Chapter 16

77. Dr. Benjamin Kurtz.--Shoulder to shoulder with Schmucker stood B. Kurtz (1795-1865). He studied theology under G. Lochman; was assistant pastor to his uncle, J. Daniel Kurtz, at Baltimore in 1815; pastor at Hagerstown, Md., from 1815 to 1831; at Chambersburg, Pa., from 1831 to 1833; editor of the _Lutheran Observer_ from 1833 to 1861. His book _Why You Are a Lutheran_ had a wide circulation. In 1841, at Baltimore, Kurtz was appointed by the General Synod to write a "judiciously written life of Luther," which, however, though later committed to Reynolds, never appeared. In most enthusiastic manner Kurtz pleaded the cause of the General Synod, not only in America, but also in Europe, where he succeeded in collecting $12,000 for the Gettysburg Seminary. (_Proceedings_ 1827, 29.) In the _Observer_ of July 3, 1857, Kurtz made the following confession: Originally he, too, had endeavored to teach "on the benefit of the Sacrament" in complete accordance with the symbolical books; later, when such was no longer possible to him, he had explained his own faith into the Catechism; this becoming a burden to his conscience, he had been on the point of joining the Presbyterians or Methodists; his older colleagues, however, had held him back from taking this step; they had advised him not to be troubled about such matters, as the Lutheran Church was far too liberal mid generous to insist on agreement with the symbols on minor matters, and that without compunction they themselves deviated in various points from the Confessions farther than he did, it being sufficient to adhere to the great fundamental doctrines; this advice had suddenly given comfort to his heart and made the Lutheran Church dearer to him than before; and ever since he had boldly told his catechumens that he did not believe what the Catechism teaches of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, etc. Thus Kurtz's Lutheranism, like that of Schmucker's, deteriorated as the years rolled on. Kurtz was a fiery advocate of "new measures," revivals, protracted meetings, Sabbath- and temperance-reform, etc., and an ardent champion of "American Lutheranism" and the Definite Platform. He violently opposed every effort at Lutheranizing and confessionalizing the General Synod. Through the _Lutheran Observer_ he wielded a tremendous influence, weekly filling it with ferocious attacks on the Lutheran symbols and the "symbolists" who opposed the Reformed theology of Schmucker and his compeers, and ridiculing in the coarsest fashion everything distinctive of true and historic Lutheranism. In its issue of November 23, 1849, Kurtz wrote, revealing the spirit that moved him: "The Fathers--who are the 'Fathers'? They are the children; they lived in the infancy of the Church, in the early dawn of the Gospel-day. John was the greatest among the prophets, and yet he that was the least in the kingdom of God, in the Christian Church, was greater than he. He probably knew less, and that little less distinctly, than a Sunday-school child, ten years of age, in the present day. Even the Apostle Peter, after all the personal instruction of Christ, could not expand his views sufficiently to learn that the Gospel was to be preached to the Gentiles, and that the Church of Christ was to compass the whole world. A special miracle was wrought to remove his prejudice and convince him of his folly. Every well-instructed Sunday-school child understands this thing, without a miracle, better than Peter did. Who, then, are the 'Fathers'? They have become the Children; they were the Fathers compared with those who lived in the infancy of the Jewish dispensation; but, compared with the present and advanced age, they are the Children, and the learned and pious of the nineteenth century are the Fathers. We are three hundred years older than Luther and his noble coadjutors, and eighteen hundred years older than the primitives; theirs was the age of infancy and adolescence, and ours that of full-grown, adult manhood. They were the Children; we are the Fathers; the tables are turned." Down to its merger in 1915 with the _Lutheran Church Work_, the _Observer_ has always borne the stamp of Kurtz's Reformed and Methodistic theology, as well as of his fanatical and Puritanic spirit. In 1858 Kurtz founded _The Mission Institute_, which was declared to be non-sectarian. (_L. u. W._ 1858, 351.) In 1862 he wrote: "With the editor of the _Lutheran_ I am an admirer of the Augsburg Confession, but he must allow me to interpret it for myself, as I allow him." (_L. u. W._ 1862, 152.) Kurtz and the _Observer_ were never censured by the General Synod. Moreover, in 1866, at Fort Wayne, Synod resolved, in memory of B. Kurtz, "that by this afflicting dispensation the Lutheran Church has lost one of her oldest, most faithful, and successful ministers; the General Synod, one of her earliest, ablest, and most constant defenders; and the cause of Protestantism and Evangelical piety in our country, one of its most enlightened and fearless advocates." (37.)

