Wyneken at the General Synod (1845)

On 20 May 1845 Friedrich Wyneken, then a pastor in Baltimore, arrived at the 13th convention of the General Synod, being held in Philadelphia. At the time he was a member of the Synod of the West.

The meeting had begun on 16 May, and before Wyneken arrived, the assembly had instructed its Committee for Foreign Correspondence to defend the General Synod against the alleged false accusations spread in Germany that it was not orthodox and to ask the Lutheran societies there to send it available missionaries. Though Wyneken was not named in the resolution, it was aimed at him and the accounts he had shared in Germany during his 1841-1843 visit about the conditions of the church in America.

Once Wyneken was in attendance, he participated in the discussions, at one point attempting to remove a section of a resolution that commended the American Tract Society for issuing its publications in German.

He also opened one of the sessions with prayer.

According to J. C. W. Lindemann's biography of Wyneken,

When Wyneken appeared at the synod and heard about the decision [to write to Germany in defense of the General Synod’s theology], he made the motion on the last day of the conference: “To send Dr. Schmucker’s and Dr. Benjamin Kurtz’s writings, also a volume of the Lutheran Observer and the Hirtenstimme and other books and periodicals, in which the doctrine and practice of the General Synod is described, to Dr. Rudelbach, Prof. Harless and other editors and publishers in Germany of excellent Lutheran periodicals for scrutiny and thereby prove the orthodoxy of the General Synod to the Lutheran Church of Germany.”

The synod tabled this motion so dangerous for it. Wyneken, however, rose again and said he didn’t expect anything else than this and for that reason he had formulated a second motion in advance and pocketed it. He pulled it out of his pocket very calmly and read it. He called for: “The General Synod should publicly disapprove and repudiate the previously mentioned writings of Dr. Schmucker and Dr. Kurtz, as well as the Lutheran Observer and Hirtenstimme as heretical and deviating from the standard of beneficial doctrine!”

Such language had been unheard of until then at conferences of the synod. Everyone was appalled by such an incredible demand and did not think in the slightest to comply.

This confrontation is not recorded in the printed proceedings of the 1845 General Synod.