Joseph A. Seiss

Joseph Augustus Seiss was born on March 18, 1823, at Graceham, Maryland, into a family of Moravian descent. He attended Pennsylvania College at Gettysburg, studied theology largely on his own, and was licensed to preach as a Lutheran in 1842, at nineteen.

He served congregations in Virginia and Maryland, including Cumberland and Baltimore, before coming to Philadelphia in 1858 to St. John's Lutheran Church. In 1874 he and much of that congregation founded the Church of the Holy Communion, where he was pastor until he retired in 1900.

He was one of the most popular Lutheran preachers in nineteenth-century America, and one of the busiest men in the denomination. He edited The Lutheran and later The Lutheran and Missionary, wrote on the Augsburg Confession, defended confessional Lutheran teaching against both rationalism and revivalist looseness, and helped shape the General Council of Lutheran churches.

What made him a household name outside his own denomination was Revelation. Beginning in 1869 he delivered a long series of Sunday-evening lectures on the Apocalypse in Philadelphia, published in three volumes between 1870 and 1884 as The Apocalypse: Lectures on the Book of Revelation. Seiss read the book as future history, a literal tribulation, a personal Antichrist, the church taken out before the worst of it, and Christ returning bodily to reign on the earth. It was among the first popular American works to lay that futurist reading out in full, and it went through edition after edition.

He also wrote The Last Times, The Gospel in Leviticus, Voices from Babylon on Daniel, and volumes of lectures on the Gospels and the Epistles for the church year.

Two of his books took him somewhere stranger. A Miracle in Stone: or, The Great Pyramid of Egypt (1877) argued that the Great Pyramid was built under divine direction and encoded prophetic measurements, a school of thought called pyramidology, popular in his day, which later surveying and Egyptology did not sustain. The Gospel in the Stars (1882) argued that the ancient constellations were originally given as a picture-record of the promise of a coming Redeemer, corrupted afterward into pagan astrology.

Those two books are why some readers dismiss him and others quote him constantly. Seiss himself was consistent. He believed God had written his purposes into the heavens, into the stone, and into the text, and that the reader's business was to look.

He also gave English-speaking Christians a hymn. The version of the German carol "Schönster Herr Jesu" that most American churches sing as "Beautiful Savior" is his translation, made in 1873.

He preached and wrote nearly to the end, and died in Philadelphia on June 20, 1904, at eighty-one.

Sources: Joseph A. Seiss, The Apocalypse: Lectures on the Book of Revelation, A Miracle in Stone, and The Gospel in the Stars; the Lutheran Cyclopedia (1899); Abdel Ross Wentz, A Basic History of Lutheranism in America; Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism.