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In his "Preface" to the 1888 Common Service, Beale Melanchthon Schmucker described the genesis of the service, which was the product of four years of effort by representatives of the General Council, among other things. Second, he drew direct comparison to the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), a masterpiece of Reformation liturgy, and not incidentally a central criterion in the definition of Anglican identity. Building upon the claims of antiquity and purity, Schmucker now claimed that the Common Service not only paralleled the 1549 BCP but--as if by time travel!--exerted an influence upon its creation.
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I. TWO DAUGHTERS OF THE REFORMATION
In his "Preface" to the 1888 Common Service [CS], Beale Melanchthon Schmucker described the genesis of the service, which was the product of four years of effort by representatives of the General Council, the General Synod, and the General Synod of the South,1 and which remains a central document in the history of Lutheran liturgical renewal, and of the drive toward unity which produced the contemporary Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Schmucker made a number of audacious claims. First, he claimed that the Common Service was not a new creation, but the English translation of an almost Platonic "form" of pure liturgical expression, previously revealed by Lutherans of the sixteenth century:
The Order of Service here presented is not new. Its newest portions of any consequence are as old as the time of the Reformation. In the order of its parts, and in the great body of its contents, it gives the pure Service of the Christian Church of the West, dating back to very early times...It can lay claim, as no other order of Service now in use can, to be the completest embodiment of the Common Service of the pure Christian Church of all ages, and may be tendered to all Christians who use a fixed Order, as the Service of the future as it has been of the past.2
Second, he drew direct comparison to the Book of Common Prayer [BCP], a masterpiece of Reformation liturgy, and not incidentally a central criterion in the definition of Anglican identity:
The Lutheran revision of the Communion Service...had been fully tested by more than twenty years of continuous use before the revision of the Service made by the Anglican Church, first issued in the Prayer Book of Edward VL, 1549.
Between this first Prayer Book of the Church of England and the Lutheran Service, there is an extremely close agreement. The causes whence this resulted are clearly traceable. The Sarum, and other Anglican Missals, from which translations were made, agreed almost entirely with the Bamberg, Mainz, and other German missals, all alike differing from the Roman use.3
He went on to sketch out, briefly, the many connections between Lutheran and Anglican theologians of the Reformation era: Cranmer's travel in Germany, his "intimate terms" with Osiander while Osiander and Brenz were preparing the Brandenburg-Nurnberg order of 1532; Martin Bucer's contribution to the 1549 BCP after having collaborated with Melanchthon on the 1543 Revised Order of Cologne; and the "constantly-recurring embassies...between the Anglican and Lutheran rulers touching these matters, as well as unity of faith on the basis of the Augsburg Confession."4
Building upon the claims of antiquity and purity, Schmucker now claimed that the Common Service not only paralleled the 1549 BCP but-as if by time travel!-exerted an influence upon its creation. But most startling, perhaps, was his offer to present-day Anglicans:
It was natural, therefore, that the first and best Service Book of the Church of England should closely resemble the Lutheran Service, and present but few divergencies from it. And should the Anglican Church, and her daughters, return to the use of the first Book of Edward VL, as many of her most learned and devout members have ever wished, there would be an almost entire harmony in the Orders of Worship between these two daughters of the Reformation.5
Schmucker concluded with a claim likely to startle both Lutherans and Anglicans:
Beyond question, the Lutheran Service deserves to be placed alongside of the Confession of Augsburg: the one being the central Service, as the other is the Central Confession, of Protestant Christendom. Happy the day when the One, Holy, Catholic, Christian Church, shall unite in the use of One Common Order of Public Worship, and join in One Confession of the one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all...6
Schmucker claimed, in essence, that the Joint Committee on the Common Service had uncovered a previously hidden treasure, a "pure Service of the Christian Church of the West," from which other presumably less-pure services had been derived; he named a treasured liturgical artifact as an example of such a service; and he offered his own liturgy as a substitute, for all Christians and especially for Anglicans. Schmucker claimed for the Common Service equality with the guarantors of both Anglican and Lutheran identity. Moreover, he made these claims, and this offer, not in private correspondence or the back pages of a theological quarterly, but in a location of almost absurd prominence: the front of a hymnal. Schmucker's "Preface" was printed in the General Council Church-Book [CB] and reprinted (in a different form) in the Common Service Book of 1917 [CSB], which was not superseded until the 1958 Service Book and Hymnal [SBH]. The "Preface" was therefore readily available, and its claims impressed upon the minds of Lutheran worshipers, for seventy years.
