30-CHAPTER XXIV "CHILIASTIC EXAGGERATIONS ARE SECTARIAN ERRORS AND OPPOSED TO THE SOBRIETY OF SOU...
CHAPTER XXIV "CHILIASTIC EXAGGERATIONS ARE SECTARIAN ERRORS AND OPPOSED TO THE SOBRIETY OF SOUND CHRISTIAN HOPE"
"The teaching concerning the Millennial kingdom is extravagant and unscientific. It is associated with so many exaggerations, often childish fantasies, that one has a direct duty to warn against it. In particular, lay circles and especially certain sects and fanatical movements have made very great misuse of it." To be sure! In the course of history it has very often happened that just such excesses have brought the whole doctrine into discredit with many. The history of Chiliasm (the doctrine of a Millennial kingdom) shows that in fact very often onesidedness and excrescences have displayed a " bewildered eschatology." This occurred especially in certain fanatical and sectarian movements as early as the time of the Reformation, and later especially with the "Bible Searchers," "Jehovah’s Witnesses," and " Seventh Day Adventists."
Such fanatical excesses and fantastic imaginings are met in even the first Christian period, even by men such as Papias of Hierapolis in the second century. Thus Papias, so as to picture the fruit Savior of nature in the Messianic kingdom, mentions a supposed word of the Lord:"Days will come in which vines will have 10,000 rods, and each rod 10,000 branches, and each branch 10,000 clusters, and each cluster 10 bunches, and each bunch10,000 berries, and each berry when pressed will yield five measures of wine; and if one of the saints takes hold of a bunch another will cry, I am a better bunch, take me and give thanks to the Lord through me" (that is, in the cup of blessing at the Lord’s Supper). Similarly one corn of wheat will bear 10,000 ears, and each ear will contain 10,000 corns, and each corn will yield five two-pound measures of fine, clean flour or meal (See Zahn, TheRevelationofJohn).
It can be understood that with men such as Origen and Augustine, with their strong Greek philosophical training, and calm legal thinking, such and similar descriptions produced a correspondingly strong reaction, and that they fell into the opposite extreme and wholly denied any right to expect such an earthly kingdom of God, that is, the doctrine of a Millennial kingdom, so that they forthwith "spiritualized" everything. The prophecy of the Millennial kingdom was applied to church history and it was explained that the triumph of Christianity over heathendom in the fourth century was the royal rule of God and that the kingdom of God announced in the Apocalypse had commenced.
Upon this Dr. R. Pache not unjustly remarks that "If it were so we must call the Messianic rule a truly pitiful affair, for it certainly has not the appearance of Satan being bound and not in a position to deceive the nations; or he must—as someone has said—be bound with a terribly long chain," which allows him very much freedom of movement. (LeRetourdeJesusChrist, 424). In any case this stands fast, that the expectation of not only a spiritual but also of an earthly national restoration of Israel, and of a kingdom intervening between the return of Christ (parousia, epiphany) and world destruction and world perfecting, was both the original Christian belief and has again and again been distinctly asserted by leaders in the newer Bible-believing theological science. This can only be overlooked by want of care or insufficient acquaintance with the history of theology. From the history of early Christianity we mention Papias of Hierapolis (about a.d. 140), Justin from Sichem (about 150), Irenaeus (died about 202), Tertullian (died after 222). In the early Christian centuries Chiliasm first weakened with the strengthening among. Christians of Greek philosophical thought. Especially through Clement and Origen of Alexandria in the East (about 250), and through Ticonius (about 400), and Augustine, Bishop of Carthage (died 430), it came in the West, for the official Church, to the extinction of Chiliasm, and the doctrine of the last things came to be a vacuum for official Church theology. Greek sentiment and thought opposed even the conception of a final historical drama and a real Millennial kingdom on this earth. This of course threw the door wide open to certain fanatical movements. Especially since the Reformation all sorts of sects have advanced remarkable theories as to the Millennium. The guilt of this, however, lies in large measure in the failure of official theology in this region. There arose thereby a vacuum into which fanatical movements pressed. Fanatical movements often flourish through the indifference of orthodox movements to certain Biblical truths. In the history of earlier Protestantism Campegius Vitringa (Professor of Theology in Leiden, Holland) and Friedrich Adolph Lampe (Professor of Theology in Bremen) became pioneers in the re-discovery of Biblical prophetic truth; both these lived in the seventeenth century. By these the Biblicist Fathers at Wiirttemberg were influenced, especially Bishop J. A. Bengel (Stuttgart, died 1752) and Bishop Oetinger (died 1782).
Through these last, Chiliasm, sometimes in milder, sometimes in stronger form, found entrance to scientific theology in the nineteenth century. Notable leaders in this were the Lutherans von Hofmann (Professor of Theology in Erlangen, died 1877), F. H. R. Frank (also Professor of Theology in Erlangen, died 1894), K. A. Auberlen (Professor of Theology in Basel, died 1864), as well as K. J. H. A. Ebrard (Professor of Reformed Theology in Erlangen, died 1888), J. T. Beck (Professor of Theology in Tubingen, died 1878), and Bishop Dr. T. Hermann (1924). In the light of the history of theology it would therefore be an erroneous verdict, overlooking these indisputable facts, if one should awaken an impression, not to say expressly declare, that the expectation of a literal Millennial kingdom is an error found indeed among fanatics or sectaries, "laymen" or untrained Bible teachers, who do not deserve the title "theologian," but not represented or defended by any distinguished believing scientific theologians. To rebut this idea was the reason, in the above detailed statement, for so repeatedly emphasizing the academic offices of the numerous Bible expositors named.
Among later such leaders we mention Dachsel, Modersohn, Professor Bettex, Dr. S. P. Tregelles, John Lillie, D.D., Edward Greswell, B.D., Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Benjamin Wills Newton, Henry Alford, D.D., Dean of Canterbury, Dr. Scofield, Dr. Gaebelein, Dr. A. T. Pierson, George Muller, John Nelson Darby, G. H. Pember, Johann de Heer, (Holland), D. L. Moody, Dr. R. A. Torrey, Hudson Taylor. It cannot be said of these Bible teachers and leading men of God in the church of Christ that they were sectaries or merely lay defenders of a "bewildered eschatology." But above all this it is here to be said: One can never rightly oppose an extreme by going to the opposite extreme. A cause is in no wise refuted by abuse. An extreme may serve to beget another extreme, but this does not justify either the one or the other. While rejecting firmly excrescences of a Biblical doctrine, it becomes us soberly to hold fast to the Biblical doctrine itself.