Robert Thoburn was born of Scottish ancestry in Cadiz, Ohio on the New Deal Dairy Farm. He was not born into an easy life economically or otherwise. His father having left home and his older brothers away at war, before he was even in high school he ran the farm which supported his mother and family.
But he never complained about his situation. He learned the value of hard work. His mother at Christmas promised him the "wide world to make a living in."
Robert Thoburn applied himself in school. He scored 10th in all of Ohio on an eighth grade test. He attended Muskingum College where he met my mother, Rosemary Sweet Thoburn. Later studying theology at Pittsburgh-Xenia he found he had one professor who towered above all of his other teachers. He decided that he should go to school where that instructor had studied. That is how he ended up at Westminster Theological Seminary near Philadelphia. At Westminster he studied under greats such as John Murray and the presuppositional apologist Cornelius Van Til, men who permanently influenced his understanding.
Robert Thoburn embarked on many undertakings in the wide world in which to make a living. And, he considered all manner of work to be Christian service. Ordained in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church he came to Virginia to start a new congregation. He later pastored an independent church. Many times I heard him say that the fact that Christ's resurrection was a physical event proved that God's kingdom would not merely be victorious in some spiritual sense but that it would actually triumph in this physical world. He did much to help spread the ideas of Van Til and the theologian Rousas John Rushdoony.
Even before the modern Christian school movement, he became convicted that God had appointed to parents, not to the state, the responsibility for instructing children. He founded the first privately owned Christian school in America and together with Mrs. Thoburn spoke and wrote freely to help hundreds of others start new schools. He helped found Oak Hill in 1997.
Running for political office many times, he articulated truth and not necessarily what he thought people wanted to hear. In public he did not advocate government handouts and in private he avoided taking them so much that he even declined to use local government owned parks and libraries. He served on the board of the Institute for Christian Economics. In 1977 he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates where he distinguished himself as a legislator who was not afraid to vote no. Even when his colleagues supported taxes and spending, he stood firmly against those things. One year the budget vote was 98-1, with him alone opposing.
Working long hours and being thrifty, Robert Thoburn was at one time one of the wealthiest men in Fairfax County. He was father to 6 sons and 2 daughters and enjoyed a host of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He had a number of brothers and sisters, including a younger brother Carl who years ago worked with him on the farm and today teaches math at Oak Hill.
No one is just like my father. And, my dad never faced the kind of threats that Polycarp saw. But like that great bishop of the past, my father seemed to know that there was something greater than this short life. I think he too would have been quite unafraid of wild beasts and threats from the proconsul. He knew that Christ is strong to save both body and soul. In the 1990's we all learned that he was terminally ill. While the news should have been hard to hear, his reaction was no reaction. It was as if no one had ever promised him another day in the first place. He never fretted, never worried. He carried on with no medical treatment for many years and until not too long ago always seemed to be in great shape. He feared God and certainly did not fear man nor illness.
May we all ask for grace to love God, enjoy life, and anticipate the resurrection as Robert Thoburn did.
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. ... and this mortal shall have put on immortality...Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? ...Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.
Robert Loren Thoburn II
