Evangelical Lutheran Tennessee Synod
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The Evangelical Lutheran Tennessee Synod (1820-1920) was a Lutheran Church body known for its staunch adherence to the Augsburg Confession and commitment to confessional Lutheranism. The Synod began with 6 ministers in 1820 and had 40 by 1919. Most of the congregations were in Western North Carolina or East Tennessee until 1860 when the congregations located in Tennessee formed the Evangelical Lutheran Holston Synod. However the Tennessee Synod kept its name, and so after 1860, it had congregations in Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Alabama, but none in Tennessee. In 1884 the Tennessee Synod (along with the Holston Synod and other southern synods) joined the United Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the South, paving the way for the Tennessee Synod’s merge into the United Synod of North Carolina in 1920, thus ending the Tennessee Synod’s history as a separate body.
The Tennessee Synod is probably best known for producing the first English translation of the Book of Concord (the confessions of the Lutheran church) in 1851 (Henkel Press, New Market Virginia).
The Tennessee Synod’s defining characteristic was certainly its confessionalism. The Synod’s ministers were labeled “Henkelites” and lambasted by their opponents. (“Henkelites” is a reference to the fact that Paul Henkel’s family produced many of the leaders of the synod.) They had a strict standard of Lutheran orthodoxy which kept them from joining with other Lutherans in surrounding states for several generations. Especially were they opposed to the General Synod (see Bente below). A tribute to their confessional character: C.F.W. Walther in the Lutheraner of January, 1849: "… this Synod belongs to the small number of those who are determined not only to be called Lutherans, but also to be and to remain Lutherans.” But unity was never established with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod due to geographic and linguistic separation, the Civil War, and the Tennessee Synod’s drift toward union with the less strict North Carolina synod in the 1880’s. The United Synod of the South’s constitution was variously interpreted by member Synods who took differing stands on the Four Points during the 1890’s, and the conservative insistence originally held by the Tennessee Synod was first given several exceptions and finally abandoned altogether with the 1920 merger.
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[edit] Bibliography
Pro-Henkelite:
- Socrates Henkel. History of the Evangelical Lutheran Tennessee Synod (New Market: Henkel & Co. Printers and Publishers, 1890). This includes the annual convention minutes until the mid-1880s.
- F. Bente. American Lutheranism, Volume I: Early History of American Lutheranism and the Tennessee Synod. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1919. 148-237
- F. Bente. American Lutheranism: Volume II: The United Lutheran Church. St. Louis: Concordia, 1919. 228-43.
Anti-Henkelite:
- S.S. Schmucker. American Lutheran Church. Philadelphia: E. W. Miller, Ranstead Place, 1852. pp. 215-226.
- Ernest L. Hazelius. History of the American Lutheran Church. Zanesville: Edwin C. Church. 1846. 149-152, 222, 281.
- G. D. Bernheim. History of the German Settlements and the Lutheran Church in North and South Carolina. Philadelphia: The Lutheran Book Store, 1872. 440-445, 485-488.
Neutral
- C.W. Cassell, W.J. Fink, and Elon O. Henkel. History of the Lutheran Church in Virginia and East Tennessee. Strasburg, VA: Shenandoah Publishing House, Inc., 1930. 48-55, 133-144.
