Ransom Dunn

Rev. Ransom Dunn, D.D. (July 7, 1818 – November 9, 1900) (nickname: "the Grand Old Man of Hillsdale") was an American minister and theologian, prominent in the early Free Will Baptist movement in New England. He was President of Rio Grande College in Ohio, and Hillsdale College in Michigan.A Discourse on the Freedom of the Will is one of his most notable works.

Dunn was born in the town of Bakersfield, in the north corner of Vermont to John (died 1835) and Abigail Reed Dunn (died 1858), a family of English and Scots descent. Three brothers, Hiram, Lewis, and Thomas, also became ministers; there were at least two older half-brothers, Joab and John. He had at least one sister, Amanda Dunn Montague.

Around 1840 Dunn attended the Baptist Seminary (later called Cobb Divinity School) in New Hampton, New Hampshire. In 1873 he received an honorary doctorate from Bates College in Maine, which was then affiliated with the seminary.

On the third Sabbath in August, 1837, Ransom Dunn, at the request of the Lenox church, was ordained to the gospel ministry. Among his most important pastorates were in the cities of Dover, New Hampshire, Great Falls, New Hampshire, New York City, and Boston, Massachusetts. By 1843, he was recording secretary of the Home Mission Society. In 1849, he began preaching at the Stuyvesant Institute in New York City. He became a pastor of the Free Will Baptist Church of Boston.

He is known for his publication A Discourse on the Freedom of the Will, published in 1850. With John Jay Butler, he published Lectures on systematic theology: embracing the existence and attributes of God, the authority and doctrine of the scriptures, the polllinstitutions and ordinances of the gospel in 1892. Dunn once mused, "The real value of colleges and universities is not to be estimated by the magnitude of buildings or endowments, but by the increase of mental power and moral force."

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