Samuel Gottfried Christoph Cloeter

Samuel Gottfried Christoph Cloeter (* 11. October 1823 in Bayreuth in Upper Franconia ; † 20th March 1894 in Weiltingen in Middle Franconia ) was a German Lutheran pastor , the decidedly due to its apocalyptic and millenarian piety was suspended and then the emigrants settlement grace castle in the Russian Caucasus founded .

Title page of an interpretation of the Revelation of John by Pastor Köhler from Gnadenburg. In this book Köhler claimed to faithfully reproduce Cloeter's teaching.

Life

Cloeter studied Protestant theology in Erlangen and Leipzig and was ordained in 1847. He worked as vicar in Happurg near Hersbruck and was parish administrator in Marienheim im Donaumoos from 1849-1856 , in Woringen near Memmingen in 1856/1857 and in Reutin near Lindau. In 1861 he became pastor in Illenschwang near Dinkelsbühl . In 1880 he was removed from office because of his views. All the more intensely, he pursued his project to settle German Lutherans in the Caucasus. With the contractual purchase of the land on May 15, 1881, he founded the Gnadenburg settlement in the Russian Caucasus. He coined the name Gnadenburg because the grace of God is like a safe castle. He expected the antichrist power to appear soon . In doing so, he represented the reading that had already led separatist pietist circles to emigrate to the Caucasus in the late 18th and early 19th centuries : only in Russia could one evade the rule of the Antichrist. This view was derived from a specific interpretation of certain Bible passages such as B. Ez 38,3  LUT : "Thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I want to you, Gog, who are the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal!" Meshech and Tubal became as Moscow and Tobolsk and thus as pars pro toto interpreted for Russia. With this teaching, Cloeter had succeeded in persuading pious families in the Franconian-Swabian region of his parish in Illenschwang to emigrate.

In 1882 there were already 52 families living in the Gnadenburg colony. Cloeter and his followers viewed the German Protestant state churches very critically and wavered between a complete withdrawal from the national church and a moderate inner-church distance, as is the case for example. B. was practiced in the community movement . So the settlers in Gnadenburg initially oriented themselves towards a rather free church community similar to the Moravian Brethren , but in the course of the decades they came closer and closer to the Lutheran church again. In 1933 the Gnadenburg Protestants officially joined the Lutheran Church of Russia.

Cloeter himself did not stay permanently in Gnadenburg; he died in 1894 in Weiltingen in Central Franconia , his wife's hometown.

literature

• Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz : Cloeter, Samuel Gottfried Christoph. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon. I (1990), col. 1069-1070.
• Gottlieb Bieri: The community of Gnadenburg in the North Caucasus . in: Joseph Schnurr (ed.): The churches and the religious life of the Russian Germans - Evangelical part, Stuttgart (1978), pp. 272-302.
• Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach: Evangelical Spirit and Faith in Modern Bavaria . Munich 1980. pp. 267-280.
• Karl Stumpp : Directory of German settlements in the North Caucasus . in: Heimatbuch der Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland, Stuttgart (1961), pp. 155–161.