F. Burton Nelson Papers

F. Burton Nelson was born August 24, 1924 in Mt. Kuling in Hupeh, China to Covenant missionaries K.M. and Anna Nelson. His parents returned to the U.S. in 1926 and settled in Princeton, Illinois, where his father set up a medical practice and the family attended the Evangelical Covenant Church. He attended North Park College in Chicago, earning an associate’s degree in 1944 and then graduated in 1946 from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He later received a diploma from North Park Theological Seminary in 1948 while also completing graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Chicago. While a student at North Park, he met L. Grace Johnson. They married in June 1948. Nelson was ordained in 1949 and served Covenant churches in West Warwick and Providence, Rhode Island (assistant); Garyton, Indiana; Chicago (North Park as assistant) and Evanston, Illinois; and Plainville and Bristol, Connecticut.

During his seminary education, Nelson was challenged to pursue a career in teaching. While serving as a pastor, Nelson also studied at Yale University Divinity School (Master of Divinity in 1950), where he decided to focus on Christian ethics, following in the footsteps of one of his professors, Richard Niebuhr. He then earned a Ph.D. in theology from Northwestern University in 1965 and studied ethics at Garrett Theological Seminary. It was at Northwestern that Nelson first seriously studied the life and work of Lutheran pastor and Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His studies on Bonhoeffer led Nelson to teach about the Holocaust. He became a founding member of the Annual Scholar’s Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, and in 2000 was honored with the Eternal Flame award for his contributions to the field of Holocaust studies.

Published works include The Story of the People of God (1971), A Testament to Freedom: the Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1990) co-edited with Geffrey Kelly of LaSalle University, and The Cost of Moral Leadership (2003), co-authored with Kelly. He also edited The Bonhoeffers: Portrait of a Family by Sabine Leibholz-Bonhoeffer and was a consultant for a Bonhoeffer documentary released in 2003.

F. Burton Nelson died on March 22, 2004. At the time, he was serving as research professor of Christian ethics at North Park Seminary and a senior associate at Oxford University. (Source: Covenant Companion, March 2004, pp 31-32).