W. E. Biederwolf
| W. E. Biederwolf | |
|---|---|
Biederwolf circa 1920
|
|
| Born | September 9, 1867 |
| Died | September 3, 1939 (aged 71) Monticello, Indiana |
| Resting place | Old Monticello Cemetery, Monticello, Indiana |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Princeton College |
| Occupation | Evangelist |
| Home town | Monticello, Indiana |
| Spouse(s) | Ida Casad |
| Parent(s) | Michael Biederwolf, Abolana Schnetzer Biederwolf |
William Edward Biederwolf (September 29, 1867 – September 3, 1939) was an American Presbyterian evangelist.
W. E. Biederwolf was born in Monticello, Indiana, the son of German immigrants. At the age of eighteen, while teaching at a public school in White County, Biederwolf made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ and joined the local Presbyterian church.
After attending Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, for a year, Biederwolf moved on to Princeton College where he earned a B.A. in 1892 and an M.A. in 1894. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1895. Much to his father’s displeasure, Biederwolf also played football during his years at Princeton. During the summers Biederwolf worked at rescue missions in the Bowery and in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and after graduation from seminary, he worked for a year with evangelist B. Fay Mills. After marrying his childhood friend Ida Casad in 1896, Biederwolf spent eighteen months studying at the University of Berlin and the University of Erlangen in Germany and at the Sorbonne in Paris. While in Berlin he also preached at the American Church.
Biederwolf returned to the United States in 1897 and was called as pastor of the Broadway Presbyterian Church in Logansport, Indiana, serving a year before the Spanish–American War and three years afterward. During the war, he was commissioned as a chaplain with the 161st Indiana Volunteers, which served in Cuba for six months. (Biederwolf himself wrote an exhaustive regimental history.) His military experience suggested how social service might be melded with evangelism.
In 1900, Biederwolf left the pastorate for professional evangelism, first apprenticing under Presbyterian evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman, then striking out on his own by 1906. Although he never achieved the extraordinary popularity of Billy Sunday, Biederwolf was in the first rank of contemporary evangelists along with such men as Chapman, Gypsy Smith, and R. A. Torrey. By the 1910s he was holding evangelistic campaigns in small cities such as Fall River, Massachusetts; Watertown, New York; and Allentown, Pennsylvania. Like Sunday, Biederwolf emphasized prohibition and tended to meld patriotism with religion, calling the "flag of the saloon" the "dirty red flag" of socialism. Yet Biederwolf, a staunch theological conservative, also promoted civic reform and played a prominent role in the Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–12, which tenuously mingled soul winning with the Social Gospel.
...
Wikipedia