Pastor Nathan Bickel had questions about my Theodore Schmauk quotations. I am going to give a little historical overview.
Bishop Stephan came over with the Saxon group and established a Pietistic cult in Missouri. Walther took over and the Missouri Synod experienced what other Pietistic groups saw in America. The Pietism of Europe
was under attack by American Evangelicals.
Each group had its Pietistic origins and base, plus a renewed study of the Lutheran confessions. The Augustana Synod (Swedish) was very much like Missouri - Pietism blended with the Lutheran orthodoxy of the post-Concord era. There was a great deal of interest in Luther, too (unlike today).
No one said, "We are not Lutherans, we are Pietists," but they were Halle Pietists. Labels mean little today, too. Most of the modern Lutheran groups consider themselves confessional, and each one is the true Lutheran standard-bearer. They all agree about that label when they meet at Fuller Seminary, Willow Creek, and Sweet retreats - especially when they share in Thrivent events and training.
Schmauk probably saw the positive trend toward the Confessions going backwards when he wrote Confessional Principle. He was saying, as I often do, that the formality of confessional subscription is meaningless. What really matters is - what are you teaching and what will you leave behind?
Liberal Lutherans were bending in the direction of evolution, New Testament text manipulation, and working together in One Big Happy Christian Family. Those influences moved liberals away from the Confessions, because the Book of Concord and Luther were obstacles in the way of true progress.
The Social Gospel (political activism of the church) was already starting when Schmauk wrote his book. They had a little group that gathered (The Brotherhood of the Kingdom) and eventually influenced every denominational with its Social Gospel Creed. The Federal Council of Churches, renamed the National Council of Churches, was the agency for promoting ecumenism and the Social Gospel. The World Council of Churches was a separate entity, a bigger and badder version, with the same agenda. Each denomination had its sub-group, such as the Lutheran World Federation.
Chemnitz and the Concordists held that their doctrine was the original teaching of the Apostles and the early Christian Church - not a Lutheran brand.
Thanks to modern Pietism, Lutheran organizations promote their brand rather than Biblical, confessional doctrine. The Lutheran groups are all quite similar, as Sasse observed, simply arriving at the same omega point at slightly different times, like the cars in a train.
I had to show how Lutherans fell into the Social Gospel Movement, when I wrote my PhD dissertation at Notre Dame. Dr. Bruce Wenger thought it was amusing that I was trying to explain Lutheran mergers and splits to a Mennonite, a Roman Catholic, and a blend (Yoder, Gleason, and Hauerwas - in that order). Wenger was trained in medicine and was an expert in physiology, at Yale and Harvard.
The research paralleled what happened with the Church Growth Movement in Lutherdom. The same tactics were used, the same denials issued, the same apostasy rewarded.
