A History of Luther Seminary by Mark Granquist

Author:Mark Granquist [Granquist, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-5064-5663-8
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2019-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

1911–1937: The George Sverdrup Era

Although George Sverdrup was his father’s son, his education and experiences were quite different from those of his father; George represented the classic example of a second-generation immigrant religious leader. While his father had been born and educated in Norway and formed by the pietist and liberal party struggle for greater independence from the Norwegian state and state church, George was educated in the United States and was finely attuned to the needs and opportunities of the Norwegian American religious communities as they moved inexorably toward acculturation and assimilation in United States. Instead of attending the preparatory department at Augsburg, George instead received an American high school education in Minneapolis. After earning a collegiate degree at Augsburg, he took further classes at the University of Minnesota and in 1901 was admitted to the Yale University Graduate School, where he earned a master’s degree in 1902 in Semitic languages and biblical studies. Like his father before him, he was not an ordained pastor, and neither of them had ever served in a congregation. He attended Yale on and off as his finances would allow and spent several years in the Middle East studying and participating in archeological excavations and even teaching at the Protestant college in Beirut, Lebanon.

Given these factors, and his desire to return to Yale and complete his PhD, it seems reasonable to conclude that he had ambitions beyond the small and confined world of Augsburg Seminary. But with the death of his father in 1907, Augsburg came calling, and George dutifully answered. George Sverdrup was emblematic of a number of bright and academically talented Lutherans of the second and third generations in these immigrant denominations who had the ability to complete doctoral degrees and gain a wider career but sacrificed these opportunities to return to church colleges like Augsburg and help transform them into modern educational institutions. He labored at Augsburg for thirty years until his untimely death in 1937 at age fifty-eight. One cannot say for certain, but surely the personal labors that were required to bring Augsburg into the twentieth century and through the rigors of the Great Depression could easily have led to his death at a relatively young age.

One thing was certain: Augsburg desperately needed his help, because the institution was directionless and in decline. The seminary program was holding its own through these years; although it was never a growing or flourishing program, there was a constant need for pastors for the Lutheran Free Church, and the seminary supplied these. But surely the narrowly defined and unaccredited collegiate department was in crisis. The decline in collegiate enrollment that had begun at the start of the twentieth century continued and threatened the very survival of the entire institution. By 1911 the number of students in the college had declined to fifty-three, and by 1918 the numbers had slipped to twenty-three, although some of this drop might be attributed to the effects of World War I.[12] Even though the primary focus

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