Chapter 4

20. Exaggerated Estimates.--After what has already been said, the following evaluations of the General Synod will be received with a grain of salt. In the "Pastoral Letter" of the General Synod, written in 1831 by David F. Schaeffer, we read: "No church had to contend with so great difficulties as we have overcome by the help of God. As the English language is the language of our fortunate country, the untiring endeavors of our fathers to retain the knowledge of the German language among the youth were futile. Many who spoke German were not able to read this language. The consequences of this state of affairs were pitiable. The religious books of the parents were of no use, and in many cases true piety was gradually lost as well as the love for our Zion. In the mean time some Christian denominations who held their service in the English language were ardently endeavoring to promote the interest of religion and the growth of their churches. But the God of an Arndt, Spener, Francke, and of many other renowned founders and benefactors of our Church still lives. In this most critical moment, when our Church, which is distinguished for the simplicity of its service, the purity of its doctrines, and the excellency of its church-discipline, was about to sink into oblivion, just at this important moment the General Synod was brought into existence, and through this body the Theological Seminary and College grew up which now are in efficient operation and in a flourishing condition. Now our children may be instructed in all the different branches of the sciences by pious and well-trained teachers of our faith. Now, by our Seminary, the Church may be supplied with learned and pious preachers, who are able to instruct their hearers in both languages. And from this institute they will always go forth as brethren, inspired by the same spirit and led by the same principles." (_Proceedings_, 1831,22.) In 1857, Krauth, Jr., defending the General Synod, said: "She is the offspring of a reviving Lutheranism, born in the dawn that followed the night which fell upon our Church in this land, when the patriarchal luminaries of her early history had set on earth to rise in heaven. When the General Synod came into being, Rationalism still was in the ascendant in Europe. The names of Gabler and Bretschneider, of Wegscheider and Roehr, were names which had been held high in honor in the Lutheran Church in Germany. That Church had become what such men might have been expected to make her. Where their influence prevailed, she had become rotten in doctrine, destitute not only of the power of godliness, but even of the decencies of its forms, and ready, at the command of a royal devotee of Dagon, for a conjunction which she once would have regarded as the adding of a scaly tail and fishy fin to the fair bust of woman; but the bust was as fishy as the tail now, and they were frozen into happy conjunction. But this was not the Lutheranism which the General Synod desired to plant and perpetuate in the New World. When the Lutheran Church looked around her in her adopted land, she saw ignorance of her principles and prejudices of every hue prevailing against her. When she looked to her native land, all was thick darkness there. What was there on this side of the Atlantic or beyond it to inspire hope? Why not abandon the experiment as a thing foregone, and yield to the process of absorption into surrounding sects? It was at this crisis that the life of the Church displayed itself in the formation of the General Synod. The formation was a great act of faith, made, as the framers of her Constitution sublimely express it, in reliance 'upon God our Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, under the guidance and direction of the Holy Spirit in the Word of God.' The framers of that Constitution should be as dear to us as Lutherans as the framers of our Federal Constitution are to us as Americans. When the General Synod became completely organized by the acknowledgment of the doctrinal Articles of the Augsburg Confession as a standard of faith, it was the only voluntary body on earth pretending to embrace a nation as its territory, and bearing a Lutheran name, in which the fundamental doctrines of Lutheranism were the basis of union. The General Synod was a declaration, on the part of the Lutheran Church in America, that she had no intention of dying or moving, that she liked this Western World and meant to live here. And she has lived and waxed stronger and stronger, and the General Synod has been a mighty agent in sustaining and extending her beneficent work, and is destined to see a future which shall eclipse all her glory in the past. Heaven pity the fate of the man who looks upon the General Synod as having been a curse to the Church, or an inefficient worker in it--who imagines that Lutheranism would be stronger if the General Synod were weaker, or that truth would be reared upon the ruins of what she has been patiently laboring for nearly forty years to build." (Spaeth, 1, 383.)

