Lutheranism

American Lutheranism is a name given to a movement within the American Lutheran Church led by S. S. Schmucker beginning in the 1840's, aiming to preserve a highly moderate confessional type of Lutheranism which had become native to America (typified earlier by the body of Lutherans known as the General Synod) as over against a rising tide of conservative and strictly confessional type of Lutheranism. Those holding to the large body of confessional books of the church as normative were given the name of "Old Lutherans." The controversy which raged reflected the European conflict among Lutherans, between the "Symbolists" and "Anti-Symbolists," following the Prussian Plan of Union of Lutheran and Reformed churches of 1817. It also reflected the growing denominational consciousness and rivalry throughout Protestant America of the period.

Hosts of conservative German Lutheran immigrants crowded the American Lutheran scene with a flood tide in the thirties, forties and fifties. Schmucker, the American liberal, saw the impending confessional shadow and began his campaign to save his church from falling into traditional forms and provincial isolation. The controversy reached its climax with the anonymous publication of the Definite Synodical Platform in 1855: a work circulated among district synods aimed at uniting American Lutherans on the common confessional ground of a more simple "American Recension of the Augsburg Confession." This pamphlet, a desperate effort on the part of S.S.S. to stem the conservative tide was not only unsuccessful but it tragically hastened the day of the loss of his leadership and it broke ties of friendship. American Lutheranism never rallied from that day to this.

German Lutheranism was especially prolific in the production of communistic sects. Earliest among these were the followers of the ex-Lutheran pastor, Johann Jacob Zimmermann, who sought for his followers retreat from "the Babylon of Europe" in the wilderness of the New World . But Zimmermann died at Rotterdam the day before embarkation and Johann Kelpius (1673-1708), a young Rosicrucian intellectual and eccentric who came successively under the influence of Jacob Boehme, the mystic, Jacob Spener, founder of the Pietists, and Jane Leade, of the English Philadelphists, assumed the leadership of the enterprise. They established their colony on the Wissahickon, near the present site of Fairmount Park , Philadelphia in 1694.

Scandinavian Lutheranism also produced its communistic sects. These arose out of the activities of the Devotionalists, or Readers (Lasare), who sought to lead the State Church back to the zeal, simplicity, and faith of the early Christians. Among the leaders of this movement in Helsingland , Sweden , was Eric Janson, who settled with a party of Swedes at Bishop Hill , Ill. , so called after his birthplace in Sweden . Few communistic groups suffered such hardships in their earlier years. One ship was lost at sea, two were shipwrecked with but few survivors, and only one reached New York . After they arrived they lived in dug-outs and sod houses, subsisted on pork and corn, and suffered from malaria and cholera, 114 dying within two weeks. In 1848 two hundred left the colony because they could not accept Janson's extravagant religious claim that he was the actual reincarnation of Christ.