6. Development During and After the Reformation

and the apparently approaching down- fall of the "anti-Christian" papacy seemed a certain prelude to the coming of the Lord. As in the primitive centuries, the martyrdoms of per- secuted Protestants red the prom ises of coming redemption. Some Ana baptists prepared for the approaching revelation of Christ by the abolition of government and of the Church's teaching function, and at Münster in 1534 established the new Zion with community of prop erty (see Münster, Anabaptists In). Both the Lutheran Church in the Augsburg Confession (xvii.) and the Reformed in the Helvetic Confession (mi.) rejected this caricature of true millenarianism as mere visionary Judaism; and the Roman Catholic body had even less room for such speculations. The theosophy, indeed, of Jacob Böhme and of the mystics who followed ParaAelsus awakened apocalyptic hopes by painting the restoration of Paradise in the most glowing colors; but it was in the seventeenth century that millenarianism had the freest play. The political convulsions which shook Europe, the revolutions in England, the religious wars in Germany, the maltreatment of the Protestants in France, spread its teaching far beyond the walls of the conventicle. Sober and learned men became prophets under the pressure of the times. Toward the end of the century the Lutheran Church was influenced in this direction by the Pietistic movement. Spener himself (in his Hofjnung ktlnfUger besaerer Zeiten, 1893) gave utterance to a refined millenarianism, to which Joachim Lange added a still stronger apocalyptic note in 1730. The Berleburg Bible (see Bibles, Annotated) and the writings of the English ecstatic Jane Lead (q.v.; d. 1704) influenced thoughtful men in Germany very widely from the beginning of the eighteenth century.

7. Doctrine in the Eighteenth Century

But the chiliastic doctrines received their most powerful support from Johann Albrecht Bengel (q.v.), whose writings may be said to open the third period. England, America, and Germany were the countries in which the doctrine spread most widely. In the first-named, the millenarian sect of the Plymouth Brethren arose between 1820 and 1830, and in 1832 the Irvingites established their "Catholic Apostolic Church" (q.v.), proclaiming that the Lord was at hand. The Mormons in America laid the foundations of the new Zion; and the sect of Adventists founded by William Miller (q.v., and see Adventists) awaited the coming of Christ in 1847. Meantime, among the most recent theologians, according to their attitude toward the text of Scripture and the Revelation in particular, some reject the doctrine altogether, while others are not willing to give up a refined form of it.