EVALUATION.
19. Serving, in a Way, the Lutheran Church.—Apart from the name there was nothing of genuine Lutheranism in the constitution of the General Synod. "The name," said Dr. Mann in 1855, "is the most important characteristic of the General Synod." "Hatte man," he continues, "dem Leib die Knochen und die Eingeweide und das Herz herausgenommen, so konnte man in den leeren Balg hineinschieben, was man wollte, und der Name Lutherisch blieb ja." In a letter dated April 15, 1857, he said of the General Synod: "Wer kann dieses mark- und kraftlose Ding, dieses verwaschene, um jeden individuellen Zug gekommene Gesicht der lutherischen Kirche gerne sehen?" (Spaeth, W. J. Mann, 174. 180.) C. P. Krauth declared in 1845: "It cannot be denied that the name Lutherans in this country simply states an historical fact without giving in any case a sure index to the views, feelings, or practises of those who bear it." (Spaeth, C. P. Krauth, 1, 119.) Yet, even the mere name, the mere empty skin of Luther, was not without some value. It served as a constant reminder of the lost crown, and kept numerous Lutherans from joining the sects. The union of Lutherans into a general body gave a standing to the Lutheran Church among the denominations, and thus, in a way, strengthened the Lutheran consciousness. It diminished the threatening danger of a merger with the Reformed in Pennsylvania and with the Episcopalians and Presbyterians in North Carolina. And by inserting the confession of "Jesus Christ as the Son of God and ground of our faith and hope" into its constitution, the General Synod may also have acted as a check on the inroads of Socinianism. Furthermore, the General Synod created a certain interest in the Lutheran Church of America abroad, especially in Germany, and roused her energies at home. In 1825 the General Synod established a theological seminary at Gettysburg, Samuel S. Schmucker being its first professor, with a free dwelling and a salary of $500 for the first year. In the same year it was "resolved that an agent be sent to Europe without delay, in order to receive contributions in moneys and in books for the use of the Seminary; and that our beloved and honored colleague Mr. Benjamin Kurtz be such agent." (8.) The minutes of 1827 report that Kurtz had collected $12,000. (27.) In 1837 Schmucker made a similar tour in America, collecting from Congregationalists and others $14,917 for the Seminary Fund. Only if Gettysburg will nourish, said I. Oswald in the Seminary Report of 1837, "we can expect that the Gospel-trumpet will be blown from the Wittenberg in America with the result that the Germans who have settled in the various States and are scattered in our extended countries (some of whom are famishing for lack of knowledge, and by reason of circumstances are outcasts of the church) will hear and come to adore the Lord in His holy mountain." (1837, 61.) In every direction the General Synod developed a lively activity. In 1842, the year of the Muhlenberg centennial jubilee, the General Synod made strenuous efforts to raise a fund of $150,000 for its charitable institutions. (1841, 53 ff.) "What is this sum," it was said, "for a church numbering 100,000 members and more than 25,000 families? It amounts to only $1.50 for each member, and not even $10 for every family!" In 1857 the General Synod resolved: "That the churches in connection with the General Synod be recommended to observe our regular ecclesiastical festivals in commemoration of the fundamental facts of our religion, viz.: Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day, and Whitsunday, in the hope and persuasion that by the divine blessing they will be found to be, as they have often proved, occasions of reviving to our congregations." (32.) In 1866 the resolution was added: "That it be recommended to the ministers and churches in our connection to celebrate the thirty-first of October in each year in commemoration of the commencement of the Reformation." (42.) In 1879, the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Luther's Catechism, the General Synod resolved that we "reaffirm our appreciation of Luther's Smaller Catechism as the best manual of instruction preparatory to church-membership." (39.) In the same year the resolution was adopted: "That in view of the fact that 1880 will be the semicentennial of the Augsburg Confession, every pastor of the General Synod be requested to preach on that subject on or near the twenty-fifth of June in that year." (40.) The General Synod organized the "Parent Educational Society" for assisting ministerial students; the "Central Missionary Society" for domestic missions; the "Foreign Mission Society" for work in India; and established a "Pastors' Fund," a book company, etc. The General Synod was always on the alert to draw Lutherans in all parts of the country into her circles. Thus, e.g., when, in 1839, the Saxons had arrived in Missouri, the General Synod passed the resolutions: "1. That a special committee be appointed to open a correspondence with the companies of Lutherans recently arrived in the United States from Germany, and represented by Dr. Charles Vehse and others, and the Rev. Mr. Stephan; 2. that the committee write in the name of the General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States, giving a sketch of the history and objects of this body, with any other intelligence which they may think it important to communicate, and requesting of Dr. Vehse and the Rev. Mr. Stephan and their respective associates any information which they may think proper to make relative to their own history, their present situation, and their future prospects." (19.)
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.)