21. Spaeth, and Jacobs on the General Synod.--After referring to the unionistic, rationalistic, and Socinian degeneration in the Pennsylvania and New York Ministeriums prior to the organization of the General Synod, A. Spaeth continues: "With this powerful influx of rationalism, and with the tendency of the remaining positive elements of our Church to assimilate and unite themselves with the surrounding 'Evangelical Denominations,' there was evident danger for the Lutheran Church in America of losing her historical connection with the fathers, and surrendering the distinctive features for which they contended, and as a religious society becoming simply a member of the Reformed family. At this point of threatening disintegration and dilapidation, the first steps were taken toward the establishment of the General Synod, which was certainly an honest effort to improve the state of affairs, to gather the scattered members of our Lutheran Church, and to preserve her as such on this Western Continent. Viewed in this light, the formation of the General Synod was 'an offspring of reviving Lutheranism,' as Dr. Krauth called it. But the difficulty and danger arose from the fact that two conflicting and irreconcilable elements tried to unite in it with a sort of compromise, the one, latitudinarian, un-Lutheran, unwilling or unable to prize the treasures of the Mother Church of the Reformation, and overanxious to exchange them for Puritan legalism and Methodistic 'new measures'; the other, conservative, holding on to the inheritance of the fathers, and hoping almost against hope to bring the Church back to their good foundation. If the former element succeeded in keeping out of the General Synod's original constitution any direct and outspoken reference to the historic confession of the Lutheran Church, the latter might have thought themselves secure in the provision which denied to the General Synod the power 'to make or demand any alteration whatever in the doctrines hitherto received by us.' But the first-named party, at the outset, had the popular sympathy on its side; it was the 'American' over against the 'foreigner'; it was aggressive, and had the advantage of having able and determined leaders, and thus, during the first twenty-five years of the General Synod's history, easily ruled the day, while the Lutheran consciousness of the second party slowly awoke from its slumbers, and those that were to be its leaders on the day of battle were quietly maturing from boyhood into manhood." (1, 320.) H. E. Jacobs, endeavoring to view the origin of the General Synod in its historical context, writes: "The General Synod must be regarded as a very important forward movement, and its influence as beneficial. It necessarily was not without the weaknesses that characterized the Lutheran Church in America at that time. One who ignores the entire historical development will find much to criticize and condemn, when examined from the standpoint of what is demanded by consistency with accurate theological definitions and clear conceptions of church polity. But he will find just as much that incurs the same judgment in the proceedings of the synods that united to form it. The faults peculiar to each synod were lost, while only the common faults of them all remained. The General Synod was a protest against the Socinianizing tendency in New York and the schemes of a union with the Reformed in Pennsylvania and with the Episcopalians in North Carolina. It stood for the independent existence of the Lutheran Church in America, and the clear and unequivocal confession of a positive faith. It failed, as its founders in the several synods had failed, in specifically determining the contents of this faith. It was not ready yet, as these synods were not ready, to return to the foundations laid by Muhlenberg and his associates, and from which there had been a general recession from twenty-five to thirty years before. Lament defects as we may, the General Synod saved the Church, as it became anglicized, from the calamity of the type of doctrine which within the New York Ministerium had been introduced into the English language." (_History_, 361 f.)

DOCTRINAL BASIS.

