical life of faith — and with a swift about-face I turned away from the Millennium forever. Since then the right light has first dawned on me, that both the Reformers and our old dogmaticians must reject — not merely a particular species of chiliasm, but chiliasm itself in all its forms, as crassus, subtilis, and subtilissimus. The chiliastic spirit is always one and the same, and only creates for itself, depending on the difference of times and persons in which it finds entry, now a coarse, now a subtle, now a most subtle embodiment. The Augsburg Confession has seen through its essential character with incomparable sharpness of sight: it labels it "Jewish." That it is, and remains, in all its forms; therefore it may find no room in evangelical Christendom. Were I to define chiliasm, I could, to the best of my knowledge, describe it in no other way than as: the Jewish hope for the Messiah carried over into the New Testament (Testament, of course, understood not as a book but as a covenant). To be Jewish-minded and yet at the same time New-Testament-minded is, to be sure, a glaring contradiction; but such a contradiction is exactly how chiliasm appears to me as well. I am utterly incapable of reconciling faith in a future thousand-year kingdom with faith in the incarnation of Christ that has already taken place — the one always cancels out the other for me. All the true salvation that humanity has to expect before the Last Day lies, for me, solely in the great facts of the past that are summarized in the Apostles' Creed. I can believe neither in any need for these facts to be supplemented, nor in any capacity of theirs to be supplemented; for me it comes to this: Christ's incarnation makes a thousand-year kingdom impossible, and a future millennium would defeat the purpose of the incarnation. Flörke may