The "Preface" to the CS was an audacious document, and raised many questions: Was it meant as an overture toward the Protestant Episcopal Church? Or was it meant as a rejection of their existing overture, the Chicago Quadrilateral of 1886, to which Schmucker had been asked by the General Council to draft a response? Was it intended to shore up a growing sense of Lutheran distinctiveness based on confessional identity, or to move Lutherans toward an identity based upon both their Confessions and their worship practices? Beale Melanchthon Schmucker was never able to answer any of these questions for himself; he died running to catch a train, with the original plates of the Common Service in his bag and the Quadrilateral response never to be completed. But given the complex nature of Lutheran-Episcopal relations, now as then, it seems worth the effort to tease out answers, however speculative, from the Common Service itself and from other writings of its framers.
Having introduced the CS, this essay briefly compares the two services, and in particular their adaptations of the medieval canon of the Mass. (Appendix A offers an overview of the services, and Appendix B a sample of the questions that emerge from a detailed comparison.) Based upon the well-known disagreement concerning the placement of the Lord's Prayer, it is argued that the General Council members of the Joint Committee were moved by the same Romantic vision that informed Anglican ritualism. Then the feelings about Anglicanism, and the Episcopal Church, which emerge from other writings by some of the Joint Committee members are described. And, finally, a speculative conclusion as to what prompted Schmucker's "Preface" is offered.
II. A VERY CLOSE AGREEMENT
How right-or wrong-was Schmucker's assessment of the agreement between the two services? As Appendix A shows, they were very similar in outline. But the kind of close examination begun in Appendix B will reveal many significant differences. It is around Holy Communion that they diverge most.
One convergence is noteworthy: both liturgies adopt the Reformation custom of an "Exhortation" before Communion (this is dropped from the 1917 CSB). The BCP inserts a penitential rite, derived from Lutheran sources, which is nonetheless not adopted by the CS-perhaps because it was not medieval enough.
But the most striking difference between the BCP and the CS is their respective adaptations of the canon of the Mass. The BCP provides a prayer that is far more than a translation of Sarum. The new prayer has a substantially different structure, eliminates the gestural rubrics, and is 30 percent longer, at 1006 words against 649 for the Roman canon in Latin.
In contrast, the Common Service offers no eucharistie prayer as generally understood. It is here-at the central prayer of the medieval Mass-that Schmucker's claim of "close agreement" seems weakest.
This brings us to the central controversy in the meetings of the Joint Committee. The text of the CS originally appeared in three slightly different editions, issued by each of the collaborating bodies.8 There are "about ninety" textual variations, most fairly minor.9 And then there is the placement of the Lord's Prayer. According to Reed, this issue "was debated for two full years," and after the decision was made to place the Lord's Prayer before the Verba, George Unangst Wenner reported back from the General Synod that "if we can agree to disagree...we may be able to go on with the work."10 In other words, this disagreement nearly scuttled the production of the Common Service.
Contemporary sources make little of this-Henry Eyster Jacobs calls it a point "that involved no principle whatever."11 These demurrals are misleading, perhaps intentionally so.
