# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1863_S183
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Testimony against Chiliasm from the Norwegian Lutheran Church. 183

fabrication, — and between human "conceptions," uncertain "views," or dark "hopes," "of which one does not venture to claim" that they are clearly and certainly taught in Scripture, but merely "hopes" or "supposes" or dreams that they perhaps seem to have some ground in it, etc. — for only such foggy notions can tolerate a wholly opposite "conception" beside them as relatively justified. And K. T. and her theologians ought fairly to understand this: that when a Christian is to believe according to the Word that Christ can come soon, it is not actually this Christian who condemns and rejects the opposing views of all the problematizing theologians, but rather the very Word of God, which bids him believe the one thing certainly, firmly, and unconditionally, that at the same time bids him reject and condemn all the opposing problems. It is therefore no pride and no immodesty, but obedience, that one gives God the right in his Word and wrong to everything else, that is, that one rejects it as false. If, on the other hand, K. T. can definitely maintain and prove from the Word of God that we err in teaching and maintaining, as a certain and clear revealed truth which every Christian ought according to Scripture and the confessions agreeing with it to believe, that Christ has commanded us to expect him every second, and with him the Last Day, and that therefore the apostles and all the believing fathers erred on this point — if K. T. can do that, then let her do it. That will settle all strife, for only once it is an uncertain matter can "the real conception, to which Spener and Bengel adhered, and which theologians of today acknowledge — men notorious among those outside for their deification of the confessions" (K. T. No. 4, 61, col. 54) — be "relatively justified." But if she does not prove this, but at most silently concedes the correctness of our doctrine on this point, then K. T. in any case has no right to complain that we maintain that "real conception" must be false and seductive, and just as reprehensible even if thousands like Bengel and Spener adhered to it. And it proves very little that people who are outside cry down a teacher for deification of the confessions. Even Paul Andersen has been so cried down here by the platform-men of the General Synod, and he no doubt believed that to be proof enough of his genuine loyalty to the confessions. Indeed, even K. T. is cried down for hyper-Lutheranism and exclusivism (!) (No. 12, 62, col. 191) — but that makes her neither hyper-Lutheran nor even Lutheran, if she is not. Nor does Guericke become more Lutheran than he is, even if in the widest circles he is proclaimed "hyper-Lutheran" (No. 21, 61, col. 324). And when K. T. maintains in that same place that men "of the old, genuine Lutheranism" have held and can hold such conceptions "in good agreement with the confessions of the church," and at the same time recommends to us for study the "genuinely Lutheran" journal of Rudelbach and Guericke, I will bring forward against this claim of K. T. something that stood in that very journal's third quarterly