These documents, especially the Augsburg Confession, have always been identified as the cornerstones of a distinctively Lutheran theological identity. But during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lutherans in the United States had interpreted the confessions very loosely. 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.