78. Dr. Samuel Sprecher (1810-1905) was the brother-in-law and most devoted and enthusiastic supporter of Schmucker. From 1849 to 1884 he was president of Wittenberg College in Springfield, O., which was most advanced in the advocacy and development of Schmucker's brand of American Lutheranism. Again and again Sprecher urged the necessity of making a bold and honest statement setting forth the exact tenets of American Lutheranism. "I do not see," he said, "how we can do otherwise than adopt the symbols of the Church, or form a new symbol, which shall embrace all that is fundamental to Christianity in them, rejecting what is un-scriptural, and supplying what is defective." (Spaeth, 1, 347.) Determined in his blind opposition to "symbolism," Sprecher insisted that the General Synod refuse admission to such as adhered to the Lutheran symbols and their doctrines, and declined to subscribe to the Platform. In 1858 the _Religious Telescope_ said in praise of Sprecher: "He is a Bible-Lutheran and does not cram the heads of his students with baptismal regeneration nonsense and similar semipapal imbecilities." (_Observer_, Feb. 25, 1858; _L. u. W._ 1858, 126.) Toward the end of his life Sprecher receded from his former position. In the _Lutheran Evangelist_, January 15, 1892, he wrote: "I can now say, as I could not formerly, that, like Spener, I can for myself accept the symbols of the Church without reserve.... It is true that I did once think 'The Definite Synodical Platform' (that modification of Lutheranism which perhaps has been properly called 'the culmination of Melanchthonianism') desirable and practicable, and that I now regard all such modifications of our creed as hopeless. In the mean time an increased knowledge of the spirit, methods, and literature of the Missouri Synod has convinced me that such alterations are undesirable, that the elements of true Pietism, that a sense of the necessity of personal religion, and the importance of personal assurance of salvation, can be maintained in connection with a Lutheranism modified 'by the Puritan element.'" (Jacobs, 369; Neve, 113.) In 1906 the _Observer_ remarked: "It was Sprecher's fear that true evangelical piety and the certainty of faith could not be maintained so well under a strict orthodoxy that made him hesitate to embrace all of the symbolical books of the Lutheran Church in his system of faith.... This was one of the effects upon him of the New England theology with which he came in contact largely in his early life." (_L. u. W._ 1906, 277.) But even after his manly retraction Sprecher was not completely cured of the virus of Reformed subjectivism. Sprecher was among the first who, within the General Synod, declared that "inspiration does not make a book free of ... grammatical errors, rhetorical faults, and historical inaccuracies in minor and secondary matters." (_L. u. W._ 1871, 126.)

