Samuel S. Schmucker, Princeton student, General Synod Leader, 1799 - 1873
Henry Melchior Muhlenberg came over from Halle after Count Zinzendorf tried to work in America under an assumed name. Muhlenberg belonged to the earlier generation, before the General Synod, and he was quite remarkable in his efforts to provide Lutheran pastors and congregations for America.
His work became organized as the Pennsylvania Ministerium.
1711 - 1787
With the Lutheran population growing, they organized the General Synod in 1820. Their college and seminary were in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which was the site of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. That is the only Seminary Hill where troops fought instead of the faculty.
Schmucker not only helped in founding Gettysburg - he also served there almost 40 years as a professor and chairman of the faculty.
This was a time when many Lutherans saw Calvinism as slightly different from their own confession of faith. That ignorance continues to this day. Schmucker was a Lutheran in name only, very much influenced by his time at Princeton, a Calvinist school. I visited there with plans to go to graduate school. They kept bragging about their Yale-educated faculty, and I went to Yale. The Princeton dean was required reading in church history, but his mentor was at Yale - Roland Bainton.
Two big movements were the union of Calvinism and Lutheranism - with Lutherans conceding everything - and revivalism. In revivalism, the congregation set up a Mourner's Bench. If a sermon was especially effective in getting people to cry, they would come forward and kneel on the bench, pledging to start a new life. The revivalists/unionists cared little for the Lutheran liturgy or Lutheran hymns (see WELS for a modern example).
About half of the General Synod pulled away to form the General Council, which located their seminary in Philadelphia - Mt. Airy. (I was given an HEW interview there, which meant they already had their guy and needed to prove fairness. Nice trip, though.) The Philadelphia professors were Back to the Reformation Lutherans and gradually influenced the General Synod to abandon its anti-Lutheran ways. The two parts merged in 1918, but mergers always favor the weakest in doctrine, so the United Lutheran Church in America became a triumph for the unionist leaders. That devolved into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in communion with all denominations and all religions.
The best books of that old era came from the General Council -
- Henry Eyster Jacobs
- Charles Porterfield Krauth
- Theodore Schmauk
Today, Gettysburg and Mt. Airy have merged into the so-called United Lutheran Seminary, whose first moves were
- to hire a Presbyterian to serve as president and
- to fire her.
