Milton Valentine was an American theologian and educator.
Background
Valentine was born on January 1, 1825, near Uniontown, Carroll County, Maryland. He was the son of Jacob and Rebecca (Picking) Valentine, and a descendant of George Valentine who emigrated from Germany in the early part of the eighteenth century and settled in Frederick County, Maryland, in 1740.
Education
Milton worked on the farm until he was twenty-one, meanwhile preparing for college at the Taneytown Academy.
In 1846, he enrolled at Pennsylvania College, Gettysburg, and was graduated in 1850; he then entered the Lutheran Theological Seminary in the same town, where he was graduated in 1852 and was licensed as a minister.
Career
Valentine served for a year as supply pastor at Winchester, Virginia, a year as a missionary in Pittsburgh, a year as regular pastor at Greensburg, Pennsylvania, and four years as principal of Emmaus Institute at Middletown, Pennsylvania. In 1859, he became pastor of St. Matthew's Lutheran Church at Reading, where he ministered with conspicuous success for seven years.
In 1866, he accepted the professorship of Biblical and ecclesiastical history in the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg. The seminary was passing through a crisis. It had been founded in 1826, and Pennsylvania College in 1832, by Samuel S. Schmucker, moving spirit in the early history of the General Synod of the Lutheran Church in the United States.
Schmucker's position was that of a liberally conservative Lutheranism, based upon the Scriptures as "the inspired Word of God and the only perfect rule of faith and practice" and upon the Augsburg Confession as "a summary and just exhibition of the fundamental doctrines of the Word of God. "
Diverging from this central position, there began in the 1850's a movement towards the left on the part of certain zealous advocates of "American Lutheranism, " impatient of liturgies and interested in revivals and other "new measures"; and toward the right, partly owing to immigration, a strong swing toward "Old Lutheranism" or "Symbolism, " the supporters of which proposed as a confessional basis not only the Augsburg Confession but the whole body of Lutheran symbolical books as contained in the Book of Concord.
The growing strength of the second of these movements seriously threatened the seminary at Gettysburg. Though Schmucker resigned in 1864, the Pennsylvania Ministerium withdrew to found its own seminary in Philadelphia and led in the organization of another general body of Lutherans, the General Council, in 1867.
The directors of the seminary had faced this crisis with courage and vigor, securing funds for two new professorships and calling Valentine to one of them. After two years of teaching in this post, he was elected president of the college, to which he gave for sixteen years a scholarly, effective administration. In 1884, he returned to the service of the seminary, becoming a professor of theology and chairman of the faculty. He retired because of increasing age and impaired hearing in 1903, with the title of professor emeritus.
From 1871 to 1906, he was an editor of the Quarterly Review of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. He was a member of the joint committee which, laboring from 1885 to 1888, prepared the Common Service which is now used in public worship by most English-speaking Lutheran churches. In 1898, he published Christian Truth and Life, a volume of sermons.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
"As to my own history since entering the ministry of the Gospel, in the Lutheran Church, in 1852, I need say little. This ministry, begun in Winchester, Virginia, was continued in Alleghany City, Pennsylvania, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, and subsequently, Reading, Pennsylvania. From this place, in 1866, I was called to the Chair of Ecclesiastical History, etc. , in the Theological Seminary of the Lutheran Church, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. On the death of Dr. H. L. Baugher (1868), President of Pennsylvania College, I accepted the call to the presidency of this institution. "
Personality
Valentine was an accurate scholar, a penetrating thinker, and a stimulating teacher. He was a vigorous defender of the position of General Synod Lutheranism, which he described as "standing for the principle of union in generic and Catholic Lutheranism on the great historic Confession of Augsburg, which has always been recognized as the one decisive determining standard of our Church, apart from any of the developed specialties of explanation which have been asserted by some, and into which they have been pleased to restrict themselves".
Connections
On December 18, 1855, Valentine married Margaret G. Galt of Taneytown, Maryland, by whom he had four children.