79. Dr. James Allen Brown.--Brown, born 1821, was licensed in 1845 by the Maryland Synod; served as pastor in various congregations; as professor of theology in Newberry College, S.C., from 1859 to 1860; as chaplain in the U.S. Army; as professor of Systematic Theology at Gettysburg from 1864 to 1879; as editor of the _Lutheran Quarterly_ from 1871; insane since 1880, he died June 19, 1882. During the Platform controversy Brown was a zealous opponent of Schmucker and regarded as a conservative. In the _Evangelical Review_ he charged Schmucker with teaching false doctrines concerning regeneration, justification, and inherited sin. Articles against Brown appeared in the _Observer_ and in the _Evangelical Review_. (_L. u. W._ 1858, 65.) Though an opponent of Schmucker, Brown shared practically all of his peculiarly Reformed and unionistic views. "To separate her from the great multitude of God's sacramental host, degrades the Lutheran Church, the Mother Church of the Reformation," Brown declared in his pamphlet against the assailants of the General Synod. (22.) And when asked, in 1868, in the lawsuit of Hebron Evangelical Lutheran Church in Leechburg: "Do you believe as Professor of Didactic Theology at the Seminary of the General Synod that the doctrines of the Augsburg Confession agree with Holy Scripture?" Brown answered under oath, "I hold the Augsburg Confession to be a correct exhibition of the fundamental doctrines of the divine Word." Asked again, "Do you believe as such Professor that the Augsburg Confession teaches some things which are not in harmony with the Bible?" he answered, "In certain points there are, according to what appears to be its true and original sense, some things taught in the Augsburg Confession which I do not consider as taught in the Bible or in agreement therewith." Requested to enumerate fundamental doctrines of the Word of God found in the Augsburg Confession to which the constitution of the General Synod referred, he mentioned seven of the twenty-one articles as fundamental, one as not fundamental, and all the others as containing doctrines of fundamental character, but not fundamental in their exact expression. In his pamphlet, "The General Synod and Her Assailants," Brown wrote: The Lutheran Church has its confessions, liturgies, etc., "but she enforces none of them upon her members in the form of rigorous and compulsatory law; ... it does not lie in the genius of our Church to enforce her utterances, in all their details, as if they were indispensable, either to Christianity or herself." (12.)

80. Dr. J.G. Butler and the "Lutheran Evangelist."--Dr. Butler, pastor of the Lutheran Memorial Church in Washington, D.C., and editor of the _Lutheran Evangelist_, was among the most liberal of the General Synod pastors and in every respect a unionistic-Reformed-Methodistic theologian, who rejected every doctrine distinctive of Lutheranism. (_L. u. W._ 1908, 321.) In 1895 he wrote: "I have become almost entirely indifferent to theological and even to denominational differences of practise and belief." (1895, 251.) In 1899: "The things which separate us [evangelical denominations] are of a speculative nature and have nothing to do with the substance of that faith which saves souls and is the only hope of a lost world." (1899, 124.) At his fiftieth jubilee, in 1899, addresses were delivered by four pastors of the General Synod and seven representatives of other denominations; 250 men "of every creed, denomination, shade of religious faith, and political opinion" were invited to the banquet. (1900, 26.) In 1909 Butler gave the following advice to the Lutheran Church: "Adopt the name American Lutheran, and we may make it one of the stepping-stones toward the union of the entire Church.... The ideal is not uniformity in doctrine and life, but uniformity in love for Christ and the Kingdom." (1909, 228.) In 1909, after the death of Dr. Butler, the _Lutheran Evangelist_ was merged with the _Lutheran Observer_. The last number of the _Evangelist_ spoke of Butler as "that true prophet of God." And the _Lutheran Observer_ said in praise of the _Evangelist_: "It has been a power for good in their [its readers'] lives. Of its records they may well be proud. Founded in 1876, its career of thirty-three years has been one of achievement and honor. It has made a solid and enduring contribution to the developing history of the Lutheran Church in this country." (1909, 562.) Dr. Butler served twice as chaplain in the United States Congress.

