Conditional subscriptions to the Lutheran Confessions

I’ve been revisiting my class notes from “Lutheran Church in America”. With a few notable exceptions along the way, American “Lutherans” have generally subscribed to the Lutheran Confessions conditionally. From the colonial days down to the present, where the Confessions are even acknowledged, the subscription has been typically rendered: "I subscribe insofar as (quaetenus) the Confessions agree with the teaching of the Scriptures" or "I subscribe to the ‘doctrinal articles’ or to the ‘fundamental doctrinal articles’ articulated in the Symbolical Books.” One notorious example of this type of confessor is Samuel Simon Schmucker, who rather purposefully took up such a subscription in 1826 when he became the President of the Gettysburg Seminary. According to my notes, it seems that Schmucker spent the rest of his life trying to work out exactly which of the “doctrinal articles” are “fundamental”, as can be seen especially in Schmucker’s “American Rescension of the Augsburg Confession” - “The Definite Synodical Platform” of 1855.

The norm of conditional subscriptions does have a few notable (and perhaps debatable) exceptions. The Synod formed by the Henkel family in Tennessee in 1820 produced a quia subscription to the unaltered Augsburg Confession but fell short of explicitly subscribing unconditionally to the entire Book of Concord. In 1845, some twenty-five years later, the followers of Grabau in the Buffalo Synod became the first in the U.S. to produce an unconditional subscription to the entire Book of Concord; they were followed two years later by the Missouri Synod, which was organized in 1847.