# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S346
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

346 Clöter, One Flock under One Shepherd, etc.

is tainted with a Jewish-papist leaven. But even to preach reconciliation is not enough; it is only one piece out of the great plan of God's kingdom; it is the heart of that plan, but one should not, over it, forget the golden head, the kingdom of Christ" (p. 100). And woe to those who suppress this word or even hinder it! Woe above all to the preachers who would dare such a thing! "Evil servants — it says at one point — that is, evil preachers, the Lord calls those who say: The Lord is not coming for a long time yet, and who begin to rail at the preachers who proclaim the coming of Jesus and the prophecy, to accuse them and persecute them: such godless and duty-forgetting pastors and shepherds the Lord will hew in pieces when He comes" (p. 45).

These "churchly reflections" were delivered by an evangelical pastor-administrator in an evangelical congregation of our evangelical territorial church, and have now already been put out to the people, in a third edition, as wholesome evangelical food. On the Reformation Festival the first reflection was delivered, and on that occasion, on the day when Luther set the Gospel of the free grace of God in Christ up on the bushel [i.e., brought it out into the open, cf. Matt. 5:15], there was laid upon the people's heart, as a task of our Church, the calling to proclaim the coming kingdom of Jesus. On the last Sunday of the church year a sermon is preached on the coming tyranny of the Antichrist, and the people are fed on that occasion with Apollyon, and with the years 800, 1806, and 1866. At Christmas the thousand-year reign of peace of Jesus is proclaimed, and the angels' hymn of praise is set before their eyes as first to be fulfilled in that future time: of any preliminary fulfillment not a word is said. And so these reflections go on, Sunday after Sunday, down to the second Sunday after Epiphany.

What the apostle Paul preached to the congregation at Rome, we know; what he had to proclaim to the congregations of Galatia, we know too, and need only recall in this connection the terribly earnest word of Galatians 1:8–9; indeed, we know his whole apostolic practice. Luther's Gospel we know no less, and know what he fought and contended for throughout his life, and our evangelical confession ought surely to be known to an evangelical clergyman as well. It is true that Clöter has already pronounced an anathema of the highest authority upon all who would dare to touch his new manner of teaching, when he says: "Evil servants, that is, evil preachers, the Lord calls those who say: the Lord is not coming for a long time yet! and who begin to rail at the preachers, to accuse them and persecute them, who proclaim the coming of Jesus and the prophecy. Such godless and duty-forgetting pastors and shepherds the Lord will hew in pieces when He comes" (p. 45). Nevertheless we venture, all the same, to state the proposition that no evangelical preacher has the right to offer our people, as the word of God, his own private wisdom, which runs so flatly counter to the whole of apostolic practice. But what is to become of our poor congregations, if every preacher burdens his congregation with his own thoughts and