# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1859_S229
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 229

The Driving Force of Error. After Pastor Löhe published his sermon on "The Coming Forth to the Resurrection," there are now already "Lutherans" to be found who go still further. Among them is the editor of the Pilger aus Sachsen [Pilgrim from Saxony]. In the issue of that paper of April 23 of this year, he now reports on two cases in which the graves of zealous Christians, buried not long before, were opened and — found empty. At the head of these stories he places the words: "Of a first resurrection St. Matthew tells in chapter 27, verses 52 and 53. Is what follows to be taken as such a case as well?" As to the first case, the editor of the Pilger reports concerning the preacher Spleiß, who experienced it himself: "Pastor Spleiß was deeply moved by this fact; to him it was the confirmation of a suspicion regarding the first resurrection mentioned in Revelation 20:5–6, which had now (!) become a certainty for him. The decomposition of the grave, he said, is a process of combustion, in which the coarse parts of the sensory body, defiled by sin, are gradually consumed, while the spiritual resurrection-body is set free." (If that is so, the thing could obviously be achieved more easily by reintroducing the heathen cremation of corpses; and by this reasoning it is evidently also unnecessary that those in the graves should hear the voice of the Son of God — the resurrection would then be merely a chemical process.) "But a body burns the more completely, and the more entirely without any coarse residue, the more it comports itself passively and yieldingly toward the higher power of life." (Flourishing nonsense! By this logic even a corpse must have faith and love!) "Human bodies, then, which in their earthly life have already, through the power of the blood and Spirit of Christ, been sanctified and cleansed to a high degree, may have completed that purifying process of the grave earlier, and thus have a part earlier than others in the resurrection of the righteous." (God grant that the papists do not learn this secret, for it would show them an entirely new way of finding out, with certainty, whom they have to canonize — they would need only examine the graves. That would also be a means of proving that Joseph, David, Luther, and others made poor progress in sanctification.) It is deeply distressing to see how men of whom one would have expected better can, in these last times, be so quickly bewitched by an error and fall into the silliest fanaticism. A key to this phenomenon, as regards the editor of the Pilger, is furnished by the fact that he had shortly before been at Neuendettelsau, and had come back from there intoxicated.

Chiliasm. On this subject Pastor Diedrich, author of the tract "Against Chiliasm," expresses himself as follows in the Lutheran Village Church Gazette and elsewhere: "The writer of this is also of the opinion, along with the Löwenberg Synodical Assembly (of last September), 'that one should by no means place every chiliast under discipline, and possibly (in the further course) exclude him, on account of his chiliasm' — although he does not quite understand what it means to say that '"chiliasts"' who do not reject the non-chiliasts, and who moreover also do not reject the '"fundamental doctrines of our confession,"' are indeed to be tolerated: for if one is a chiliast, then he holds chiliasm itself to be God's word, and regards its opponents as those who, consciously or unconsciously, fight against God's word. If someone does not reject the opposition to chiliasm, then he is at least not a chiliast, even if he has perhaps not yet formed a settled opinion. Further, I do not know: is '"the fundamental doctrines of our confession"' meant to denote certain principal doctrines of our Symbols — or is the sense rather that the fundamental doctrines simply are our Symbols? If the latter is the case, as we assume, then the question arises: which chiliasm can be reconciled with the Symbols? We maintain, with our older teachers: none. The whole fundamental view of our church concerning the Gospel and concerning the sinfulness of this world tolerates none at all, unless one wished to call "chiliasm" something that no one else has ever so called.

"Just as little do we wish to proceed to the removal of pastors from office; but we do not understand what it means when someone lets chiliasm be '"a free opinion."' As far as I am concerned, it may be a free opinion for a theologian whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun around the earth, but chiliasm never becomes a free opinion merely because someone, out of timidity and lack of clarity, or out of stiff obstinacy, says: 'To me it is a free opinion.' How far a doctrine's effect is to extend does not at all depend on the will of men, but always lies in the matter itself. Therefore it helps nothing at all when someone says: the Crucified One is my wisdom, and so forth — that, as is well known, is said by all Roman Catholics, Reformed, Anabaptists, and other sects alike. The only question is: does chiliasm touch the heart of Christianity, or does it not? We hold that Christianity is not a thing like a piece of land, or like a house, where one part can be attacked or ruined while the others remain wholly untouched; rather it is like a living body, which becomes sick through and through when one member is poisoned. It is a sign of great superficiality, and altogether of a more external relation to the Lord, when one supposes that one may hold, or not hold, certain doctrines as a matter of free opinion alongside others. If that were so, then our fathers asked far too much, and wrongly, about doctrine. To be sure, I grant that the spirit which stirs in every"