American Lutheranism, Volume 2 / The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General Council, United Synod in the South)

by F. Bente

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.)

24. Doctrinal Statements from 1829 to 1835.—The Pastoral Letter of the convention of the General Synod in Hagerstown (Haegerstadt), 1829, contains the following statements: The object of the General Synod is not to introduce absolute uniformity also in non-essential doctrines; such a unity did not exist in the early Christian congregations; it is sufficient to adhere to the fundamental tenets of the Reformation; every teacher and layman is entitled to use his Bible without being bound by any human confessions; the General Synod merely demands acceptance of the fundamental doctrines of the Gospel as taught in the Augsburg Confession, and leaves everything else unlimited; but she does not agree with those who absolutely reject all confessions of faith; the Church is in need of a confession in order to protect herself against the Socinians; most of the confessions, however, have lost themselves into minute (spitzfindige) and doubtful dogmas, and thus encouraged the spirit of superstition and schism, and naturally must continue to do so, the longer, the more; in every one of the different orthodox [evangelical] denominations, frequently, indeed, in the same congregation, there are persons who differ as much in their opinions as the confession of their Church differs from that of other Churches; accordingly, there is no reason why synods bearing the name of Luther should not unite with the General Synod, though differing in their views as to non-fundamentals; the General Synod has no power to call members of individual synods to account for aberrations in doctrine or life; the most it can do is to admonish such a synod to investigate the matter; however, a synod refusing to demand orthodoxy in fundamentals can be expelled from the General Synod; in brief, the four synods now constituting the General Body are so many independent ecclesiastical jurisdictions, united only in order to promote brotherly love, and to combine their forces in the execution of such things as are of general benefit, and which no individual synod could perform. (16.) "The General Synod therefore," says the letter of 1829, "only demands of those who are connected with her that they hold the fundamental doctrines of the Gospel as they are taught in the Augsburg Confession, and leaves all other things unlimited." "Why, then," the letter continues, "should not all those synods of our country that bear the name of our immortal Luther, and have always yet retained the chief traits of this sublime Reformer, be united by the tender bond of the General Synod, notwithstanding the different opinions which they may entertain in; some points which do not touch the foundation of the Augsburg Confession?" (16.) It was in accordance with the sentiments expressed in this letter when the General Synod at the same convention in Hagerstown adopted for its district synods a constitution with a form of licensure and ordination containing the questions: "Do you believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God and the only infallible rule of faith and practise?" "Do you believe that the fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures are taught in a manner substantially correct (wesentlich richtig) in the doctrinal articles of the Augsburg Confession?" (43. 45.) Prior to 1864 the General Synod as such, however, was not in any shape or manner committed to the Augsburg Confession constitutionally. In 1835, when the Constitution was amended, Synod as such remained non-committal. The doctrinal basis then adopted and embodied in the Constitution does not mention the Augsburg Confession. It reads as follows: "All regularly constituted Lutheran synods holding the fundamental doctrines of the Bible as taught by our Church, not now in connection with the General Synod, may at any time become associated with it by adopting this Constitution and sending delegates to its convention, according to the ratio specified in Art. II." (Proceedings 1839, 49.) Evidently this deliverance, though marking an advance over the Constitution of 1820, intentionally omits a direct reference to the Augustana. Till 1864, then, the exact constitutional basis of the General Synod as such was not the Augsburg Confession, but the indefinite phrase: "the fundamental doctrines of the Bible as taught by our Church." All other confessional deliverances of the General Synod till 1864 may be summarized as follows: The fundamental doctrines of the Bible, i.e., the doctrines in which all evangelical (non-Socinian) Christians agree, are taught in a manner substantially correct in the doctrinal articles of the Augsburg Confession.

25. "A Solemn Farce."—The doctrinal basis of the General Synod, prior to 1864, is limited in more than one way. It does not embrace all of the Lutheran symbols. It includes only the twenty-one doctrinal articles of the Augustana. It binds only to the fundamental articles of the Bible. It presupposes that fundamental articles are such only as are agreed to by all evangelical Churches. It leaves the question whether all of those twenty-one articles of the Augsburg Confession are to be regarded as "fundamental doctrines of the Bible" undecided. It adopts the articles of the Augsburg Confession regarded as fundamental, not simply and absolutely, but merely as substantially correct." On the question of the ordination form of 1829 Krauth, Jr., commented in 1857 as follows: "What, then, is that question? We reply, in general: First, that the subject of her general affirmation is not the Book of Concord as a whole, but simply and purely the Augsburg Confession. Secondly, that not the entire Confession, but only the twenty-one articles of it which treat of doctrine, are specified in the affirmation. Thirdly, that only so far as these articles embrace fundamental doctrines does she make an affirmation. Fourthly, that of these she affirms that they teach the doctrines in a correct manner, and defines the correctness as a substantial one." (Spaeth, 1, 386.) J. L. Neve explains: "They [General Synod] considered what the Lutheran Church has in common with the other churches, and looked upon this as the fundamentals of Christianity, while the characteristic peculiarity of the Church of Luther, her special inheritance, was set aside as non-fundamental and unessential." (Geschichte, 90.) Accordingly, the General Synod, prior to 1864, did not subscribe to the distinctive doctrines of the Lutheran Church, but only to the doctrines held in common by the evangelical churches of Protestantism. Charles Philip Krauth, who was styled a Symbolist and Old Lutheran by the latitudinarians, declared in 1850, in his address before the General Synod at Charleston: "The terms of the subscription [to the Augustana] are such as to admit of the rejection of any doctrine or doctrines which the subscriber may not receive. It is subscribed or assented to as containing the doctrines of the Word of God substantially; they are set forth in substance; the understanding is that there are some doctrines in it not contained in the Word of God, but there is no specification concerning them. Every one could omit from his assent whatever he did not believe. The subscription did not preclude this. It is at once evident that a creed thus presented is no creed; that it is anything or nothing; that its subscription is a solemn farce." (Spaeth, 1, 370.)