Henry Eyster Jacobs (1844-1932): American – Confessional – Lutheran
By Carmine A. Pernini, Philadelphia, PA
For over 50 years, Henry Eyster Jacobs was a professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a young man growing up in Gettysburg, he was close enough to Abraham Lincoln to see the president’s hands shake while reading the Gettysburg Address. Jacobs’ firsthand experience of the horrors of war inspired him to pursue a career in the ministry in order to help spread Gospel truth and social healing. As a teacher and a leader in the Ministerium of Pennsylvania and the General Council, he was a prolific translator and writer. He was also a leading figure in workingacross denominational lines. He was active in the composition of the 1888 Common Service and in the 1918 formation of the United Lutheran Church in America which re-united the General Synod, the General Council, and the United Synod of the South after decades of division.
As a fifth generation American, Jacobs believed that the Lutheran church in this country must be an American church. At the same time, his love of the Lutheran Confessions meant that he would not elevate context over content. For Jacobs, the Lutheran Confessions set Lutherans apart from other visible expressions of the church and within the one invisible church. That is, you can be a Christian among Christians, but to be Lutheran involves a particular confession embodied in the Book of Concord and in the Augsburg Confessionin particular. To Jacobs, these are not merely documents to which one gives intellectual assent, nor are they writings to forget after taking an oath of allegiance. Instead, these statements of faithare confessed from the heart and lived into throughout life. Jacobs wrote, “The aim of the Augustana, when formulated, was to exhibit clearly what had already been the teaching in our churches; its employment, as a bond of external union among churches, was subsequent. It was first, a confession of faith, i.e., a declaration of convictions, before it could be made a compact or covenant, uniting men in religious society.”[1] Jacobs claimed that a church which gave its common confession might thrive in a new way in America. HeJacobs summarized:
Nowhere as in the United States has Lutheranism been able to apply to practice either its ecclesiastical or its political principles. The great reforms which it effected in the religious life of the lands in which it sprung, were only beginnings, which were soon adjusted to circumstances in civil life, as it then existed, that have retarded their progress, curbed their power, and have culminated at last in the horrors that have forced our government, after much patient suffering and long delay, to intercede for oppressed humanity. At the same time, the great thoughts of the Reformation, imperfectly assimilated in the land in which they were then confessed, having been carried across the ocean, have been afforded freedom of development and application here, as never before, and have not only left their impress upon the American Constitution and its interpretation, but have given our Church a place and opportunity such as is impossible, where the sense of the direct responsibility of the individual to God, and the cherishing of Christian fellowship, have been obscured and retarded by the transformation of the Church into a political institution.[2]
Jacobs embraced the freedoms afforded by the United States constitution as an aid in fostering the continued growth of the Lutheran tradition. The secular freedoms of the United States had a spiritual parallel in the freedom of Christian practices, so long as the center of the Lutheran faith (justification by grace through faith in Christ) was maintained. This freedombecame most visible when juxtaposing the differences between a state church model and the spirit of volunteerism found in the United States. Jacobs believed that the Reformers were hindered in their expression of their Christian freedom by their time and place and that the Reformers were aware of this hindrance, specifically the relationship between the church and the state. Jacobs explained:
The reformation was first a mere leaven, a new stimulus to Christian life. Then it became a revision of Christian doctrine. For a long time the hope was entertained that the old fabric of the Church would remain, and with the recognition of justice of the position of the Reformers, the administration of former years be reinstated. Seven years passed before any change in Church government was attempted by Luther. When this became necessary the work of the Reformers became more complicated. The problem was how to adjust the administration of the revised doctrine to the peculiarities of time and place, the genius of the nation, even the harmless prejudices and the iron-bound customs of diminutive principalities, only partially enlightened princes and densely ignorant people, to whom the complete freedom of the Gospel could not be entrusted too suddenly. Some of the abuses that could not be immediately remedied were crystalized into the framework of the Lutheran Church, and have greatly trammelled it in later times. And yet, even then, the great variety of Church Constitutions and their provisions testify clearly how the Reformers rejected uniformity of government as a necessary expression of unity in the faith.[3]
