Gettysburg College and the Lutheran Connection: An Open-Ended Story of a Proud Relationship

The oldest Lutheran College in America is a mark of distinction credited to Gettysburg. Just what Lutheran has meant to this institution throughout its century and a half is the subject of this historical essay. This is an open-ended story because the Lutheran connection of Gettysburg College is a live relationship today and gives promise of being a mutually supportive association in the future. Gettysburg represents not only a high water mark in the history of this nation, but also a place of landmark developments for Lutheranism in America. The College and the Seminary were center stage for these developments, and they continue to show marks of their Lutheran heritage. In tracing the nature of the Lutheran identity of the College, focus will be on the part played by its founder, its supporting synods, its faculty, its trustees, and its students. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/collegehistory/1001/thumbnail.jp

Interview with Harold A. Dunkelberger, July 29, 1999

The first of two interviews, Harold A. Dunkelberger, a student and professor at Gettysburg College, was interviewed on July 29, 1999 by Michael J. Birkner & David Hedrick. He graduated with the class of 1936, and discusses his experience as a student of English at Gettysburg and his time at the Gettysburg Seminary. Length of Interview: 87 minutes Collection Note: This oral history was selected from the Oral History Collection maintained by Special Collections & College Archives. Transcripts are available for browsing in the Special Collections Reading Room, 4th floor, Musselman Library. GettDigital contains the complete listing of oral histories done from 1978 to the present. To view this list and to access selected digital versions please visit -- http://gettysburg.cdmhost.com/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16274coll

5. The Left Wing: The Anabaptists

Thus far we have considered the churches of the Protestant Reformation which, in spite of their secession from Rome, nevertheless retained some important elements of the Catholic tradition. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Henry VIII all assumed that the churches which they had established should embrace the entire community, and that ideally everyone would become members of the church through infant baptism. Also, these reformers believed in maintaining close relations with the temporal power which, they asserted, was ordained by God for the benefit of men. Nowhere is this attitude seen more clearly than in the case of Richard Hooker, who maintained that the Church of England and the English state were but two aspects of one and the same thing. Each man was a member of church and state, and pad obligations to both. [excerpt

2. The Instrumentalism of John Dewey

The approach of John Dewey to philosophy, while influenced by many of the same factors which were important to Russell, and despite his agreement with Russell on many social issues, takes a radically different direction. Dewey sees a person\u27s philosophy as more intimately and internally related to the social processes than does Russell. Instead of viewing it as primarily a means of analysis and clarification, Dewey sees the role of philosophy as a method of social reconstruction, and logic as a method of inquiry rather than a means of exploring the implications of analytical definitions and empirical facts. It is therefore not surprising that his categories for dealing with different philosophies are conservative and progressive, rather than critical and constructive or idealistic and materialistic. How he arrived at his instrumentalist philosophy can best be understood by tracing briefly his own long intellectual pilgrimage. [excerpt

7. Jerusalem: St. Augustine

Perhaps no individual after Paul exercised an influence on t he history of Christianity comparable to that of Augustine (354- 430). Beyond a doubt the greatest of the Latin Church fathers, he lived during the years when the formative period of the Christian Church was drawing to its close. By the time of his death, the polity, the doctrine, and many of the practices which the Western Church was to carry into the Middle Ages were already clearly recognizable, if not finally set. It was the contribution of Augustine, during the last half of a long and eventful life, to sharpen, expound, and expand upon so many different aspects of the Christian faith and in such a convincing (though sometimes inconsistent) way that there was no significant restatement of Roman Catholic doctrine for more than eight hundred years after his death. When the early Protestants of the sixteenth century wished to return to what they held to be true Christianity, they did so through Augustine. [excerpt

8. The Gothic Cathedral

The Gothic cathedral, like the Summa of Aquinas, the University of Paris, and the Christendom of Innocent III, stands as one of the major expressions of the spirit of the High Middle Ages. The word Gothic, coined by the Renaissance as a term of disparagement, has come recently to have more favorable and appreciative connotations. Such a reevaluation may be due not only to the better perspective that a longer period of time offers us, but also to a deeper understanding of the cultural role of artistic and spiritual symbolism. The artistic expression of the Middle Ages found its supreme embodiment in the architecture of the Gothic cathedral. [excerpt

7. The Making of France as a National State

The west Frankish kingdom of Charles the Bald, which he had received in 843 as his portion of his grandfather\u27s great empire, is geographically the genesis of modern France. In the century of disorder and confusion following the partition of Charlemagne\u27s realm into three kingdoms, government fell into the hands of powerful vassals. From the first, therefore, great lords in France exercised the functions of independent rulers. In 987 they chose one of the weaker of their number, Hugh Capet (987-996), to be king. He and his successors faced two great problems in establishing nationhood in France: how to recover and unite the territories by wrestling control of the land from the great barons; and how to create and develop an effective central government. [excerpt

3. Manorialism

Parallel to the military and political system called feudalism, and acting as the foundation, was an economic system known as manorialism. The two systems were distinct and could exist without each other, but they were often linked by the fact that a vassal generally be received as a fief, the lordship of one or more small, self-sufficient farming villages called manors. Although the typical manor never existed, and although the manorial system was not found in southern Europe and in the Celtic countries, the general features of this system as it prevailed in the feudal Europe of the eleventh century can be broadly sketched. [excerpt

3. Rome: Roman Citizenship

The Roman concept of citizenship represents both a measure of their capacity to govern and one of their key contributions to Western culture. In the Greek city-state, citizenship was something which could not be separated from the intimate and varied life of the polis. It enabled a man to live the good life because it entitled him to participate in all the activities which the polis sponsored. Justice, Plato wrote, meant that every man in this society was doing that for which he was best suited and was receiving in return what was his due. It was the result of a harmony and a balance among the classes. There was little tendency here to picture the state as a legal creature called into existence in large part to protect individual rights. The Greek made no distinction between the state, which commands obedience, and society, which enlists cooperation . There was no hint that an Athenian citizen could retain his status as a citizen if he left Athens; if he left the city, he would become in this respect a fish out of water. Finally, there was no thought that citizenship could ever really become universal. Greek thinkers frankly believed that men were so unequal that only a few of them could ever hope to enjoy the good life and therefore only a few could be admitted into the ranks of citizen. [excerpt

3. Athens: Greek Civilization

The importance of the Greeks lies in the fact that they sketched out many, although of course not all, of the broad foundations upon which Western Civilization rests. This may seem a bit strange in view of the fact that each city-state was independent and often jealous of the others, but the Greeks were bound together by a common language, by common gods, by belief in their descent from a common ancestor and in their superiority to non-Greeks, and by many common customs. Although the name of Athens has been chosen in the title of this chapter to represent the vigorous cultural life of the Golden Age, it must be remembered that other city-states made important contributions as well. [excerpt