# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1859_S146
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

146 On the History of American Chiliasm.

Individualism is what is questionable for the church's continued existence. In Württemberg individualism is in any case strong enough. That is what makes Beck so influential, but also so dangerous, for his church.

Baumgarten's conduct since then has not been as one might have wished. He also closes himself off against the most sincerely meant and most earnest reminders which Delitzsch has addressed to him, and takes pleasure in now, more than ever, exalting Schleiermacher in an unbearable way — which, were the corresponding consequences to be drawn, would rob our theology of the blessings of progress that it has made, with God's help, since Schleiermacher's day. And what gain could accrue to the cause and to the Kingdom of God from his bringing his affair before the provincial estates, which, as has been sufficiently shown, are scarcely the appropriate forum for deciding church and theological questions in a manner pleasing to God? Or how can he throw himself into the arms of the Kirchentag, and seek from it a vote of censure against the Mecklenburg church authorities and a recognition of the biblical character of his theology, while that same Kirchentag declares at the same time that it cannot enter into a theological judgment of this matter? We cannot follow Baumgarten along paths that run ever more into mere opposition. He will not be told anything; so we can only commend him to God's preserving grace.

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On the History of American Chiliasm.

As we see from the second number of the re-appeared "Informatorium," the Buffalo Synod too has had its trouble with chiliasm. In September 1857 it made the Löhe disciple Johannes Dörfler pastor of a congregation in Toledo, Ohio, which belonged to its body. It did not, to be sure, first examine him regarding chiliasm, although it was already known at the time that Löhe's present pupils were, to a man, chiliasts. But the young man seems to have been not a little strengthened in his error by the fact that the Buffalo people, far from showing earnestness against chiliasm, on the contrary (as Pastor Grabau expressly recalls to his memory in a published letter) publicly disapproved of the deposition of Schieferdecker within the Missouri Synod.*) The consequence was that Dörfler, already in August 1858, blurted out in a private conversation with Pastor Grabau, as the latter himself reports, the disclosure: "he believed in a thousand-year kingdom." That he was already admonished about this at that time,

*) Pastor Grabau says, to excuse this: "because he had not preached such a doctrine, nor did he wish to preach it" — but this is incorrect, as is already evident from the fact that it was the congregation itself which turned to the synod on account of the crude chiliasm of their pastor that was troubling them.