22. First Statement on Doctrinal Position.--The "Address of the General Synod to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States" of 1823 contains the following reference to the doctrinal attitude of the General Synod: "An acquaintance with the history of the Christian Church in the past ages, as well as a knowledge of her present condition throughout the world, establishes the fact that mankind are prone on this subject to fall into contrary extremes; some maintaining that if our external conduct be correct, it matters not what we believe, and others contending that as long as our creed is sound, the Church has little to do with private deportment. But the principle which the General Synod conceive to be taught in Scripture, and which they would recommend to the Church at large, is this, that we should view with charity, and treat with forbearance, those who have fallen into an aberration of non-fundamental importance either from the faith or the practise of the Bible and the Augsburg Confession; and on the other hand, that we are bound 'not to eat with a fornicator, or a covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner,' but to 'put away from among us such wicked persons,' and that 'a man that is an heretic,' who denies a fundamental doctrine, a doctrine essential to the Christian scheme, we are in like manner bound 'after the first and second admonition to reject.'" (14.) A fair analysis of this document yields the propositions: The General Synod receives the Bible and the Augsburg Confession. It distinguishes between fundamental and non-fundamental doctrines and aberrations from both. It holds that some of the doctrines of the Bible are not fundamental. It also holds that some of the doctrines of the Augsburg Confession are not fundamental. It enumerates neither the doctrines of the Bible nor of the Augsburg Confession regarded as non-fundamental. It defines fundamental doctrines as doctrines essential to the Christian scheme, hence, non-fundamental doctrines as not essential to the Christian scheme. Indirectly it admits that a doctrine essential to the Lutheran scheme is not necessarily a fundamental doctrine or a doctrine essential to the Christian scheme. It admits the inference that not all of the doctrines of the Augsburg Confession are essential to the Lutheran scheme. It denies that all the doctrines of the Augsburg Confession are essential to the Christian scheme. It holds that non-fundamental aberrations from the Christian scheme are not subject to church discipline. It also teaches that denial of some of the doctrines of the Augsburg Confession is not a matter of church discipline. In brief, the General Synod, according to the Address of 1823, held that there are errors subject to discipline, while others are not, but defined and enumerated neither the former nor the latter. It failed to draw a line of demarcation between the doctrines which may, and which may not, be denied with impunity. Indeed, the Constitution adopted 1820 speaks of "Jesus Christ as the Son of God and ground of our faith and hope." (Art. III, Sec. 2.) Possibly, however, the General Synod was not ready in 1823 to enforce the ban on Socinianism. That the sentiment against it was hardly as pronounced as is frequently assumed, appears also from the fact that the General Synod, in 1825, appointed a committee to prepare a hymn-book, liturgy, and a collection of prayers, in the English language, "adhering particularly to the New York Hymn-Book and German Liturgy of Pennsylvania as their guides." (11.) The New York Hymn-Book referred to was Quitman's and the Pennsylvania Liturgy the one of 1818, both tainted with rationalism. In the resolutions, however, adopted in the same year with respect to the Gettysburg Seminary, Jesus is confessed as "God over all, blessed forever." (5.) And the Pastoral Letter of 1829 declares that the Church is in need of a confession of faith in order to protect herself against the Socinians. (17.)

23. Gettysburg Subscription Limited.--At the time of organization of the General Synod, Samuel S. Schmucker and F. C. Schaeffer of New York apparently occupied a relatively advanced confessional position. According to a letter of Schmucker, dated Princeton, February 20, 1820, they had promised each other to labor with all earnestness that the Augsburg Confession should be raised again from the dust, and that every one subscribe to its twenty-one articles, and declare before God, by his subscription, that they agree with the Bible, not _quatenus_, but _quia_. (Singmaster, _Dist. Doct._, 44.) In 1826 Schmucker wrote, in defense of the Lutheran doctrine of the Person of Christ: "Only lack of insight and of clearness of intellect can mislead an honest opponent to impute a contradiction to the doctrine when it denies that the glorified body of Christ has the properties and is subjected to the laws which we call properties and laws of matter." (_Lutheraner_, April 12, 1852.) When, in 1825, the statutes for the government of the Seminary at Gettysburg were adopted, it was at the instance of Schmucker, the first chairman of the faculty and for nearly forty years a teacher at the Seminary, that the General Synod declared "that in this Seminary shall be taught in the German and English languages, the fundamental doctrines of the sacred Scriptures as contained in the Augsburg Confession of Faith," and that any professor may be removed "on account of error fundamental doctrines, immorality," etc. (5.) Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution of the Seminary, drawn up Schmucker and adopted by Synod, states that the Seminary is designed "to provide our churches with pastors who sincerely believe, and cordially approve of, the doctrines of the Holy Scriptures as they are fundamentally taught in the Augsburg Confession." Another article requires every professor-elect to publicly pronounce and subscribe the following declaration: "I believe the Augsburg Confession and the Catechisms of Luther to be a summary and just exhibition of the fundamental doctrines of the Word of God." And when Schmucker, September 5, 1826, was inducted into the "professorship Christian theology," D. F. Schaeffer, who delivered the charge, said: "As the Lord has signally favored our beloved Church, as her tenets are Biblical, and her veriest enemies cannot point out an important error in her articles of faith, no more than could the enemies of the truth at the Diet of Worms prove the books of the immortal Reformer erroneous, therefore the Church which entrusts you with the preparation and formation of her pastors, demands of you (and in her behalf I solemnly charge you) to establish all students confided to your care in that faith which distinguishes our Church from others. If any should object to such faith, or any part of it, or refuse to be convinced of the excellence of our discipline, they have their choice to unite with such of our Christian brethren whose particular views in matters of faith and discipline may suit them better. I hold it, however, as indispensable for the peace and welfare of a Church that unity of sentiment should prevail upon all important matters of faith and discipline among its pastors. Hence I charge you to exert yourself in convincing our students that the Augsburg Confusion is a safe directory to determine upon matters of faith declared in the Lamb's book." (Spaeth, 1, 336.) Accordingly Dr. Jacobs interprets the Gettysburg pledge as follows: "It was a pledge to a distinctively Lutheran position. Such an affirmation could never have been enforced in the proposed Lutheran-Reformed seminary which the ministerium [of Pennsylvania] had had in mind. It could not have been exacted of those who believed the confession to be in error on those points which divide the Lutherans from the Reformed. In justice, however, to those who might seem to have been acting a false part in making this affirmation while they believed the confession to contain errors, it must be stated, on the other hand, that the full force of the declaration was not so clearly apparent in a period directly following one when, as we have seen, the greatest living theologian of the Lutheran Church in America could distinguish no difference between the Augsburg Confession and the formularies of the Church of England." This interpretation appears to be in agreement with the solemn charge of Schaeffer, according to which the pledge refers to that faith which distinguishes our Church from others." However, Schmucker and his successors viewed the phrase "fundamental doctrines of the Word of God" as a restriction, limiting the subscription to the doctrines confessed by all evangelical denominations, thus eliminating from the pledge distinctive Lutheran doctrines. And the historical correctness of this view has never been satisfactorily refuted. Schmucker declared time and again: "The Augsburg Confession was not to be followed unconditionally; its binding force was expressly limited to the fundamentals. The professor's oath expressly limits our pledge to the Augsburg Confession to the fundamental doctrines of the Scriptures." He wrote: "After the abandonment of the General Synod, in 1823, by the Synods of Pennsylvania and New York, that body was chiefly sustained by the zeal and activity of younger men, in connection with a few beloved fathers who remained with us. At the very next meeting of the General Synod, in 1825, I had the pleasure, as well as honor, to introduce, for the first time in the history of that body, the recognition of the Augsburg Confession. At that time there were none amongst the friends of the General Synod who did not reject several tenets of the Augsburg Confession, such as private confession and absolution, as we all still do. Accordingly, the assent to the Augsburg Confession, expressed in the statutes for the Theological Seminary presented by me, was a _qualified_ one; it should and was intended to bind only to the _fundamentals_ of the Scriptures as taught in the Augsburg Confession. The language was well understood then, and was deemed clear and satisfactory; it has always been interpreted in the same way since, except by some, of late, whose predilections would incline them to find in it, if possible, some support for their more rigidly symbolic views." (Spaeth, 1, 338.) In the _Evangelical Review_, April, 1851, Schmucker declared: The General Synod established her theological seminary "not for the purpose of teaching the symbolic system of the sixteenth century,--for her leading members had all relinquished some of its features,--but, as her Constitution, adopted in 1825, explicitly declares, to prepare men to teach, not all the doctrines or aspects of doctrine in the Augsburg Confession, but the '_fundamental_ doctrines'; and not those aspects of doctrine which might be considered fundamental peculiarities of that Confession, but 'the fundamental doctrines _of the Scriptures_' those aspects of doctrine which Christians generally regard as fundamental truths of the Word of God. The symbolical books of the General Synod and the seminary at Gettysburg are the Bible and the Augsburg Confession, as a substantially correct exhibition of the fundamental truths of the Bible. To this the professorial oath of office in the seminary adds a similar _fundamental_ assent to the two Catechisms of Luther. For the professors to inculcate on their students the obsolete views of the old Lutherans contained in the former symbols of the Church in some parts of Germany, such as exorcism, the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, private confession, baptismal regeneration, immersion in baptism, as taught in Luther's Larger Catechism, etc., would be to betray the confidence of those who elected them to office, and to defeat the design of the institution." (Spaeth, 1, 338 f.)