Henry Eyster Jacobs
Published: 2016-06-22
Total Pages: 584
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Excerpt from The Lutheran Cyclopedia The aim of this volume is to present a summary of the chief topics comprised in the doctrine, the life, the customs, the history, and the statistics of the Luth. Church. It has been prepared almost entirely in America, from the standpoint of Lutherans, who either by nativity or adoption are Americans, and who are interested in the growth of their church and the maintenance of its influence in this its new home. The most notable fact in the progress of our Church in this land, has been not so much its rapid increase as the union within it of representatives of the hitherto separated Luth. churches of Europe. At the Reformation, Germany, the birthplace and centre of Lutheranism, was not a compact government, but a loose organization of numerous and chiefly small principalities and cities, in each of which the great religious movement of the time had its peculiar history. Upon the basis of a common confession of faith, the doctrinal, educational, liturgical, and governmental elements assumed in each province or territory a peculiar form, as each ruler selected his own theologians and jurists to aid in the reform, and, by their co-operation, published his own Church Order. In constitutions, liturgies, catechisms, hymn-books, instructions to pastors and customs, there was the greatest diversity. There was fixity of type with many varieties. To a still greater degree, the same principle was exhibited, as the Luth. faith penetrated other lands. The results of the German Reformation were adapted to the circumstances, characteristics, and precedents of the national life. In this country, these various streams, after having followed almost entirely separate courses since the Reformation, have at last met. Here are brought together, in the same synods, Lutherans from diverse parts of Germany, with a common faith, but accustomed to different modes of administering that faith. Here, too, they meet with those having an equal claim to the same name, from Norway and Sweden, Denmark and Iceland, Holland and Finland. These elements, however separated for one or more generations by national lines, must inevitably coalesce. If the Luth. Church, like a number of denominations, were based upon a peculiar polity or form of worship or mode of administering a sacrament, its people would soon be absorbed by churches of English origin. Mere reverence for ancestors is too weak a foundation for any permanence. When a few generations, at most, separate men from the land of their fathers, the attractions of their immediate surroundings overcome the resistance of such remote ties. But standing for a positive, clearly defined type of doctrine, which has been enriched by the labors of the profoundest theologians from whose treasures all scholars of other Protestant communions have freely drawn; possessing riches of devotional literature in song and prayer that have moulded the hymnody and liturgies of those around them; the heirs of a long line of noble witnesses, with voice and pen, often amidst the fires of persecution; having the nearest access to various forms of practical activity, introduced by their fathers and brethren in the faith, and now widely appropriated in almost all parts of the Protestant denominations; above all, as the representatives of the weak, and yet strong man, selected by God to lay the foundations of modern Christianity, and whose words are recalled and still arouse to life and action, wherever the history of the Church is earnestly read and the Bible studied, it is impossible for Lutherans to continue for centuries or even decades to continue to surrender their heritage with their native lands and languages. They are called upon to defend and maintain the same faith, in the same languages, to the same people, and under the same circumstances; and, in so doing, will soon share in each others efforts. Nor can they isolate themselves from their historical antecedents, or the cotemporaneous...
