Background
Friedrich August was born on January 3, 1837 at Leutenberg, Thuringia, Germany, and came at the age of four with his parents to St. Louis. He was the son of Martin and Helena (Wirth) Schmidt.
Friedrich August was born on January 3, 1837 at Leutenberg, Thuringia, Germany, and came at the age of four with his parents to St. Louis. He was the son of Martin and Helena (Wirth) Schmidt.
In St. Louis Schmidt attended parochial school and Concordia Theological Seminary. He was graduated from the preparatory department of the seminary in 1853 and from the theological in 1857.
Schmidt was pastor at Eden, New York, from 1857 to 1859, and at Baltimore, Maryland, from 1859 to 1861. For the following eleven years he was professor at Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, and from 1872 to 1876 professor of theology at his alma mater. When the Norwegian Synod established its own school of theology at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1878, Schmidt was transferred to this institution, where he taught till 1886.
When the Brotherhood, in 1890, merged to form the United Norwegian Lutheran Church, Schmidt suffered another transfer to Augsburg Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he taught until 1893. Because of friction in the new faculty and new church body, Augsburg Seminary was abandoned and the United Norwegian Lutheran Church founded the Luther Theological Seminary at St. Anthony Park, St. Paul, Minnesota, where Schmidt was professor of systematic theology from 1893 to 1912, when he resigned.
To combat the new "Calvinism" he edited Altes und Neues, 1880-85, and Lutherske Vidnesbyrd, 1882-90. For these and similar efforts the Evangelical Lutheran Inter-Synodical Conference in 1882 refused to receive him as delegate from the Norwegian Synod.
Besides the publications already mentioned, he edited the Lutheran Watchman, 1866-67, was joint editor of the Luthersk Kirkeblad, 1890-95, and Der Sprechsaal, 1901-03, he also wrote Naadevalgs-striden, 1881, Intuitu fidei, 1895, and Sandhed og Frihed, 1914.
He died in 1928.
Schmidt's name figured extensively in the predestination controversy, there being few doctrinal controversies among the Lutherans of German or Norwegian antecedents in the West in which he did not participate. Up to 1878 he was an ardent admirer of the Missouri Synod and its leader, C. F. W. Walther, but when the latter began to press the claim that God elected man to salvation prior to the foundation of the world, independent of any fore-knowledge of faith, Schmidt changed his allegiance.
He failed to recognize the limits of human knowledge about the will-problem and its distribution on various levels of discussion.
He was liberal enough to stand for "open questions" in eschatology, to doubt the wisdom of subscribing to the Book of Concord as too theological for the laity, and to distinguish between fundamental and non-fundamental doctrines. But he believed in verbal inspiration and jure divino ministry, and regarded ecclesiastical "unionism" as sinful.
He was happy that his one-time plan to study in Germany had been shattered because he considered it to be the land of rationalism.
Schmidt was a small-statured man, kind, sociable, honest to the core, and versatile.
His wife was Caroline Sophia Allwardt, to whom Schmidt was married on December 8, 1858. They had eight children, six of whom survived their father.