One must read the rubrics carefully to see it, but to worshipers the difference would have been readily apparent: at Communion in General Synod congregations, the Lord's Prayer would have been said once in any service, by the whole congregation. In General Council congregations, it would have been said twice in a Communion service, the second time by a celebrant with his back to the nave, and about to launch, without interruption, into the Words of Institution. It would have looked, in that latter case, as if the Lord's Prayer were serving as part of the consecration, combined with the Verba to create a makeshift eucharistie prayer.12
In fact, it is here suggested that such is precisely how it was intended. The question of how, or whether, the canon of the Mass should be received into Lutheran worship has been problematic from the Reformation to the present.13 Years before the CS, General Council had decided upon its own solution. In its 1877 German-language Kirchenbuch, the Lord's Prayer is said by the whole assembly, as in the later CB. At Communion, the Preface and Sanctus are sung, the Exhortation is read, and then "the pastor turns to the altar, puts his hand over the bread and says or sings" the Lord's Prayer, proceeding immediately into the Verba. The whole action is identified by a section title as "Die Konsekration."14 The General Council, it seems, desired a Communion ordo that was continuous not only with Reformation models, but also with pre-Reformation models. They wanted, but were not yet able to ask for, a eucharistie prayer.15 And it was to this that the General Synod objected so strenuously.
This divergence is revealing. Conventional historiography treats the rupture which created the General Council as a matter of confessional renewal, and that was certainly the principal field upon which battle was waged.16 But the question of where the Lord's Prayer should occur in the ordo-or of whether there ought to be a Eucharistie Prayer-was not one to be either posed or answered by an appeal to the Lutheran Confessions. While the Confessions are profoundly concerned with the meaning of the Mass, they display a marked lack of interest in its form. Luther himself declined to prescribe a rigid formula. The Joint Committee, as the conclusion to Schmucker's "Preface" suggests, was not above placing the historic Lutheran liturgies on a nearpar with the confessions, but even there they could find no decisive warrant.18 So: if this battle was not over rigorism or laxity in the interpretation of the confessions, what was it?
I have previously argued that the framers of the Common Service shared in a major cultural shift among Euro-American Christians, which R. J. Franklin has called a "New Catholicism."19 This shift was part of the broader Romantic movement in Euro-American culture, with its persistent nostalgia for an idealized past.20 In keeping with all this, the General Council members envisioned the Common Service as an extension of the Gothic Revival already underway in both architecture and worship. And the intense disagreement of the General Synod shows that this is about more than a narrow confessional issue. They were objecting to a cultural movement, and everything that it represented.
This is all speculative; the records of the committee certainly do not describe a controversy over adapting the canon. But when Schmucker spoke of "close agreement" with the 1549 BCP, we must conclude either that he was mistaken with regard to a central feature of the service-or that he understood the CS not as a liturgy without a eucharistie prayer, but simply one in which the whole of that prayer was derived from two biblical sources, and hence "purified."
Another example, far less weighty than the Lord's Prayer dispute, may illustrate the point. The liturgical calendars of the CB and the general Synod's Book of Worship [BW] are clearly a single document, with the same title ("Festivals of the Church") and the same division into "Immovable Festivals" and "Movable Festivals."21 But the BW lacks entirely a subset of Immovable Festivals found in the CB: "Minor Festivals, observed in some parts of the Lutheran Church."22 These include observances of the Apostles, as well as the Annunciation, Visitation, the Birthday of St. John the Baptist, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, St. Michael the Archangel, and All Saints. (Both calendars include Reformation Day and, curiously, neither includes the Transfiguration.)23 A profusion of saints' days, including two observances closely associated with the Virgin Mary, points strongly toward a self-conscious retrieval of medieval models on the part of the General Council.
In the mind of the General Council, but not the General Synod, this was to be a Gothic Revival liturgy.
III. FACES IN THE MIRROR
This gives us some insight into the thinking of the Joint Committee, but it does not really tell us what they thought about Anglicanism, or why. For this, we turn to some of their writings which, although subsequent to the CS, may reveal their thinking.
We begin with The Lutheran Movement in England, by Henry Eyster Jacobs, published 1890.24 Jacobs cataloged evidence of Lutheran theology and theologians present in early Tudor England, with special reference to liturgies. Most controversially, he claimed Lutheran influence, not merely on English theology in a general sense, but specifically upon the two Edwardian editions of the BCP.25 This led to a testy exchange of opinions with Anglicans Edward Burbidge and EE. Brightman.26
What matters to us is not the truth or falsity of these claims, but the reason they were made. Why did nineteenth-century Lutherans feel a need to claim kinship with, and influence over, sixteenth-century Anglicans? Two interrelated answers are here proposed: the English system of education and the American system of social status.
