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The Origin of the German Evangelical Synod of North America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Carl E. Schneider
Carl E. Schneider
Affiliation:
Eden Theological Seminary Webster Groves, Missouri
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Extract

The German Evangelical Synod of North America, now merged with the Reformed Church in the United States under the name of Evangelical-Reformed Church, was founded in the year 1840 as Der Deutsche Evangelische Kirchenverein des Westens. It might appear to the casual observer that the establishment of the Kirchenverein, like the founding of all immigrant churches, represented purely the transplantation of a foreign culture to the new world where, protected from old-world influences and indifferent to the forces of a strange environment, it would develop its independent forms. The development of this German religious community on the Missouri frontier, however, can not be understood apart from the conditions prevailing in both Europe and America at the time. From the time of its inception it was put to the task of emancipating itself from the ties which bound it to the fatherland and establishing such contacts with the new environment as would constitute it an American body.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , December 1935 , pp. 268 - 281
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1935

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References

1 Quoted by Legge, J. G., Rhyme and Revolution, London, 1918, p. 131.Google Scholar

2 The unrivalled popularity of Missouri among the German immigrants of this period was due to Duden who, during the years 1824–27, located in Warren County, Missouri, and attractively described his experiences in his Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nord Amerikas und über einen mehrjährigen Aufenthalt am Missouri … Elberfeld, 1829.Google Scholar

3 Löber evidently used census statistics in his estimate that the number of emigrants from 1831 to 1860 averaged 50,000 a year, reached the annual number of 100,000 after 1849 and amounted to 143,000 in 1853. The total from 1815 to 1860 amounted to 2,500,000. Vide Löher, Franz, Geschichte der Deutschen in Amerika, Göttingen, 1855, p. 253.Google Scholar

4 Foerster, Erich, Die Entstehung der Preussischen Landeskirche, Tübingen, 1905.Google Scholar

5 In the year 1818 this “territory was settling as fast as any other was settled” and in 1819 we are told that “the emigration to Missouri is so great as to furnish a home market …” Niles' Register, 05 16, 1818; 01 1819.Google Scholar

6 The mouthpiece of political and religious liberalism, and the outstanding representative of enlightened German thought in the Middle West for decades to come was the Anzeiger des Westens, founded in 1835 by Herr von Festen and Christian Bimpage.

7 The operations of such an impostor are described by Büttner, Johann, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nord Amerika—Mein Aufenthalt und meine Reisen in denselben vom Jahre 1834–1841, Hamburg, 1844, I, pp. 148–152.Google Scholar

8 Bek, W. G., “Followers of Dudan,” Missouri Historical Review, XV (1921), 534.Google Scholar

9 Magazin für die neueste Geschichte der protestantischen Missions und Bibelgesellschaft, Basel, XX (1835), 396Google Scholar; XXI (1836), 429. Diary of J. J. Riess, 1834–1850, (MS).Google Scholar

10 Erinnerung an den Ehrwürdigen Sermann Garlichs (edited by ministers of the First Conference of the Lutheran Ministerium of New York, N. Y., 1865)Google Scholar. Bek, , “Followers of Duden,” M. H. R. XVIII (1923), 36.Google Scholar

11 Rauch contributed a series of eight articles on “German Characteristics” to the Home Missionary, VIII (1835), 135 to IX (1836).Google Scholar

12 Home Missionary, IX (1836), 36; VIII (1836), 209.Google Scholar

13 J. Gerber, presumably located at Madison, Indiana, at the time, begged to be excused “on account of business.” J. Rieger at the time of the meeting was returning from Germany with his bride. Desiring to be charter members of the society, both later affixed their signatures to the protocol of 1840.

14 In the following year (1841) subscription to the symbolic books was made secondary to the acknowledgement of the Old and New Testaments as the sole criterion of faith, in the exposition of which the consensus of the symbolic books of the Lutheran and the Reformed churches was considered normative. In 1848 the symbolic books are specifically mentioned as being “mainly” the Augsburg Confession, and the Lutheran and the Heidelberg Catechisms.