Background
Johannes Andreas August Grabau was born on March 18, 1804, in Saxon Prussia at Olvenstedt near Magdeburg, the elder of the two children of Johann Andreas and Anna Dorothea (Jericho) Grabau.
Johannes Andreas August Grabau was born on March 18, 1804, in Saxon Prussia at Olvenstedt near Magdeburg, the elder of the two children of Johann Andreas and Anna Dorothea (Jericho) Grabau.
The father, a farmer, bestowed care and love on Grabau’s education until his unexpected death in 1822 left the family in grief and distress.
Assisted by his teachers and by a small stipend, Grabau completed the course in the Dom-Gymnasium in Magdeburg and matriculated at Michaelmas 1825 in the University of Halle, where he studied for five years.
After teaching for four years in Magdeburg and Sachsa, Grabau was elected pastor of St. Andreas in Erfurt March 3, 1834, and was ordained June 17, in the Barfiisser Kirche.
In 1836, he announced that as a strict Lutheran he could no longer use the Union liturgy, and when his superiors failed to persuade him he was deposed from office and forbidden to enter his church.
He conducted services in private houses in defiance of the authorities until he was arrested March 1, 1837, and imprisoned at Heiligenstadt.
In September, he escaped. With his rescuer, Capt. Heinrich K. G. von Rohr, who had been dismissed from the Prussian army for opposing the Union, he made his way about the country visiting sympathizers as far away as Stettin.
On September 21, 1838, he was captured and remanded to prison. Finally, he received permission to emigrate; Von Rohr gathered a company of one thousand with Grabau as their pastor, and in June and July 1839, they sailed from Hamburg in five ships.
Grabau and the greater part of the company settled in Buffalo in October. There he was pastor of the DreifaltigkeitsKirche for almost forty years.
In 1840, with Von Rohr as his first pupil, he opened a school, later known as Martin Luther Seminary, to train candidates for the ministry. On July 15, 1845, Grabau, Von Rohr, and three other clergymen met at Milwaukee and organized the Synod of the Lutheran Church Emigrated from Prussia, which soon became known as the Buffalo Synod.
In 1853-54, he and Von Rohr visited Germany to confer with Wilhelm Lohe on matters of doctrine. From 1842 until 1866, he carried on a fierce controversy with C. F. W. Walther and other theologians of the Missouri Synod on the subject of ordination, the ministry, and the church.
The Missouri Synod made the controversy into a war of extermination against Grabau and his followers, set up rival congregations and rejoiced when the Buffalo Synod split into three factions in 1866.
The largest faction, consisting of Christian Hochstetter and eleven other pastors, promptly allied themselves with the Missourians; Von Rohr continued at the head of his party until his death in 1874; and Grabau, with a few pastors still loyal to him, kept open his seminary, started a new paper, Die Wachende Kirche, to take the place of the old Informatorium, which remained in Von Rohr’s possession, and was elected Senior Ministerii of the new Buffalo Synod.
The last years of his life were peaceful. He edited a hymn-book for his Synod and had a liturgy ready for publication at the time of his death.
A notable pastor and preacher, Grabau was too often tactless, opinionated, and headstrong in dealing with other ministers of his denomination, and in consequence he failed to realize his dream of a great Lutheran synod that would conform in doctrine to the Book of Concord, as he understood it, and in government to the old Saxon and Pomeranian church ordinances.
Violent and irascible when engaged in theological controversy, he was at all other times gentle and mild of manner, though relentless in his demands on his own body, mind, and conscience.
On July 15, Grabau married Christiane Sophie Burggraf, who with two sons and a daughter survived him.
