Beale Melanchthon Schmucker

Background

Beale Melanchthon was born on August 26, 1827 at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, United States, the second of the twelve children of Samuel Simon Schmucker by his second wife, Mary Catherine Steenbergen. His father was the most gifted and most influential evangelical among the Lutherans of America.

Education

Schmucker graduated from Pennsylvania (later Gettysburg) College in 1844 and from the Gettysburg Theological Seminary in 1847.

Career

Schmucker was licensed by the West Pennsylvania Synod in 1847, and was ordained by the Virginia Synod in 1849.

His first charge was Martinsburg and Shepherdstown, Virginia. (now West Virginia), where he succeeded his friend Charles Porterfield Krauth from 1848 to 1851. The winter of 1851-52 he spent in his father's house at Gettysburg, recovering from an affection of the throat. Subsequently he was pastor of St. John's English Lutheran Church, Allentown, 1852-62; of St. John's, Easton, with Philip Pfatteicher as his German colleague, 1862-67; of St. James', Reading, 1867-81; and of the Church of the Transfiguration, Pottstown, from 1881 till his death seven years later.

He was English secretary of the board of directors of the Philadelphia Theological Seminary from 1864 to 1888, secretary of the board of foreign missions of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania and of the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

As a liturgical scholar he had no equal in the United States and few in Europe. The first-fruit of his work in this field was A Liturgy for the Use of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (1860; 1868; 1871), in which he collaborated with A. T. Geissenhainer; it was nominally a translation of the second edition (1855) of the Liturgie und Kirchenagende edited by Charles Rudolph Demme, but was really based on older, more conservative principles and was a finer achievement.

With Frederic Mayer Bird he edited the Hymns for the Use of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (1865; 1868), which was the best American hymnbook that had yet appeared. His drastic criticism, from the floor of the Ministerium, of the provisional edition (1871) of the Kirchenbuch resulted in his addition to the committee engaged on it, and the completed Kirchenbuch (1877), like the English liturgies and hymnbooks of the Ministerium and the General Council, bears the stamp of his taste and scholarship.

He wrote the preface to the first edition of The Common Service (1888) published by the United Synod of the South, and he continued to work on the forms for ministerial acts until the end. His editorial work is incorporated in The Church Book (1891) and The Common Service Book (1919).

Schmucker was averse to publishing anything under his own name, but late in life he produced a number of historical and biographical studies of importance, and he collaborated with William Julius Mann and Wilhelm Germann on an annotated edition of the Hallesche Nachrichten (1886 - 95).

On October 15, 1888, he left his home in Pottstown to take the completed manuscript of The Church Book to the publishing house in Philadelphia. He ran to catch his train and died of a heart attack near Phoenixville.

Achievements

• Beale Melanchthon Schmucker greatly influenced the liturgical development of the Lutheran Church in America. In particular, Schmucker worked to revive historic liturgical practice. His knowledge of details in matters pertaining to the order of service, especially of the Lutheran Church of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was unusually extensive and accurate, that proved his famous works: A Liturgy for the Use of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (1860; 1868; 1871), The Early History of the Tulpehocken Churches (1882), The Lutheran Church in Pottstown (1882).

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Lutheran Church In York, Penn'a: An Historical Discourse Delivered September 23rd, 1883, At The One Hundred And Fiftieth Anniversary Of The Establishment Of Christ's Church...

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • The Organization of the Congregation in the Early Lutheran Churches in America

Views

Schmucker was intellectually in closer sympathy with Charles Porterfield Krauth, became one of the leaders of the extreme churchly party which discredited his father Samuel Simon Schmucker and remoulded almost completely the doctrine and life of the Lutheran Church in America.

Personality

From his father Schmucker had inherited his dignity and self-control, his profound piety, his logical habits of thought, and his capacity for severe, sustained intellectual toil, but in their religious temper father and son differed radically. The breach between father and son never became personal; amid the theological strife of that generation Beale could write of his father with a serenity, tenderness, and understanding profoundly moving; but there was tragedy, however concealed, in their intellectual estrangement.

His knowledge of the early Lutheran liturgies and of those of the undivided church was profound; he had an intuitive sense for the proprieties of worship; and his literary taste was impeccable.

Interests

• Beale Melanchthon Schmucker collected what was probably the best liturgical library in the United States (now at the Philadelphia Theological Seminary).

Connections

On March 6, 1860, Schmucker married Christiana M. Pretz of Allentown, by whom he had two sons.

Father:

Samuel Simon Schmucker

Mother:

Mary Catherine Steenbergen

Spouse:

Christiana M. Pretz

Friend:

Charles Porterfield Krauth

coworker:

William Julius Mann

coworker:

A. T. Geissenhainer

coworker:

Wilhelm Germann

coworker:

With Frederic Mayer Bird

References

• History of the Gettysburg Theological Seminary of the General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States and of the United Lutheran Church in America, Gettsburg, Pennsylvania 1826 - 1926