Charles Porterfield Krauth
| Charles Porterfield Krauth | |
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| Born |
17 March 1823 Martinsburg, Virginia |
| Died | 2 January 1883 (aged 59) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
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Charles Porterfield Krauth (March 17, 1823 – January 2, 1883) was a pastor, theologian and educator in the Lutheran branch of Christianity. He is a leading figure in the revival of the Lutheran Confessions connected to Neo-Lutheranism in the United States.
Born in Martinsburg, Virginia to minister Charles Philip Krauth. Young Krauth graduated from Gettysburg College (then called Pennsylvania College) in 1839 (while his father served as that school's president), and two years later from the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg. From 1841-1852, the younger Rev. Krauth served congregations in Baltimore, Maryland, Martinsburg, and Winchester, Virginia. During the winter of 1853-54, for three months he served the Dutch Reformed congregation in Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where he was visiting on account of his wife's illness. Krauth later published a sketch of this visit entitled A Winter and Spring in the Danish West Indies. Upon returning, Krauth was called to congregations in Pittsburgh from 1855 to 1859, and Philadelphia from 1859 to 1861.
In 1861, Krauth resigned from parish ministry to serve full-time as editor of The Lutheran, a theological journal. One of The Lutheran’s goals was to restore the confessions of faith found in the Book of Concord to prominence in Lutheran church life.
These documents, especially the Augsburg Confession, have always been identified as the cornerstones of a distinctively Lutheran theological identity. But during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lutherans in the United States had interpreted the confessions very loosely. A key figure in this movement was Samuel Simon Schmucker, one of Krauth’s professors at Gettysburg, whose “American Lutheranism” as outlined in the Definite Synodical platform of 1855, proposed that the Augsburg Confession was mistaken on such questions as Baptismal Regeneration and the Real Presence in the Eucharist.
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