The influential Oxford fathers voiced a loud dislike of Lutheranism-although this dislike was often based upon striking ignorance. In their schooldays, as M. A. Crowther points out, "The German language was not yet a polite accomplishment like French or Italian, nor was it taught in the schools or universities as a rule;"2 and "as late as 1851 Oxford students were not required to read any German theological works except Mosheim and J.C. K. Giseler's Compendium of Ecclesiastical History."'291 No full-scale translation of Kant was undertaken until 1838, and Schliermacher's major works were not translated until after midcentury.29 Hard as it is to imagine a culture of theologians without access to German theology, the situation was much worse than that. What little German thought did make its way across the channel was brought by Scottish Dissenters, who could not take degrees at English universities, and so often studied abroad; and by freethinkers, such as George Eliot or Thomas Carlyle.30 The latter party fixed upon classics of rationalism, such as Strauss's Lebenjesu. As a result, the "German theology" known to Oxford theologians was everything against which they were in rebellion, offered and interpreted by those against whom they most rebelled. They had little or no access to Hengstenberg, Kliefoth or Löhe. Grundtvig, despite his travels in Britain, seems unknown to them.
Edward Pusey should have been the antidote, but wasn't. Pusey had studied in Germany, and (like many other new catholic leaders, from Löhe to Schaff) was personally acquainted with Schleiermacher and Neander. One of his first major publications was An Historical Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character lately predominant in the Theology of Germany (1828), essentially a defense of the Germans against Hugh James Rose. Where Rose considered rationalism endemic to German thought, Pusey argued optimistically that rationalism, although bad, was limited to the social élite and was already in decline.31 As his views matured, Pusey reconsidered this position, to become as Crowther calls him, "one of the most implacable enemies of German theology."32
A primary locus of this enmity was the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. His Tracts 67, 68, and 69 together make up an extended essay entitled "Scriptural Views of Holy Baptism." They are an explicit rejection of Zwingli and Calvin,33 but a sympathetic Lutheran reader considers Pusey's views close to Luther and, perhaps more pointedly, to Grundtvig.34 Nonetheless, it seems to be from this source that the myth of Lutheranism as a movement opposed to baptismal regeneration grew. Newman, for whom his acceptance of the doctrine "indicates his defection from Evangelicalism,"35 refers to it often.36 Paradoxically, Pusey's essay on baptism provoked a crisis for ED. Maurice, setting him apart from the Oxford Movement.37 We may ask which is more odd: that Maurice felt himself a defender of Luther, or that he misunderstood what he claimed to defend. In fact, had any of the Oxford divines actually picked up a copy of the Book of Concord, they might have been pleasantly surprised.38 Instead, their failings, like their successes, were carried across the Atlantic.
Now consider the Lutheran experience in English-speaking America, as described by two framers of the CS, Henry Eyster Jacobs and George Unangst Wenner. Both men, it should be mentioned, were products of an English-speaking environment, and only learned German as adults. Both men, in their early years, had been approached by representatives of the Episcopal Church, and both had decisively chosen Lutheranism.39 While Jacobs was a product of Gettysburg's Lutheran community, Wenner was an alumnus of Yale and Union Theological Seminary, and (despite one year at Gettysburg) held no degree from any Lutheran institution. In fact, Wenner's one parish-which he served for sixty-eight years-had begun as a Presbyterian mission.
Despite the seeming anti-ecumenism of the General Council's official position, Jacobs' Memoirs describe his participation in several interdenominational groups. He attended-and sometimes preached at-the services of Presbyterian, Reformed and Methodist congregations. Still, Jacobs had surprisingly little to say about the leaders of other churches-except for Episcopalians. Regarding them, he offered several telling anecdotes.