81. Dr. J.D. Severinghaus (1834-1905) graduated 1861 in the Seminary at Springfield, O.; from 1873 to 1905 he was active in Chicago; in 1869 he founded _Lutherischer Kirchenfreund_ (temporarily called _Lutherischer Hausfreund_); in 1875 he published _Denkschrift der Generalsynode_; he established connections with Chrischona, and in 1878 with Pastor C. Jensen in Breklum, to prepare candidates for the Wartburg Synod; in 1883 he founded the Chicago Seminary. Severinghaus was one of the most fanatical opponents of Lutheran confessionalism. "The _Kirchenfreund_," he declared, "intends to be genuinely Lutheran, hence not in the sense in which the name after the Reformation was so frequently abused in the interest of a quarrelsome exclusive faction (_Rotte_). In the Lutheran Church there have not only been, and have been tolerated, different opinions on non-essential articles, but it is of the very essence of the true liberty of the Lutheran Church that such differences must be tolerated." (_L. u. W._ 1869, 58.) Severinghaus was an implacable enemy and unscrupulous detractor of Walther and the Missouri Synod. Of his numerous aspersions in the _Kirchenfreund_ the following has attracted special attention: "Well, the Missourians are not Quakerish. They believe in fighting, even against their own Government. For during the time of war they had raised a rebel flag on their Preachers' College in St. Louis, a proof that they intended to tread the Constitution of our country under their feet, in order to enforce their own despotism the more easily." In Dr. Neve's _Kurzgefasste Geschichte_ of 1915 Geo. Fritschel writes: "Walther sympathized with the South, and even had the Rebellion flag hoisted over the Seminary." (247.) However, the _Lutheraner_ of February 1, 1870, brands "the scribble" of the _Kirchenfreund_ as an "infamous slander" and Severinghaus as "a mendacious slanderer." "The truth is"--the _Lutheraner_ continues--"that during the time of war never a Rebellion Flag, but repeatedly a Union flag was hoisted over our College in St. Louis." (26, 84. 150. 159; 25, 114. 190.) The General Synod approved of, and repeatedly endorsed, the _Kirchenfreund_. In 1871, at Dayton, 0.: "The _Kirchenfreund_ has also proved that our principles are favorably received by a large portion of our brethren. Outside of our Church the paper is doing a good work in removing prejudices against the General Synod and in defending our principles." (21.) In 1873, at Canton, 0., the Committee on German Church paper reported: "The influence of the paper is seen in many things, but especially in the growing interest in the German work. There no longer can be any doubt that our type of Lutheranism commends itself to the Germans, and that it need but be understood to gain their favor. It is so clear that it needs no proof that the German and English work must go hand in hand in the General Synod. The _Kirchenfreund_ is doing this twofold work of bringing us into closer sympathy with the Germans, and bringing them into closer union with ourselves." (40 f.; cf. 1875, 50.) In 1879, at Wooster, 0.: "The _Kirchenfreund_ has been published regularly in 24 numbers per year, since the last convention, and our report covers volumes IX and X. This has not been the most prosperous period of its history; on the contrary, we are obliged to report a very material loss of subscribers and proportionate diminution of receipts. We believe, however, that this loss is not attributable to any defects of the paper itself, nor to any circumstance whatsoever under our control, but rather to general causes, such as the continued and exhausting depression of the business interests of the country, change in the habits of our people, increase of good secular papers, and Sunday editions of local papers, westward removal of our people, etc." (37.) In the same year, 1879, Severinghaus declared that Missouri showed "all marks of the antichrist described in the Word of God." (_L. u. W._ 1879, 55.)

82. Dr. Milton Valentine (1825-1906), for nineteen years professor of Dogmatic Theology in Gettysburg, opposed the confessional trend within the General Synod, and, in important distinctive doctrines, occupied a Reformed position. In his _Christian Theology_ of 1906, Dr. Valentine sacrifices the inerrancy of the Scriptures in making concessions to modern geology, astronomy, and Evolution. He denies the total depravity of man; charges the Formula of Concord with Flacianism; teaches the humiliation of Christ's divine nature; denies that the divine majesty was communicated to His human nature; and questions the penal suffering of Christ. He teaches that Christ did not pay the full penalty for all sins, for then forgiveness of sin could not be spoken of; Christ's atonement merely made forgiveness possible for God, which followed under the condition that man consents thereto; faith precedes regeneration and conversion; God does not produce the act of faith, but only the ability to believe; the Holy Ghost merely enables man to fulfil the conditions of justification and to convert himself; God restores free choice, but man himself must make the choice and decide in favor of grace; the will of man is the third cause of conversion; children cannot believe, and are saved without faith of their own; Baptism does not work regeneration; heathen are saved if they follow their natural light; in the Eucharist Christ's body and blood are not received orally nor by unbelievers; close communion militates against the unity of the Church; a Church is orthodox so long as it adheres to the fundamental doctrines held in common by all Evangelical communions; deviation in other doctrines is no hindrance to church-fellowship; the government and officers of the State must acknowledge Jesus as Lord and His will as the highest law; legislation must be guided by the Bible; divorces not sanctioned in Scripture may not be granted by the State; the State must enforce the "divine Sabbath"; the Bible teaches a millennium in which the Gospel shall rule supreme, etc. (_L. u. W._ 1908, 128.)

