Charles Porterfield Krauth

Charles Porterfield Krauth (March 17, 1823 – January 2, 1883) was a pastor, theologian and educator in the Lutheran branch of Christianity. He is a leading figure in the revival of the Lutheran Confessions in the United States.

Education and Parish Ministry

Krauth was educated at Gettysburg College (then called Pennsylvania College), of which his father Chales Philip Krauth was president, and the Gettysburg Seminary. From 1841-1852, he served congregations in Maryland and West Virginia. During the winter of 1853-53, he briefly served the Dutch Reformed congregation in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. Upon his return to the United States, he was called to congregations in Pittsburgh and later Philadelphia.

The Confessional Revival

In 1861, Krauth resigned from parish ministry to serve full-time as editor of The Lutheran, a theological journal. One of The Lutheran’s goals was to restore the confessions of faith found in the Book of Concord to prominence in Lutheran church life.

These documents, especially the Augsburg Confession, have always been identified as the cornerstones of a distinctively Lutheran theological identity. But during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lutherans in the United States had interpreted the confessions very loosely. A key figure in this movement was Samuel Simon Schmucker, one of Krauth’s professors at Gettysburg, whose “American Lutheranism” as outlined in the Definite Synodical platform of 1855, proposed that the Augsburg Confession was mistaken on such questions as Baptismal Regeneration and the Real Presence in the Eucharist.

In contrast, Krauth and his collaborators (who eventually included his own father and Beale Melanchthon Schmucker, the son of Samuel Simon) preferred a more literal reading of the Lutheran Confessions. They saw Martin Luther’s theology not as a radical rejection of traditional patristic and medieval theology, but as an essentially conservative return to first principles. In both theology and worship, they sought to create Lutheranism in which the medieval heritage was more readily apparent than the Enlightenment adaptations. For example, one of Krauth’s major books, “The Conservative Reformation and its Theology,” is an extended defense of the Real Presence.

Krauth was personally influenced by his reading of the Mercersburg theologians, John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff, who had attempted a similar repristination of Calvinist theology within the American branch of the German Reformed Church. Nevin and Schaff had called themselves “evangelical catholics,” a term which has come to be used rarely, if at all, among the Reformed churches, but quite commonly among Lutherans. (Church, 226-229).

Similar revival movements took place in the early nineteenth century among Roman Catholics and Anglicans, as for example in Gueranger’s re-founding of the abbey at Solesmes, and in the Oxford Movement. (Franklin, passim.) In European Lutheranism as well, this revival was carried out by theologians and pastors such as Wilhelm Loehe.

The General Council

Conflict between the “American Lutherans” and the leaders of the confessional revival led to a schism. In 1864, Krauth and his supporters founded a seminary in Philadelphia to rival the one in Gettyburg. In 1867, they founded the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It was composed of seven regional bodies which had withdrawn from the General Synod.

As the first professor of theology at the new seminary, Krauth was at the intellectual center of the General Council. He was the author of its Fundamental Articles of Faith and Church Polity, as well as of the constitution for its congregations. His liturgical scholarship guided the formation of General Council worship materials. From 1868, Krauth also served as professor of mental and moral philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and from 1873 as vice-provost.

One of Krauth’s most controversial acts was to prepare a series of theses on pulpit and altar fellowship. Called the “Akron-Galesburg Rule,” these may be summarized as saying “Lutheran pulpits are for Lutheran ministers only, and Lutheran altars are for Lutheran communicants only.” Although Krauth’s Rule permitted exceptions, it was nonetheless a strong repudiation of the broad ecumenical relationships pursued by the General Synod.

References

Church, Michael. “A Beautiful and Right Praxis: the Ecclesiology of the Common Service,” in Essays and Reports of the Lutheran Historical Conference (1998), vol. 18.

Franklin, R.W. Three Nineteenth-Century Churches: the History of a New Catholicism in Wuerttenburg, England and France. New York and London, Garland Publishing: 1987.

Nelson, E. Clifford. The Lutherans in North America, revised ed. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980.

Spaeth, Adolph. “Krauth, Charles Porterfield,” article in H.E. Jacobs, ed., The Lutheran Cyclopedia. New York Scribner’s, 1899.