He attended the 1883 General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, recalling that "I heard five or six of their bishops [and] was considerably disappointed, and doubted whether the same men could have attained a similar position in the Lutheran Church, if their lives had been spent with us."40 Later, he was disappointed with the preaching of the celebrated Bishop Phillips Brooks.41
These are private reflections; but Jacobs also described public controversies. Attending a lecture by S.D. McConnell, rector of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, Jacobs said, "I came at a time when he reviewed the German immigration to Pennsylvania and spoke in the most disparaging terms of the founders of our Church..."42 Jacobs responded with an article, published in the Lutheran press, which one of his seminary colleagues ordered printed, "and sent to every Episcopal clergyman in the neighborhood of Philadelphia. "43
Jacobs further recalls the speeches and lectures that accompanied the 350th anniversary of Luther's death. His own speech appears to have been given fire by the fact that "[t]he Rev. W. Hudson Shaw, an Anglican clergyman, and a popular lecturer, had severely attacked Luther a few days before."44
The most touching of these stories concerns Jacobs' friendship with Henry R. Percival, a Philadelphia rector "known as the leader of the High Churchmen in that city and one of their most scholarly representatives in America."45 The relationship was warm, but always tense. When they met, Percival alluded obliquely to his own partisan hostility toward Luther and Lutheranism. Later, Jacobs brought along a seminary colleague, William Julius Mann, who upon departure remarked to Percival, "If more of your clergymen had your erudition, I would have more respect for your denomination."46
The friendship survived, but was threatened again when Percival wrote an article, containing "a most violent attack upon Luther..."4 The two were reconciled in a striking passage, concluding in Percival's bedroom.
Finally, Jacobs also told two stories of large bequests which had been promised the Lutherans, but which were eventually given either to secular or to Episcopal charities. In both cases, he mentioned in particular that the donor was changed from his or her course by the intervention of Episcopalian advisors.48
There were no such emotionally-laden anecdotes about the Presbyterians or Methodists. Episcopalians occupied a unique place in Jacobs' recollections. He returned again and again to his favorite themes: the intellectual limitations of the Episcopal clergy; their misguided contempt for Luther; and-perhaps most tellingly-their success at obtaining material blessings intended for Lutherans. This was not, of course, a fair representation of the truth; but it is how Jacobs saw things.
Wenner, as synod president, preached a 1909 sermon on "the Babylonian captivity of the Palatines."49 He treated three kinds of historic "captivity": economic; social; and religious.50 His comments on the "social captivity" of anglicized names are particularly telling:
[T]hese outward signs are indications of an internal condition, of a surrendered individuality, of a subordinate personality. They were the labels upon which were advertised our social subjugation.51
This was strong stuff. Wenner had touched on the same theme two years earlier, when he discussed the place of Lutheranism in America, and bemoaned those "educated men of other faiths" who knew nothing of Lutheranism.52 He added that few Lutherans were in the upper social classes, and those who arrived there "frequently cease to be Lutherans."53 In the same sermon, he said what Jacobs and Schmucker had only implied, mentioning "a Church which in the days of Archbishop Cranmer and of Edward the Sixth belonged to the Lutheran fold."54
The case seemed, for both Jacobs and Wenner, to be about social class. Although Lutheran roots in the New World were comparable in depth to Anglican roots, the social fortunes of Lutherans had not been nearly as good as those of the proverbially élite Episcopal Church. Hence the defensiveness that marked so much Lutheran thinking about Anglicanism.
Here, at last, was what lay between Lutherans and Anglicans in the era of the Common Service. Both had been through an extraordinary century. Anglicanism emerged from the century quite changed from what it had been entering. So did Lutheranism, and-especially-Lutheran worship. The "Preface" to the General Synod's Book of Worship, different from Schmucker's, alluded to "the revival of our Church life which has distinguished the Nineteenth Century."05 Revolution might have been a better word. Both churches had been remade in the spirit of the Catholic Revival.
But for all of that, they had not been through the revolution together. Anglicans misunderstood and misrepresented Lutheranism. Lutherans, at least in the United States, felt deprived of their identity-deprived first by their own history, and now by the failure of the culturally-dominant theological voices to recognize that they too had been restored. It was oblivion on one side, Schadenfreude on the other.
