# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S371
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

371
New Testimonies against Chiliasm.

A. Althaus writes in the Rudelbach-Guericke Journal, in this year's
second quarterly number: "I also know that chiliasm itself cannot be got
at by some differently shaped understanding of the Apocalypse or of any
other passage of Scripture one pleases. Indeed, would that it were a plant
grown out of Scripture! Would that the thousandfold fibrous roots of this
thicket rested even only in a wrongly understood Scripture! But they rest
and grow quite elsewhere — above all in unbridled lust of the eyes, in the
Pelagian, materialistic bents of the heart, in the impatience that wants to
see the world beyond already within the world here below — and once
this has ripened, it seeks its frame in Scripture, and must then bend and
break everything in order to make Scripture fit that frame."

H. D. Köhler writes in a review of the work: The Thousand-Year
Kingdom Belongs Not to the Past but to the Future. A Proof against Dr.
E. W. Hengstenberg on the Basis of the Relevant Scripture Passages, the
Lutheran Symbols, and History, conducted by II. Gütersloh, 1860, among
other things the following: This is the ordinary chiliasm of our day,
which knows itself far exalted above the chiliasm of the sectarians of the
Reformation era, and yet denies its Jewish origin no less, since for the
shadowy types which have lost their significance since Christ (Col. 2:17;
1 Cor. 5:7; Rom. 10:4; Heb. 9 and 10) it claims a renewed realization,
and teaches an earthly kingdom of Israel, into which the converted Jews
will again come. All this has long ceased to be anything unusual, but it is
strange indeed how far even the symbolical books must furnish the
author with weapons against Hengstenberg. Where the questions of
antichristendom and popery are at issue, longer passages from the
Smalcald Articles, and also from Luther and Johann Gerhard, are cited
against Hengstenberg — one would therefore suppose the author also
held the pope to be the Antichrist — but then he continues: "Even though
Luther erred in saying that the pope is the very Antichrist, he was
nevertheless right in saying that antichristendom proceeds out of
Christendom" (p. 52). So out of the Church's doctrine one arbitrary piece,
which pleases him, is retained and even used for polemics, while another
arbitrary piece, which does not please him, is rejected. Just as arbitrarily
Article 17 of the Augsburg Confession is handled (p. 106 ff.), as though
the Reformers had rejected only an unbiblical species of chiliasm and left
the door open for the correct, biblical kind. But now every "Jewish"
opinion is rejected on principle, and consequently so is the author's own,
however he may modulate it. We therefore deny the author the right to
appeal to the Symbols; they are twisted or mutilated by him.