Charles Porterfield Krauth
[1] 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.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.In contrast, Krauth and his collaborators (who eventually included his own father and Beale Melanchthon Schmucker, the son of Samuel Simon) preferred a more literal reading of the Lutheran Confessions.Krauth was personally influenced by his reading of the Mercersburg theologians, John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff, who had attempted a similar repristination of Calvinist theology within the American branch of the German Reformed Church.Nevin and Schaff had called themselves “evangelical catholics,” a term which has come to be used rarely, if at all, among the Reformed churches, but quite commonly among Lutherans.[citation needed] In 1880 he went to Europe to visit the scenes of the life and labors of Martin Luther, in order to complete a biography, for which he had made extensive preparations.