IV. THE RAGE OF CALIBAN.
What, then, did Dr. Schmucker mean? What was his rhetorical objective when he claimed not only that the 1888 Common Service was as old as the Reformation, and as important as the Augsburg Confession, but also that it might become the servicebook of a repristinated Anglicanism?
Oscar Wilde said that the nineteenth century's distaste for realism was the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the mirror; and added, that the nineteenth century's distaste for romanticism was the rage of Caliban not seeing his face in the mirror.56 This was what some Lutherans felt when they looked at their Anglican neighbors: the rage of Caliban. Or perhaps it was the rage of Ishmael, howling in the desert. In book and essay and article, the Lutherans compared themselves to Anglicans. "We are older," they said. "We inspired them; they got their best ideas from us, their worst from Calvin. Their worship is merely our worship Englished." Perhaps they did not speak loudly enough, or perhaps nobody was listening.
We have in Schmucker's "Preface" the desperate bid for attention of a man who feels that he has not been heard. And behind him lies a movement, large and growing, that feels likewise. The language is measured, even polite; but it cannot disguise the underlying rage. In Schmucker, we have a man who might rather die than respond to the Chicago Quadrilateral-that is, from a Lutheran perspective, accede to the suggestion that Christian unity be effected through the agency of an Anglican episcopate, that the churches might become one by becoming Anglican. He did in fact the before he answered that invitation, although it is unlikely he ever would have done so. The Common Service and its "Preface" are his answer.
1 After 1886, the United Synod of the South.
2 "'Preface' to the Common Service," Church-Book. For the use of Evangelical Lutheran Congregations (Philadelphia, 892, reprinted 1912) iix-ix. The 1917 Common Service Book offers a "Preface" and rubrics which, despite substantial similarity, differ in many details from the CB.
3 Ibid., vii-viii.
4 Ibid., viii.
5 Ibid., viii.
6 Ibid., xii.
7 Luther D. Reed, The Lutheran Liturgy (Philadelphia, 1947) 190. I have also made extensive use of his revised edition, still dated 1947 but clearly not issued until after 1958. In the revised edition, which I shall cite as Reed-Revised, this passage begins at 189.
8 Ibid., 190ff.
9 Ibid., 191; Reed-Revised, 189. He cites his full accounting of these variations, in "The Standard Manuscript of the Common Service and the Variata Editions," in The Lutheran Church-Review, Vol. 20, July 1901, 459-73.
10 Ibid., 188.
11 Henry Eyster Jacobs, Memoirs: Notes on the Life of a Churchman, Henry Eyster Horn, ed. [Written 1906; edited 1938; self-published, 1974; 3 vols., paginated as one], 271.
12 Not in terms of the classic structure of such prayers, but rather in terms of the placement and perception by the participants. Pfatteicher suggests the Lord's Prayer here has "an epiclectic character," but this seems to be forcing the point. Philip Pfatteicher, Commentary an the Lutheran Rook of Worship (Minneapolis, 1990) 173.
13 One frequently hears the claim that Luther "deleted" the Canon of the Mass, but this is not strictly accurate. In the Ordo Missae, he asks that the Verba "be chanted in the same tone that the Lord's Prayer is elsewhere in the canon," which seems to imply the existence of Eucharistie Prayer, although none is specified. (LW 53, 27-28). In the Deutsche Messe, he proposes an "admonition to those who want to partake of the sacrament," to be followed by "the Office and Consecration." (LW 53, 80ff). In other words, and as he virtually says outright in both essays, Luther does not want to offer clear instructions, much less a formula to be followed verbatim.
14Kirchenbuch fiir Evangelisch-Lutherische Gemeinden (Philadelphia, 1877) 17.
15ThIs desire did not spring from the brow of Zeus; the 1855 Agende of the Pennsylvania Ministerium and the Synods of New York and Ohio had adapted prayers from the 1543 Pfalz-Neuburg order that served much the same structural purpose, albeit more elaborately; so did the 1879 Bavarian Agende, and a liturgy approved by the Joint Synod of Ohio in 1904. (Pfatteicher, 170.)
16E.g., E. Clifford Nelson, ed., The Lutherans in North America (Philadelphia, 1975; revised ed., 1980) pp. 230ff.
