# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1862_S192
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

192    Church News of the Day.

Premises. In reality there are two mutually hostile spirits colliding here. Huschke's "neo-Lutheran" adherents champion Moses and the Law; Diedrich and his "Old Lutheran" friends take up the cause of Christ and the Gospel, though admittedly still with much wavering and various inaccuracies. Thus, for example, they still cannot find their way in the Locus de tripl. statu hierarch. [the topic of the threefold hierarchical estate]; they mistake the species for the genus, one part of every estate for the whole estate: they hold "the preaching office, the household estate (the family), and civil authority" to be identical with the stat. ecclesiasticus, oeconomicus, politicus [ecclesiastical, domestic, and political estates], which leads to strange consequences. Nor are they free from the desire to see the holy Christian church (though the Creed says: I believe in a holy Christian church). This holds especially of Könnemann, who, in a mistaken interpretation of Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession, goes so far as to assert that there can be truly believing people who are not members of the holy Christian church. (P. 7.) The "Old Lutheran" rejection of the altogether true Extra ecclesiam nulla salus [outside the church there is no salvation] is likewise connected with this. One thing, however, is highly to be praised in the "Old Lutherans": whoever dares to address an evangelical congregation gathered in a holy place, not in the name of Jesus Christ, but in the name of some visible human authority — for example "in the name of the Supreme Church Collegium" — him they show the door brevi manu [without ceremony].

Chiliasm. In a review of an opinion by the chiliast Hebart on Löhe's chiliastic preaching, Ströbel says: "Hebart, on the main point — the assumption of a still-future thousand-year kingdom — sides with Löhe, but repeatedly acknowledges Diedrich's counter-arguments. Thus he concedes, against Löhe: 'It is very doubtful whether the apostle Paul knew anything of a first resurrection, such as, according to the Revelation of John, is to precede the thousand-year kingdom. We do not have the slightest hint of this in any of his letters.' This striking admission ought, however, to have pressed our author to the question whether chiliasm is contained in Holy Scripture at all — whether it is not first read into it through a rabbinical-political interpretation — whether the Revelation of John is an Apocalypse, as its title states, or a Chronicle, as that Judaizing interpretation would stamp it. — In rightly answering these questions, Diedrich rejects — as does the Augsburg Confession — 'each and every chiliasm outright.' For every form of chiliasm, as Diedrich quite correctly maintains, corrupts three clear scriptural doctrines: 'the doctrine of justification, the doctrine of the kingdom of Christ, and the doctrine of the means of grace.' It is a true word of Diedrich's: 'The images conjured up by the chiliasts vanish before the ordinary Gospel of the forgiveness of sins and of the justification of the sinner through faith alone. If this Gospel is certain to us, then chiliasm, too, stands judged in our eyes' — to which Hebart, as if confirming it, adds: 'He thereby charges Löhe's preaching with the reproach that not even a breath of the doctrine of justification is to be found in it, but that it contradicts it at the deepest level.' (In passing: our author's style is not entirely correct throughout.) — With regard to the doctrine of Christ's kingdom, Hebart likewise gives favorable testimony for Diedrich: 'It is true, what he says: what the chiliasts seek in the clouds has long since drawn near, namely the kingdom of heaven — unspeakably glorious, though in a lowly form.' By contrast, it is a consequence of that Judaizing interpretation of Scripture when the author asserts that 'chiliasm cannot be extracted from the Revelation of John without an arbitrary and disconnected interpretation' — for it is only read into it in the first place, by turning the Apocalypse into a book that ought properly to bear the title: Annals, or Diary of the Future. Nor has 'the study of Scripture, and indeed a thorough study of it, once again aroused chiliastic notions' in the least; rather, they have been called forth by that Judaizing theory of a future church, which persuades its advocates 'that only preliminary fulfillments of the Revelation of John have so far taken place, and that it still awaits its own proper, full fulfillment.' — Whether chiliasm is 'a precious' doctrine or a carnal, security-breeding one is, for me and for many others, no longer an open question."