For Jacobs, the Lutheran tradition did not reach its epitome in Germany in the sixteenth century, but rather, the Gospel freedom which had long been forgotten had been remembered and given prominence in the confessions of the early Lutheran Church. But like the church in any other time or place, the Lutheran Church in Germany struggled to fully embrace the liberty which Christ has granted. To Jacobs, this opened up a new opportunity here in America. He did not describe this opportunity as one of progress but as one of growth. The gospel is a seed, and here in America that same Reformation seed had been planted in new soil, breathed different air and used different kinds of fertilizer. At the same time, Jacobs would not want to relinquish the testimony of the great cloud of witnesses that preceded him. He said:
The United Lutheran Church should be historical in its temper, cherishing every truth confessed in the past as a precious possession, and at the same time progressive; observant of precedents and yet not mechanically bound by them; full of the freedom of the Reformation period, because its foundations are sure and its truth many sided, and its capabilities of development are exhaustless. Its sympathies will be wide, and its aspirations high as the heavens are raised above the earth.[4]
Jacobs was fully aware of the dynamic and inseparable interplay between context and confession. He put the two categories of context and confession to words in an address to the Synod of Virginia in 1917:
I infer for two great principles: first that the Lutheran faith is a trust which cannot be surrendered, but must be confessed and maintained against all hazards; and, secondly, that for such a purpose, the language of the land must become the language of the Church, educational institutions must be established on solid foundations, and a new literature arise as a witness of our faith. For to the end of time, the Church, if it is to fulfill its mission on earth, must be a nursery in which to rear the feeble and train them for vigorous manhood. It must be a hospital, which is not meant to exclude those unable to meet the test of a rigid medical examination, but which is established for the purpose of gathering within itself the sick and the injured and restoring them to health. It is a reformatory, whose inmates have all of them weaknesses, that must be borne and dealt with, as each case with its peculiar experience, requires. The Church is no aristocracy of historical antecedents or culture, or intellectual or spiritual attainments, but the people of God of every rank and condition in life, and every degree of convalescence from the dire disease with which all are born, ready to share every advantage possessed and every benefit enjoyed with every man, woman and child for whom Christ died. It reaches its divine ideal only when, like Christ, it gives to others all that it has; and yet, in giving is itself enriched.[5]
For Jacobs, the Gospel grows and produces seeds that bear fruitaccording to its context. A Gospel seed from sixteenth century Germany could certainlytake root in another place like America. The two places are linked in that the seed is the same, but the plant grows differently on account of the new context in which the seed has taken root. In Jacobs’ thinking, it was this dynamic interplay between context and confession where you would find Lutherans. He said, “National and racial lines are purely incidental to the identity of the Church. Lutheran and German are in no way synonymous terms. A Church that cannot bear transplantation and translation cannot be the church of the pure Gospel; since the Gospel is intended equally for all peoples and nations. It was the glory of the Reformation, that, instead of a dead language, which only a select few understood, the vernacular of the people was introduced.”[6] This, in a sense, was the major task of Jacobs and others like him in the late nineteenth century. Jacobs worked to translate the lived confessions of Lutheranism into a new context (the United States) and into a new language (English). At The United Lutheran Church in America’s Constituting Convention, Jacobs was given the first sermon on Hebrews 12:1-2 titled “The Race Set Before Us.” In it, he proclaimed that Lutherans should not stand aloof in this country as though they were mere sojourners. He insisted that “our Church is an American Church.”[7] He continued, “Let our voice be heard, let our testimony be given in unmistakable terms. Here is our open door for a theology, new in form, but identical in substance with that of the Reformation, in the English language and in the terms of modern thought.”[8]
Jacobs believed that adapting the confessional Lutheranism that he had inherited into the American context was itself an essential expression of what made Lutheranism Lutheran. He knew it to be the great evangelical opportunity of his age.
*Web Editor’s Note: This research is an excerpt from a larger body of research on Dr. Jacobs. Our thanks to Mr. Pernini for sharing this.
[1]Henry Eyster Jacobs, “The Race Set Before Us,” Minutes of The First Convention of The United Lutheran Church in America, November 10-18, 1918, 12 [hereafter, “The Race”]
[2] Henry Eyster Jacobs, “An International Church: Address Delivered at the Patriotic Service of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of New York and New England,” May 28, 1918, 3.
[3]Henry Eyster Jacobs. Permanent and Changeable in Lutheranism: Address at Susquehanna Lutheran Reunion. Northumberland, PA., August 28th, 1902, 12 [hereafter, “Permanent”].
[4]Henry EysterJacobs, Memoirs of Henry Eyster Jacobs: Notes on a Life of a Churchman,edited by Henry E. Horn. Huntington: Church Management Service, 1974, xiv [hereafter, Memoirs].
[5]Jacobs, Memoirs, xiii-xiv.
[6]Jacobs, “The Race,” 12.
[7]Jacobs, “The Race,” 13.
[8] Jacobs, “The Race,” 16.