17 see principally AC 24, Apol. 24, SA 2:2. Notably, the words "canon of the Mass" do not even occur in the Book of Concord. see Kenneth Larson, éd., Concordance to the Book of Concord (Milwaukee, 1989).
18 Reed cites the Joint Committee's resolution of 22-23 March, 1887: "Resolved, that we acknowledge that the authorities adduced for the placing of the Verba before the Lord's Prayer are of great worth; but the authorities for the opposite seem to us of greater weight." Reed-Revised, 188. Need it be observed that this resolution is a virtual throwing up into the air of their collective hands, and an admission that there is no classical Lutheran position on the modern controversy?
19 R. W. Franklin, Three Nineteenth-Century Churches: the History of a New Catholicism in Wuerttemburg, England and France (New York and London, 1987). My principal criticism of Franklin in my earlier paper was his failure to consider the Lutheran exponents of the New Catholicism. Since then, Frank Senn's massive Christian Liturgy: Evangelical and Catholic (Minneapolis, 1997) has appeared. Senn includes a chapter which correctly identifies the parallelism among these various national and denominational developments. Apparently, however, he has not read Franklin, and regrettably fails to note the common point of origin in the Berlin theologians Neander and Schliermacher.
20 In theology, this Romantic movement was marked not only by medievalism but by a rediscovery of seemingly-medieval sacramental doctrines in the works of the Reformers, as when J.W. Nevin's Mystical Presence reminded Calvinists that Calvin's eucharistie theology was not Zwingli's.
21 BW, 23-37; CB, viii-xxxii. Book of Worship with Hymns and Tunes, Published by the General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publications Society, 1899).
22 CB viii.
23 The absence of the Transfiguration even from the CB calendar may reflect the Gothic-ness of the Gothic Revival. The Feast of the Transfiguration, although older in the East, was not declared in the West until 1457, practically on the verge of the Reformation. To Romantics casting a fond eye upon the Middle Ages, it may have seemed like a Renaissance festival rather than a medieval one. Alternatively, however, they may have merely been copying BCP usage. When the Transfiguration does appear in CSB, it is-according to Lutheran custom-transferred from 6 August to the end of Epiphany. This custom is noted in the Lutheran Cyclopedia under "Church Year," further demonstrating the lasting General Council influence upon the CS tradition. The Cyclopedia, not to be confused with a later Missouri Synod publication of the same title, is a valuable resource for understanding the mind-set of General Council theologians of this era. H.E.Jacobs and J.A.W. Haas, eds., The Lutheran Cyclopedia (New York, 1899).
24 Henry Eyster Jacobs, The. Lutheran Movement in England during the reigns of Henry VIlI. and Edward VL, and its Literary Monuments (Philadelphia, 1980). The topic was evidently of much concern to General Council scholars. In his "Preface," Jacobs mentions evidence that Charles Porterfield Krauth had apparently begun similar research before his death, and twice gives credit to Beale Melanchthon Schmucker for inspiration and assistance.
25 Ibid., 3ISfF, 275ff.
26 Gordon W. Lathrop, "A Contemporary Lutheran Looks at the 1549 Book of Common Prayer," Virginia Theological Seminary Library Journal (January 20O)," 35; citing Brightman, The English Rite, 80:3. The same essay appeared, in slightly different form, in The Anglican (30:1, January 2001) 5-9.
27 M.A. Crowther, Church Embattled: Religious Controversy in Mid-Victorian England (Newton Abbot, Devon, 1970) 46.
28 IbId., 51. N.B., Mosheim had died in 1754; his work was hardly representative of modern German theological writing.
29 Ibid., 46-47.
30 Ibid., 47-48.
31 Cf. Henry Parry Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 4th éd. (London, 1894, 4vv) 1:146-47.
32 Crowther, 56.
33 Liddon, 1:347, provides a sample of Pusey's rhetoric: "Surely [opponents of baptismal regeneration] have entered into a most perilous path, which...must end in the rejection of all Scripture truth which does not square with their own previous opinions. It did once so end; and it is a wholesome, but awful warning...that it was out of the school of Calvin, from familiar intercourse with him, and the so-called 'Reformed' Church...that Socinianism took its rise."
