# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1863_S184
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

184 Testimony against Chiliasm from the Norwegian Lutheran Church.

quarterly issue 61, by Lic. Ströbel, stood as follows: "There remained for me only the choice between the complete renunciation of millennial ideas and — the complete withering-away of my evangelical life of faith, — and with a swift right-about-face! I turned away from the Millennium forever. Since then the right light has first dawned on me concerning this: that both the Reformers and our old dogmaticians reject, and must reject, not merely one particular species of chiliasm, but chiliasm itself in all its forms — as crassus, subtilis, and subtilissimus. The chiliastic spirit is always one and the same, and only takes on, according to the difference of times and persons in which it finds entrance, now a coarse, now a fine, now the finest embodiment. The Augsburg Confession has seen through its essential character with incomparable sharpness of sight: it calls it '"Jewish."' That is, and remains, what it is in all its forms; therefore it must find no room in evangelical Christendom. Were I to define chiliasm, I could, to the best of my knowledge, describe it in no other way than as: the Jewish hope of the Messiah within the New Testament (Testament, of course, understood not as a book but as a covenant). To be Jewish and yet at the same time New-Testament-minded is, indeed, a glaring contradiction; but such a contradiction is exactly how chiliasm appears to me also." — Now, I bring this forward first of all so that K. T. may settle with Lic. Ströbel, a contributor to her "genuinely Lutheran" journal (which, incidentally, like K. T., admits the most various "views"), who is right: she, when she maintains that men "of the old, genuine Lutheranism" have adhered to such chiliastic conceptions "in good agreement with the confessions," or he, who maintains that both the Reformers and the old dogmaticians have rejected it in all its forms, and had to reject it. K. T.'s "conception" of who counts as men "of the old, genuine Lutheranism" must therefore differ from Ströbel's; but perhaps K. T. will after all regard Str. as "relatively justified" in holding an opposite "view" on this! But be that as it may, it does not help matters whether men "of the old, genuine Lutheranism" held such conceptions — which I have not seen and do not believe until it is shown to me — and still less that they "could have held the same in good agreement with the confessions"; for a child with the catechism in hand can, as said above, demonstrate that it is not in agreement with it. And when K. T. asks us to take to heart the remark: "Independent of the thousand-year kingdom, exegesis, as it seems, demands the restoration of Israel," I will ask K. T. in turn to take to heart this "as it seems," for it amounts to no more than that something "seems" so to such exegetes; but however much it may "seem" so, it is nevertheless certain that if "the restoration of Israel" is demanded before the Day of Judgment, I cannot expect the latter until the former has taken place. Therefore no true exegete can possibly really