# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1861_S267
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

That the Pope at Rome is the Antichrist. 267.

Finally Ströbel says: "In my humble overall judgment, the present 'Doctrine of the Thousand-Year Kingdom' too (just as well as its predecessors) is no exegetical-dogmatic demonstration, but rather (both in content and in language) a philosophical speculation."

We further note that Flörke, who takes every pain to present his chiliasm as being in harmony with the confession of the church, nevertheless has the Antichrist arise only in the future, and indeed out of political revolution.

In the same issue of the said journal there is an essay by H. D. Köhler, pastor at Groß Vielen in Mecklenburg: "The Unscripturalness of Chiliasm." This essay, directed particularly against Flörke and Auberlen, is the best thing we have read on chiliasm from the present time, and well worth a separate reprint for the widest possible circulation. We call the attention of all our readers who can obtain the said issue to it. It will do every Lutheran particular good to find in it also a vigorous testimony to the now almost universally abandoned doctrine of our church, that the Pope is the Antichrist. Since the article is too long to be communicated here in full, and since it has, precisely as a whole, its own particular significance, we refrain from giving excerpts, and content ourselves with communicating in what follows the section on the Antichrist.

That the Pope at Rome is the Antichrist.

The following is written by H. D. Köhler, pastor at Groß Vielen in Mecklenburg, in an essay, "The Unscripturalness of Chiliasm," which we find in the third issue of the present year of the Rudelbach-Guericke journal:

An old answer, arising out of certainty of faith, to the question concerning the Antichrist is this, that it is the Roman Pope; and indeed this answer was occasioned by the improper central position of the Pope in the church and by his godless and pernicious dominion over it. Here was found a world-power before which kings and emperors had to bow; here was found an exaltation over God's Word, an overthrow of all true worship, the shedding of the blood of the saints, and in general all the marks that belong to the Antichrist — for which reason people pointed their fingers at the Pope. And indeed this was done long before Luther's time, as Flacius in his Catalogus testium veritatis and Gerhard in his loci (Tom. XI, p. 254 sqq.) have proven most abundantly, so that we need only follow them. Already Pope Nicholas I, around 860, was addressed thus by the archbishops of Cologne and Trier: "You wish to have the standing of a high priest, but you conduct yourself like a tyrant. Under the shape of the shepherd we sense the wolf.