34 Yngve Brilioth, The Anglican Revival: Studies in the Oxford Movement (London, 1925)305-08;314.
35 Ibid., 307.
36 E.g, Newman's 1841 letter to a friend, complaining about the Anglo-Prussian Jerusalem Episcopate: The bishop "is to take under him all the foreign Protestants who will come... They are to sign the Confession of Augsburg, and there is nothing to show that they hold the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration." Apologia Pro Vita Sua [189O]; critical edition by David DeLaura (New York, 1968) 118.
37 Liddon, Pusey, 1:350: As Maurice read the tract, "it became more and more clear to him that it represented everything that he did not think and did not believe..." and that it "undermined the doctrine of Luther...that simple belief in Christ is the deliverance from evil and the root of good."
38 As, e.g., by AC 2: "Sin condemns those not born again through Baptism;" or comparably, SC 4:9, LC 4:27, etc. The Anglicans were not entirely wrong; there were some Lutherans who rejected baptismal regeneration despite the confessional witness. Baptismal regeneration is among the seven "errors" of the confessions addressed by the "Definite Synodical Platform" promoted by Samuel Simon Schmucker, father of Beale Melanchthon. By the time of the Common Service, this "Platform" had of course become infamous among Lutherans.
39 Jacobs was approached by the Rev. I.V. Van Ingen, D.D., a brother-in-law of Bishop Whittingham of Maryland." (Memoirs, 148) Wenner recalled that after seminary, "the Presbyterians offered to make me a minister...[and] the Bishop of another denomination offered to lay his hands upon me and make me a priest." Wenner, Sixty Years in One Pulpit: 1868-1928 (New York, n.d.).
40 Jacobs, Memoirs, 249.
41 "I had read many of his sermons with interest and profit. But his delivery greatly detracted from their impressiveness," etc. Ibid., 251.
42 IbId., 316.
43 Ibid., 315-16.
44 Ibid., 362.
45 Ibid., 321.
46 IbId., 321.
47 Ibid., Memoirs, 322. The contempt for Luther, as we have seen, is a High Church affectation. And yet Jacobs clearly is no friend to the Low Church; he and Percival collaborate to frustrate Low Church efforts to recruit Swedish immigrants in the West, and he dismisses with his own contempt an Episcopalian revival service at Princeton. (Memoirs, 335).
48 The donors are Elizabeth Schaefer and James Elder. Jacobs, Memoirs, 364; 380.
49 George Unangst Wenner, "The Return from Captivity: A Sermon Preached in Schenectady, October 12th, 1909, before the Synod of New York of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, in Recognition of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Palatine Immigration." (Philadelphia, n.d.).
50 Ibid., 8.
51 Ibid., 7.
52 George Unangst Wenner, "The Church of the Augsburg Confession; A Sermon preached before the Synod... in St. Matthew's Church, Brooklyn, October 15, 1907." 36th Annual Convention of the Synod of New York and New Jersey, Minutes, 73-90. In the passage cited, Wenner is pointing out specifically that others cannot distinguish between Lutherans and Roman Catholics.
53 Ibid., "The Church," 76.
54 Ibid., "The Church," 86. Likewise, the Lutheran Cyclopedia, in its entry for "New York," strikes an almost elegiac note, when it says that Lutheran congregations had in the Colonial era owned prime Manhattan real estate, roughly the sites of the present Trinity Episcopal, Wall Street, and Transfiguration Roman Catholic, Mott Street; but that "the valuable property on Broadway was sold (1805) to the Episcopalians for $12,500. It would now bring a million or more." Lamentably, that century-old "million" might now be a billion.
55 BW, 21. Although this Preface is unsigned, Wenner-as the chief General Synod framer of the CS-might very likely have written it.
56 "Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray," excerpted in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th edn., M.H. Abrams, ed. (New York & London, 1986), 1663-64.
Michael G.L. Church is the interim pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, Long Island City, New York.
Copyright Historical Society of the Episcopal Church Sep 2005