Loraine Boettner was born on 7 March 1901 in Linden, Missouri, a small town about seven miles northwest of Rock Port, Missouri, the son of Mr. and Mrs. William Boettner. His grade school education was at the Lone Cedar and Fairview schools in rural Northwest Missouri. He next attended Tarkio High School, followed by a brief course in agriculture at the school in Columbia, MO, intending at that time to become a farmer.
But recognizing a need for further education, he entered Tarkio College, a Presbyterian school in Tarkio, Missouri. Boettner graduated from Tarkio in 1925 with a Bachelor of Science degree, cum laude. It was while he was at Tarkio that he was mentored by one of the professors there, Dr. J.B. Work. Boettner would in later years tell visitors that it was under Dr. Work's instruction that he became a postmillennialist.
By graduation Loraine Boettner was beginning to explore the possibility of God's call upon his life, and so he entered Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey in the fall of 1925. As a student there, he joined one of the dining clubs, known as the Warfield Club. Boettner spent a total of four years at Princeton, graduating from there first with the Th.B. degree in 1928 and then the Th.M. degree in 1929.
Upon completion of his work at Princeton, Boettner took a position as Professor of Bible at Pikeville College in Eastern Kentucky, teaching there from 1929 until 1937. It was while there that he met and married Miss Lillian Henry, a native of eastern Tennessee who was also teaching at Pikeville. During his years at Pikeville he also worked to complete his first three published books. These were The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (1932); A Summary of the Gospels (1933) and The Inspiration of the Scriptures (1937).
Though we are unclear at this time as to why, the Boettners moved to Washington, D.C. later in 1937, and resided there for eleven years. During these years he continued his writing, and from 1942 to 1947, Loraine worked for the Treasury Department. Quoting from the biographical account provided at Rev. Boettner's funeral, "Those years included the Second World War, 1939 until 1945, at which time the United States gained a complete victory over both Germany and Japan. Those were most interesting years to be in Washington, as that city was then, in effect, the capital of the free world, with intense activity national and international."
In 1948 the Boettner's moved again, this time to Los Angeles, California on account of Lillian Boettner's failing health. The move to Los Angeles was apparently a matter of convenience, as two of her sisters lived there and had volunteered to assist with her care. Mrs. Boettner's health continued to decline until her decease in 1958. Upon his wife's death, Loraine saw to her internment at the Linden Cemetary outside of Rock Port, Missouri.
From 1958 until his own death in 1990, Dr. Boettner lived a quite life in Rock Port. In 1933 he had been awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity by Tarkio College. The added honor of a Literary Doctorate was conferred by Tarkio in 1957, a year before his wife's death. Though his books had sold modestly well up to this point, it was really the years after returning to Rock Port that Dr. Boettner began to enter into the ministry for which he is so fondly remembered.
For the remaining 32 years of his life, he generously sold his books at cost to any who wrote to ask for them. In doing so, Boettner made good conservative theology readily available at a time when such material was often difficult to come by. Through his writings, he served to popularize the Reformed faith and influenced literally tens of thousands of men and women around the world. In some weeks, as many as 800 orders would arrive at the Tarkio Post Office, and Dr. Boettner would single-handedly sign each book, then wrap and ship it. He was generous to a fault, and was always glad to entertain the occasional visiting student or scholar, always at his own expense. Dr. Boettner was as well a very humble and unassuming man. He would want us to be careful to point out, and we concur, that in paying him this attention, our purpose is not to emulate Dr. Boettner, but rather to give praise to his Lord and ours, for the work that God accomplished through one of His servants.