An Evening with Paul Gerhardt

Borrowed from Norman Teigen's blog.

Quotes from Krauth

C. P. Krauth served as the first professor of the
General Council Seminary in Philadelphia.
I was nominated for a position at the Philadelphia school,
which Bergendoff had tried unsuccessfully to merge with Gettysburg.
Philadelphia already had their candidate selected, so 9 others were interviewed to make it look fair.
The spirit of Krauth was long-gone from that school.

I suggest reading The Finkelsteinery for some excellent selections from Krauth.

Krauth's life and work are summarized here.

Krauth and others led the Eastern Lutherans back to the Book of Concord, after S. S. Schmucker and others bewitched the General Synod over revivalism and American Lutheranism. The General Synod pioneered:

1. Dropping the liturgy.
2. Turning the Sacraments into ordinances (no efficacy of the Word).
3. Holding revivals.
4. Practicing unionism with the Reformed.

Have you heard those themes before? They sound just like the Shrinkers in WELS, Missouri, and the Little Sect on the Prairie.

Luther Weigle was the first Lutheran professor at Yale Divinity School. He came from the General Synod tradition, so he remembered the Mourner's Bench (revivalism) at his father's congregation. He joined the Congregationalists - now the fast-shrinking United Church of Christ. The unionists at St. Paul Lutheran (WELS) in New Ulm, Mn, split from St. Paul and eventually formed a UCC church.

The ULCA was concentrated in the original 13 colonies as the General Synod, which split over doctrinal issues around the time of the Civil War. The South and North both had a General Synod and a (confessional) General Council. I have heard that some important city intersections had a General Synod church on one corner and a General Council church on another. The General Council had a positive influence on all Lutherans because of the excellent professors/authors at the school. Merger with the General Synod pieces, forming the ULCA in 1917, led to a slow, anti-confessional apostasy.

Looking for Krauth's picture, I just found this quotation:

When error is admitted into the Church, it will be found that the stages in its progress are always three. It begins by asking toleration. Its friends say to the majority: You need not be afraid of us; we are few and weak; let us alone, we shall not disturb the faith of others. The Church has her standards of doctrine; of course we shall never interfere with them; we only ask for ourselves to be spared interference with our private opinions.

Indulged in for this time, error goes on to assert equal rights. Truth and error are balancing forces. The Church shall do nothing which looks like deciding between them; that would be partiality. It is bigotry to assert any superior right for the truth. We are to agree to differ, and any favoring of the truth, because it is truth, is partisanship. What the friends of truth and error hold in common is fundamental. Anything on which they differ is ipso facto non-essential. Anybody who makes account of such a thing is a disturber of the peace of the Church. Truth and error are two coordinate powers, and the great secret of church-statesmanship is to preserve the balance between them.

From this point error soon goes on to its natural end, which is to assert supremacy. Truth started with tolerating; it comes to be merely tolerated, and that only for a time. Error claims a preference for its judgments on all disputed points. It puts men into positions, not as at first in spite of their departure from the Church’s faith, but in consequence of it. Their repudiation is that they repudiate that faith, and position is given them to teach others to repudiate it, and to make them skillful in combating it.

Charles Porterfield Krauth, The Conservative Reformation (Philadelphia, 1871) p.195ff.

And this one from another blog:

More Krauth Goodness

"Had our fathers surrendered the truth, even under that pressure to which ours is but a feather, how would we have cursed their memory, as we contrasted what we were with what we might have been. And shall we despond, draw back, and give our names to the reproach of generations to come, because the burden of the hour seems too heavy? God, in His mercy, forbid! If all others are ready yo yield to despondency, and abandon the struggle, we, children of the Reformation, dare not. That struggle has taught us two lessons, which must never be forgotten. One is, that the true and the good must be secured at any price. They are beyond all price. We dare not compute their cost. They are the soul of our being, and the whole world is as dust in the balance against them. No matter what is to be paid for them, we must not hesitate to lay down their redemption price. The other grand lesson is, that their price is never paid in vain. What we give can never be lost, UNLESS WE GIVE TOO LITTLE. If we give all, we shall have all. All shall come back. Our purses shall be in the mouths of our sacks. We shall have both the corn and the money. But if we are [stingy], we lose all--lose what we meant to buy, lose what we have given. If we maintain the pure Word inflexibly at every cost, over against the arrogance of Rome and of the weak pretentions of Rationalism, we shall conquer both through the Word; but to compromise on a single point, is to lose all and to be lost."

C.P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation, p. 21.

Luther Weigle became the first Lutheran to teach at Yale Divinity School, but he joined the Congregationalists. Weigle was a leader in the notorious Revised Standard Version of the Bible, similar to Jumpin' Jack Jeske and the notorious NIV.

Oddly enough, an Augustana Synod church moved to the bottom of the hill, next to YDS. That is where I worked for a year, where little Ichabod was baptized.

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Kenneth J. Schmidt has left a new comment on your post "Quotes from Krauth":

For years I tried to convince people in the LCMS that Jerry Kieschnick was the intellectual reincarnation of S.S. Schmucker and it either went over their heads or people sneered at me. C.P. Krauth is the Lutheran hero for our time.