# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1861_S266
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

266 Chiliasm.

therefore also be so kind as to forgive me for regarding his distinctions between "ante resurrectionem" (universalem) and "post resurrectionem" (particularem), between "ante adventum Domini" and whatever else hangs together and depends on that, as not belonging to the genuine sense of the Augsburg Confession and the old dogmatics, but truly only as "artifice" and "sophistry," and for regarding his "doctrine of the Millennium" as a real "difference" from the doctrine of the church."

Further down, after giving an account of Flörke's supposed dogmatic-exegetical proof*), Ströbel writes as follows:

"Through these discussions there runs the same faint Pelagianizing strain that I have found generally in all the advocates of the thousand-year kingdom who have become known to me. Their gaze fixes rigidly on the weaknesses and infirmities of the Christian life on this side [of eternity]; for the power and glory of the children of God hidden from human eyes, of which especially the prophets bear witness in the most flourishing and glowing words, they have, one and all, no sense at all, and therefore also no understanding of the scriptural and church doctrines connected with it, such as, for instance, the distinction between the visible and the invisible church, of the spiritual office and the spiritual priesthood, and so forth. (Thoughts such as those of a well-known Pentecost hymn: "Thou art the holy oil with which my body and my soul are anointed as the true possession of the Lord Jesus Christ, to be priest and prophet, to be king, whom God protects in distress from out of the sanctuary" — lie, in their original sense, outside the millennial horizon.) In order not to come into open conflict with Holy Scripture, they need a kingdom of God of the world of the senses, manifesting itself through physical, historical, political, and social externals, because they do not have the kingdom of God of the ecclesia invisibilis, in which all the scriptural passages cited for the Millennium — with the exception of those referring to purely historical matters — find their fulfillment."

*) For how far Flörke goes, and how incautiously he himself betrays what forebears he has as a chiliast, only one passage need be given. Flörke writes of the fleshly Messianic hope of the Jews themselves: "We would fail to recognize Scripture if we wanted to overlook what connection this fleshly hope itself had in Scripture"; further: "That the Lord (passing over the Sadducees and Essenes, who 'worked at transposing Judaism into the notion of a general world-culture') turns everywhere only to the Pharisees with his teaching, with his rebuke, with his woe — that is the clearest proof that he saw in Phariseeism precisely a seed and blessing from the Lord that was still capable of being saved, and insofar as Phariseeism was one with the fleshly Messianic hope, it is at the same time also the proof of the divine truth immanent in this hope, of the glorious Messianic kingdom of this world, which is the Millennium." Further: "It is spiritualism (!) when one breaks off or weakens the basic view of Scripture, according to which the kingdoms of this world, and hence the sword of civil authority too, are to become the possession of the saints." Who is not reminded here of Münster? — Finally Flörke even writes: "It is the millennial image of the Messiah that Satan holds up before the Lord in his own way, and they are therefore nothing but truths, nothing but glories properly belonging to the Messiah himself, with which Satan lures the Lord."