Remembering Loraine Boettner

Loraine Boettner, American Presbyterian theologian, died twenty years ago today, on January 3, 1990. It is worthwhile to pause and remember his contributions to the church. His writings did much to popularize and make respectable the Reformed Faith in 20th-century America. Some of his works which were particularly influential upon me include The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (which helped to make famous the TULIP acronym); Roman Catholicism; The Millennium (a fair look at the spectrum of eschatological viewpoints which advocates postmillennialism); The Christian Attitude Towards War; and Calvinism in History. Some of these and other writings are available online still at an archived site known as The Loraine Boettner Anthology.

The following biographical sketch comes from Theopedia.com, which is extracted from that of the PCA Historical Center. Another brief biography written by Dr. C. Matthew McMahon is available online here.

Loraine Boettner (1901-1990) a Reformed Theologian, born on a farm in Linden, Missouri. After obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree from Tarkio College in 1925, he attended Princeton Theological Seminary where he studied Systematic Theology under Dr. Casper W. Hodge and received his Th.B. (1928) and Th.M. (1929). He taught Bible for eight years in Pikeville College, Kentucky. In 1933 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity from Tarkio College, and in 1957 the degree of Doctor of Literature. He was a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. From 1958 until his own death in 1990, Dr. Boettner lived a quite life in Rock Port, Missouri. For the remaining 32 years of his life, he generously sold his books at cost to any who wrote to ask for them. In doing so, Boettner made good conservative theology readily available at a time when such material was often difficult to come by. Through his writings, he served to popularize the Reformed faith and influenced literally tens of thousands of men and women around the world.