# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1859_S313
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Does the Iowa Synod Really Strive, etc. 313

...still future, and consequently "ὁ κατέχων" is now about 1800 years old. It is therefore clear that with such grounds as the synod gives in its report, the Yes to the first question cannot be proven; and we Lutherans stand by the words of our fathers: "The Antichrist is a person of succession" — the pope at Rome.

To the second question, whether the Antichrist will reign only three and a half years by our reckoning, the Iowa Synod answers: Yes. "It is said of him that he will last three and a half years, or, in other places, forty-two months or 1260 days..... just as Daniel designates the time of the Antichrist as a time, times, and half a time." (Loc. cit., p. 20.) It says further (p. 29): "If the future of the antichristian kingdom, as we assume, is so precisely described that one can judge the time by it — if that statement of time, three and a half years = forty-two months = 1260 days, is to be taken not mystically but properly and literally — then one might think one could calculate ahead in that time, as it were, when the Lord is coming, and this might contradict the word: the day of the Lord comes as a thief in the night." This contradiction is now supposed to be removed by the claims: 1. that the Christians of the last time, although they would know the nearness of Christ's coming, still could not determine the day and hour; 2. that the Lord comes as a thief in the night only for the godless, not for his own — and this is supposed to lie already in the parable of the thief. — Now if the Iowa Synod really means to take "days," etc., as equal to our own, and accordingly find a simple arithmetic exercise in prophecy, then it certainly ought not to leave out the factors that do not quite fit, but take them all; this will indeed make the matter somewhat harder, but one can then reckon on a more accurate result — and that, after all, is what matters in the end. Daniel 12:11-12 obviously also speaks of the time of the Antichrist. But there his time is given as 1290 and then as 1335 days. Now it surely no longer works: 1260 days = 1290 days = 1335 days = 42 months, and so on. — Further, Revelation 11 says: "And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy 1260 days." The beast is to kill them — so they live longer; and a new problem arises: how is 1260 days equal to 1260 days and more? — One would also do well to consider whether it would even be possible for the most refined arts of an Antichrist, in three and a half years, to overturn all conditions and seduce the whole world; for the saying, "with God nothing is impossible," certainly does not apply here, since it is the devil's works, not God's, that are in question.*) Above all this, we find in 2 Thess. 2 precisely that he was already

*) As proof of what one can prove from Holy Scripture by way of the "greater perfection" of exegesis as well, the following passage may also serve, delivered not long ago before the Senate of Missouri by a certain Rev. W. M. Leftwich. There it reads: There is a mystery in our national existence which is frequently overlooked by the masses and appreciated only by a few learned Christian philosophers. Our Constitution is called a child of biblical prophecy; and why not? Far back, in the dim "labyrinth of the centuries," God made known to the world his designs