Just found out from Pastor Dave Pepper via Facebook that Dr. Donald Bloesch, professor emeritus at Dubuque Seminary and a long-time voice for orthodoxy in the United Church of Christ, has died at the age of 82. That might not mean much to most folks, but it is a great loss to the world of Christian theology. I read Dr. Bloesch’s Essentials of Evangelical Theology in seminary, and have been blessed by his 7 volume Christian Foundations series, as well as by a variety of other books of his. He was a Reformed theologian who was a student of Karl Barth’s, but not an uncritical follower. He also taught me to take the history of theology seriously, and to read and weigh the insights of modern theologians in light of the Church Fathers and Reformers. He was also eminently readable, as opposed to so many academic theologians who seem obsessed with being as obscure as humanly possible. He will be missed.
August 26, 2010
August 26, 2010 at 6:28 pm
David -
Thanks for posting this information. I, too, read ‘Essentials’ in seminary and kept it handy to refer to ever since.
August 26, 2010 at 7:40 pm
David, didn’t know if you were aware that Clark Pinnock died on August 15.
August 26, 2010 at 7:45 pm
No, I didn’t. Gee, this has been a bad month for theologians, hasn’t it? (Well, actually a good month for them, bad one for us.) I never read that much of Pinnock, though what I did I liked, at least until he went weird with the open theism thing.
August 27, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Don Bloesch – We went to Elmhurst College together, where he was a committed Christian, so I am not all surprised at the direction of his life and contribution to the evangelical churches. I’m sure our Lord is pleased to open the eternal kingdom’s gate for this faithful servant of Jesus Christ. . . . Thanks be to God!
August 27, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Dr. Bloesch was a fixture at the Dubuque library when I was a student there from 2000-2004. Brenda would drop him off in the mornings and come get him in the evenings and he would would spend his days continuing his life’s work (years after his official ‘retirement’.)
He will be missed.