However, dynamic and flexible Lutheranism may have been with respect to its Book of Concord, an encircling traditionalism weakened these early North American churches. “The crucial difficulty for Lutheranism by its freedom of expression is the danger either of procrastination or of unreflective dependence on precedent. Over against this risk, however, we must set the responsibility that this very freedom imposes. In general, it may be said that accountability for actions taken requires careful judgment no less than cautious execution. No wonder that tradition is often considered suspect, especially since it carried within itself an inner momentum toward fixity. At risk of oversimplification, we may affirm that Lutheranism will tolerate much as long as the confessional tradition is not despised and matters are dealt with in decency and good order.”46 Given these vicissitudes and constructs of Lutheranism, Lutheran congregations in North America suffered, unable to withstand Arminian storms of revivalism.
3–2
By mid-nineteenth century, though better prepared with pastors and leaders, nevertheless forces of Americanism breached linguistic barriers. “S.S. Schmucker, graduate of Princeton and president of the Lutheran seminary at Gettysburg, was the great symbol of the Lutheran adjustment to the American theological climate. It was Schmucker who issued in 1838 a Fraternal Appeal summoning all branches of evangelical Protestantism in America to unite in a single Apostolic Protestant Church, and who with other ‘liberal’ leaders exerted strong influence on behalf of ‘new-measures’ revivalism.”47 New measures consisted of pressures, means, and tactics imposed by such as Charles G. Finney (1792–1875) and Billy Sunday (1862–1935) to compel conversions. As infuriating spirits of revivalism swept through North America and ruptured Lutheran safe havens, its adherents suffered the religious trauma of immigrants.
When acculturation broke Lutheran solidarity, an event occurred that changed descent into revivalism. “The defeat of the Americanizing Lutherans, however, was foreshadowed by the arrival in Missouri of a group of immigrants [in 1839]. They had left Germany because they could ‘see no possibility of retaining in their present home’ the ‘pure and undefiled’ faith of the historic Lutheran confessions and thus had felt “‘duty bound to emigrate and to look for a country where this Lutheran faith is not endangered.’”48 These stalwarts founded the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, 1847. With other also conservative synods—Buffalo, 1845; Wisconsin, 1850; Iowa, 1854—they reshaped American Lutheranism “. . . to maintain their fidelity to the traditional Lutheran standards.”49 Holding on to the Book of Concord and the German language, these synods lived isolated from the Evangelicalism and revivalism, rampant anti-confessional storms, which hammered North America,50 against which the Thirty-Nine had not protected Anglicans or the Westminster Standards Presbyterians and Congregationalists.
Post-Civil War. “The Lutherans, in contrast to these other denominations, maintained an almost solidly unbroken orthodox front. The most liberal of the major Lutheran bodies—the General Synod of the Lutheran Church in the United States—tightened its discipline in 1895 and affirmed that its doctrinal basis was “the Word of God as the infallible rule of faith and practice, and the unaltered Augsburg Confession as throughout in perfect consistence with it—nothing more, nothing less.”51 They, then, at this time, withstood symbol-toppling tempests of heterodoxy, revivalism, and Arminianism, which rampaged across the continent, east to west.
Profound changes, however, with loss of confessional unity and wholeness, altered Lutheran homogeneity. Post-World War Two, whirlwinds of religious hostility to standards of faith breached Lutheranism. “In the 1960’s two large Lutheran bodies came into being: ALC and LCA. The LCA’s Confession of Faith, greatly influenced by historical criticism (neo-Lutheranism) represented a departure from the historic position, while the ALC’s Confession clearly rejected modern studies.”52 While some held the Lutheran faith, clearly, others gradually and irrevocably forsook the historic creeds, storms of acculturation too strong to withstand.
Over decades Lutherans split and merged—for standing strong, for Americanization, against Americanization, for Higher Criticism, against Higher Criticism—until for an outsider the divisions and schisms seemed insuperable and undecipherable: ELCA, LC-MS, WELS, AFLC, ELS, CLB, AALC, CLC, WLCA, LAC, ALC, ELCIC, NALC, LCME; etc.
Of course, in North America the same had happened to the Presbyterians53 and the Reformed.54 Each of these three confessional traditions under assimilative pressures separated into multiple schismatic denominations, all contributing to current anti-confessionalism. In all, even those who honored the Augsburger, the Standards, or the Forms of Unity failed to see eye to eye, thereby mocking the very symbols they upheld.
Meantime, more Lutherans deposited respective historical documents into a community-held colossal garage for storage—until the next spring cleaning.
4
Reformed people came to North America early seventeenth century, settling first Manhattan (1628). The Reformed Church in America at her beginning on this continent upheld the Forms of Unity—the 1561 Confession of Faith (the Belgica), the 1563 Heidelberg Catechism, and the 1618–19 Canons of Dort. In the nineteenth century, she too suffered mangling onslaughts of revivalism and Evangelicalism, thereby surrendering creedal wholeness. Defeat before anti-confessionalism turned into confessional renewal only as waves of Dutch immigrants settled in and about the City of New York as well as in Michigan and Iowa, culminating in the 1857 institution of the Christian Reformed Church. “Not only did the new church prosper; its influence had the effect of drawing the Old Dutch church back to a more conservative position.”55 Between the 1860’s and World War One, North America’s Reformed people preferred isolation to avoid Americanization, eventually Canadianization too, specifically revivalism, Evangelicalism, and Higher Criticism. But tempests of Americanization and Canadianization in the twentieth century overshadowed and overtook motivations for confessional integrity.
As language usage moved to English and children learned North American ways, notably Arminian piety/revivalism, more church leaders worked for the reassertion of old, European values centering on the Forms of Unity, minimally succeeding at orthodoxy.56 And failed at that too. For Higher Criticism, post-World War I, blew the Forms of Unity down, preventing these symbols from forming barriers against revivalism and Evangelicalism, and therefore Arminianism.
During post-World War One decades, more immigrants joined the Reformed Church in America and the Christian Reformed Church who “. . . prided themselves on strictness of creed and code,”57 or founded smaller denominations to resist Americanization, Canadianization, and Higher Criticism (liberalism), but often sensing a sort of kinship with conservative Evangelical powers. Contrary to intentions and hopes, commitments of confessional integrity waned and faltered.58 Rather, confessional latitudinarianism advocated Canadianization north of the 49th Parallel, Americanization south of the ideologically porous international boundary line. In the CRCNA, for instance, the Confessional faction lost out by 1967.59 Even the 1970’s Reformed Church in America’s 1978 Our Song of Hope and the Christian Reformed Church’s 1984 Our World Belongs to God, even as the 1976 Presbyterians’ A Declaration of Faith, the Confession of 1967, and the 1984 Living Faith failed at turning away anti-confessional tempers, both liberal and conservative (Evangelical). The denominational ruptures still drift about and apart, despite upholding the same confessions, each an easy prey to every sort of anti-creedal wind storm. The Forms-of-Unity heritage, too, rests in an enormous garage, subdivided into a number of smaller storage units.
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The four confessional traditions on North American soils—Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Reformed—came to similar grief, each one in its own time and space. Fact is: North American fields and meadows abetted by ideological storm winds reject all symbols of the Church. Worse, all who believe the necessity and viability of church symbols do not know what to do with these confessions, except adapt to the inevitability of anti-confessionalism, slowly. Or make new ones,