Theopedia

Loraine Boettner

Overview

Loraine Boettner (1901-1990) was an American Reformed theologian and member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church,1 known for The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (1932), a restatement of Calvinist soteriology that a 2025 historical survey of twentieth-century Calvinism still calls “widely read.”2 He later wrote extensively on Roman Catholicism, postmillennial eschatology, and the intermediate state after death.

Life and Ministry

Boettner was born March 7, 1901, in Linden, Missouri.1 He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Tarkio College in 1925, then attended Princeton Theological Seminary, receiving his Th.B. in 1928 and his Th.M. in 1929.1 The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination reflected the research behind that Princeton degree.2 From 1929 to 1937 he taught at Pikeville College in eastern Kentucky, a Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. institution, and it was during this period, in 1932, that Eerdmans of Grand Rapids published the book.2 Tarkio College later awarded him an honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1933 and an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1957.1

After leaving Pikeville, Boettner worked at the Library of Congress from 1937 to 1942 and then at the U.S. Department of Internal Revenue from 1942 to 1947.1 He settled in Los Angeles with his wife’s family in 1948 and, following her death, returned to Rock Port, Missouri, in 1958, where he remained for the rest of his life.1 He died January 3, 1990.1

Theological Contribution

The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination

Boettner stated the aim of his 1932 book plainly in its opening chapter: it was written “not to set forth a new system of theological thought, but to give a re-statement to that great system which is known as the Reformed Faith or Calvinism, and to show that this is beyond all doubt the teaching of the Bible and of reason.”3 The book surveys the Five Points of Calvinism, answers common objections to predestination (among them the charge that it amounts to fatalism), and argues the doctrine’s practical bearing on the Christian life, drawing on Calvin, Luther’s The Bondage of the Will, and the confessional standards of the Presbyterian and Reformed churches.3

Roman Catholicism and the last things

Boettner’s later writing turned to apologetics against Rome and to eschatology. In Roman Catholicism (1962), he catalogued historical episodes he took to count against the doctrine of papal infallibility, including Pope Liberius’s signing of an Arian confession and Pope Honorius’s condemnation as a monothelite by the Third Council of Constantinople; Michael Kruger’s Canon Revisited cites this same material, alongside Hans Küng’s Infallible? An Unresolved Inquiry, in its own argument against the claim.4 In Immortality (1956), Boettner addressed the intermediate state between death and resurrection, describing the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory as the central point of dispute over that state’s nature among those who otherwise share a belief in the resurrection and final judgment.5 He also wrote The Millennium (1957), defending a postmillennial reading of Christ’s return in which the gospel gradually triumphs over the earth before the Second Coming.1

Historical Significance

Kenneth Stewart’s historical survey of the twentieth-century evangelical Calvinist resurgence names the 1932 publication of The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination as a notable event for “friends of the Reformed faith,” in a chapter that traces the same era’s Princeton Theological Seminary reorganization of 1929, from which J. Gresham Machen and other conservative professors withdrew to found an alternative seminary.26 Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology lists the book in its own bibliography of general treatments of the doctrine of God.7 Its argument against papal infallibility in Roman Catholicism was still being cited by evangelical scholarship decades later, in Kruger’s 2012 study of the New Testament canon.4

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Wikipedia, s.v. “Loraine Boettner,” accessed September 10, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loraine_Boettner. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  2. Kenneth J. Stewart, “Hardier than Supposed: The Resurgence of Calvinism Across the 20th Century,” Themelios 50, no. 2 (2025): 290n29: “The year 1932 was notable for friends of the Reformed faith because of the release by Eerdmans of Grand Rapids of the still-widely read Reformed Doctrine of Predestination by Loraine Boettner. The book reflected research for which Boettner had received the Princeton ThM in 1929. At the time of his book’s release, Boettner was on the faculty of Pikeville College, a PCUSA institution in eastern Kentucky.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 2. ↩ ↩2

  4. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 1, citing Loraine Boettner, Roman Catholicism (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1962), 248-53, and Hans Küng, Infallible? An Unresolved Inquiry (Edinburgh: Continuum, 1994). ↩ ↩2

  5. Loraine Boettner, Immortality (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1956), chap. “The Intermediate State.” ↩

  6. Stewart, “Hardier than Supposed,” 286: “Deep in the background lay J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) and the Princeton theology. That seminary had experienced an administrative re-organization in 1929, followed by the withdrawal of some of its leading conservative professors in order to found an alternative seminary.” ↩

  7. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 725-35. ↩