Luther Alexander Gotwald, D.D. (January 31, 1833 – September 15, 1900) was a professor of theology in the Wittenberg Theological Seminary in the United States. He was tried for heresy by the board of directors at Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, on April 4 and 5, 1893, which put on trial many key issues that Lutherans still debate today.
Gotwald died in 1900 in Springfield, Ohio.
Family
Gotwald was born in York Springs, Adams County, Pennsylvania, on January 31, 1833, the fifth child of seven brothers and five sisters. His parents were Lutheran minister Daniel Gotwald and his wife, Susannah (Krone) Gotwald, both natives of Pennsylvania and of German ancestry.
The elder Gotwald was a prominent minister of the Lutheran Church and reportedly was "one of the most able and eloquent Lutheran ministers of his time". Daniel Gotwald was born in Manchester Township, York County, Pennsylvania, on December 16, 1793. Daniel's German immigrant parents were Andrew and Mary Magdalene Gottwald. Daniel was christened January 26, 1794, in Quickel's Church, Conewago Township, Pennsylvania. Daniel and Susannah were married on July 22, 1819, in York, Pennsylvania, by John George Schmucker, the then forty-eight-year-old pastor of Christ Lutheran Church of York, and the father of famous Lutheran theologian and educator, Samuel Simon Schmucker. Daniel lived in York, where he worked as a carpenter, until the birth of his third child. In time, Daniel came to see himself as a very sinful man who was in great peril of "eternal death".
Daniel began preaching on his own, drawing surprisingly large crowds. However, Rev. John George Schmucher approached Daniel and convinced him that he needed a formal education in Lutheranism. For a year and a half, Daniel walked every week through the very thick Penn's Woods to York to recite to the elder Schmucker. However, in time, this manner of instruction only whetted his taste for an even better education in the Lutheran ministry, so he sold his home and moved his family to Gettysburg to begin his full and regular course of theological study in the Lutheran Theological Seminary there as preparation for his work in the ministry. He studied there for two and a half years under the seminary's founder,. Samuel Simon Schmucker, who later said Daniel was "one of the most diligent and successful students that the Seminary ever had." Daniel Gotwald was among the first to graduate from Gettysburg Seminary.
Daniel had two pastorates, one in Adams County and one in Centre County, Pennsylvania. His pastorate in Centre County served sixteen churches, one being over away, which required him to be on the road much of the time. Daniel ardently supported the abolition of slavery in his ministry. Moreover, he fervently espoused the cause of temperance, which caused some to accuse him of being a "Methodist". Luther Gotwald gives this further description of his father's imposing physical characteristics, which undoubtedly served him well in his ministry:
Luther's father always preached in German, never in English. Luther Gotwald reported, in his own autobiography, as to his father's German language preaching that "As an orator and preacher he possessed great power. His voice was one of remarkable compass and sweetness. His thoughts logical and good, his imagination fine, his gestures graceful and wonderfully expressive, and his manner all earnestness, pathos, fire; his own soul all alive with the truth he was uttering, and his auditors held spell bound and weeping under his moving exaltations of truth and his powerful appeals." The elder Gotwald had a fiery temper, which his son, Luther said often caused his father great embarrassment and remorse. However, Luther went on to give this amusing account of the effect of his father's equally fiery eloquence in the pulpit, albeit in German.