83. Dr. J.W. Richard (1843-1909), professor at Gettysburg since 1889, and editor of the _Lutheran Quarterly_ since 1808, occupied practically the same position as Valentine, whose _Christian Theology_ he endorsed. In the _Lutheran Quarterly_ and the _Lutheran Observer_, as well as in his _Confessional History_, Dr. Richard, following Heppe and similar German theologians, defended Melanchthonianism, and criticized the Form of Concord, the Second Article of which he branded as Calvinistic. He resisted the efforts on the part of the conservatives and the _Lutheran World_ at revising the doctrinal basis of the General Synod, and ignored the confessional resolutions of 1901 and 1905. (_L. u. W._ 1908, 84 ff.; 1909, 179.) Following such German theologians as Dr. Hauck and others, Richard distinguished between "form and substance" of the Confessions, in a manner invalidating the subscription to the Augustana, and practically amounting to the old formula: "fundamentals substantially correct." As to the Lord's Supper Richard regarded the declaration, "that Christ is present in the Eucharist," as sufficient. (_Confessional History_, 610-618.) In 1909 Richard identified himself with Schleiermacher's definition of religion, and pronounced this father of modern subjectivism and rationalism "the renewer of theology and the greatest theologian since the Reformation." (_L. u. W._ 1909, 421.)

CONSERVATIVES.

84. Confessional Tendencies.--Apart from a number of minor causes the conservative movement within the General Synod is chiefly due to the awakening of confessional Lutheranism in Germany, the increase of Lutheran immigrants, and the powerful influence of the Lutherans in the West, especially the Missouri Synod. The rapidly multiplying German elements which entered the Pennsylvania and New York Ministeriums and other Lutheran synods during the second half of the nineteenth century were always farthest advanced in taking a confessional stand with respect to Lutheran doctrine and practise. Down to the present day the attitude of the German Districts of the now defunct General Synod toward lodges, altar- and pulpit-fellowship, and the Lutheran symbols has been much more conservative than that of the English District Synods. However, the early conservatives of the General Synod, besides being in the minority and having no organ in the English language to cope with the _Lutheran Observer_, lacked the clearness, consistency, boldness, initiative, determination, and aggressiveness of their liberal opponents. And even later, when both their number and courage had increased materially, it was not in every respect the old genuine, but a modified Lutheranism which also their most pronounced representatives advocated--not whole-hearted, undivided loyalty to Lutheran doctrines and practises, but a Lutheranism tainted, more or less, with indifferentism and unionism, nor absolutely free even from elements of Pietism and Reformedism. For the cry of the conservative leaders who later organized the General Council was not, "Back to Luther!" but, "Back to Muhlenberg!" And the prominent conservatives that remained in the General Synod after the Fort Wayne rupture, they all, without exception, were outspoken unionists, ready to tolerate un-Lutheran doctrines in their own midst and pulpit-fellowship with the sects, some of them being disloyal even to doctrines distinctive of Lutheranism. During the Platform controversy some of the most influential conservatives differed from Schmucker not so much in theology as in their policy of mutual toleration and the refusal to mutilate and abandon the venerable Augsburg Confession. The lack of bold aggressiveness on the part of the most Lutheran of these conservatives is illustrated by the letter of H.J. Schmidt, already referred to: "If all open conflict is avoided, our cause, I mean the cause of truth and of the Church, will continue silently and surely to gain ground." (Spaeth, 1, 349; _Lutheraner_, April 12, 1852.) Their lack of Lutheran seriousness is exemplified by the cordial relation existing at Gettysburg between C.F. Schaeffer, who in his lectures in Catechetics endeavored to create an interest in, and respect for, the Lutheran symbols, and his brother-in-law S.S. Schmucker, who did everything in his power to discredit and misrepresent them. (_L. u. W._ 1884, 357.)