Ernst Tonsing, Ph.D.

Professor of Religion and Greek, Emeritus

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Email: tonsing@callutheran.edu
Phone: 805-492-4427

Dr. Ernst F. ("Fred") Tonsing was born in Topeka, Kansas, and studied chemistry and geology at Midland Lutheran College, Fremont, Nebraska, afterwards joining the United States Navy as an officer. After cruises of the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean, he became an Instructor at the Naval Intelligence-Communications Schools at Little Creek, Virginia.

Subsequent to the Navy, he entered Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and served as pastor at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, Oregon. Later, he entered the University of California, Santa Barbara, to pursue further academic interests, receiving a second Masters Degree and Doctor of Philosophy degree. 

Tonsing came to California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks in 1974, teaching courses in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Inter-testamental literature (Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and the Dead Sea Scrolls), Early Christian Art, and the Greek language. He retired in 2003 after teaching twenty-nine years at CLU.  Subsequently he taught Koiné Greek at St. John's Roman Catholic Seminary, Camarillo,  California, for seven years.  Tonsing’s travels have taken him to nearly forty countries, from Europe, the Near East, Central and South America, to Polynesia and the Orient.

Tonsing keeps busy lecturing, speaking and writing on topics as diverse as the career of Alexander the Great, pre-Christian Celtic invocations, Early Christian and Byzantine art, Swedish folk music, Scandinavian archaeology (the rune stones, Viking ships, and ancient Norwegian stave architecture, etc.), to family history, including Cousin Amelia, on his second cousin, Amelia Earhart.  Recently he had his articles, "2022: A Polio Anniversary Year," about his four and one-half months in a hospital bed and an Iron Lung at the age of fifteen, published in Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains (Autumn 2022), "A Lost Post Library at Fort Sill, Oklahoma," in the Chronicles of Oklahoma (Winter 2022-23), and "Vikings: New Technology--New Discoveries," in Nordstjernan (December 2023).  In 2007 he wrote the history of California Lutheran University, O Summon Your Sons and Daughters, a companion volume of alumni stories, I Remember CLC/CLU.... and more recently a personal account of teaching at the school, If Walls Could Talk: Tales from the Buildings of California Lutheran College (2020).  In all he has published seventy-four books.