Machen and the OPC
Machen and the OPC
D. G. Hart
J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) was the principal figure in the foundation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, not for another reason that was not the Presbyterian controversy in which he had a crucial performance that culminated in the beginning of the denomination in 1936. Mahen, a distinguished scholar of the New Testament in the Seminar Princeton from 1906 until 1929, defended the historical reliability of the Bible in such works like The Origin of Paul's Religion (The Origin of Pablo's Religion - 1921) and The Virgin Birth of Christ (The Virginal Birth of Christ - 1930). Did it emerge like the principal spokesman of the Presbyterian conservatives doing devastating criticism of the modernist Protestants in his well-known books Christianity and Liberalism (Christendom and Liberalism - 1923) and What is Faith? (What is faith? - 1925). When the Presbyterian ones of the north (PCUSA – Presbyterian Church in the United States of America) pushed his arguments back in the middle of the decade of 1920, and they decided to reorganize the Seminar Princeton to create a moderate school, Machen assumed the leadership in the foundation of the Seminar Westminster in Philadelphia (1929) where it taught New Testament up to his death. His continuous opposition to the liberalism in the agency of foreign missions of his denomination during the decade of the years 1930s, they led it to the creation of a new organization, The Independent Meeting for the Foreign Presbyterian Missions (1933). The judgment, conviction and suspension of the department of the members of the Independent Meeting, including to Machen, in 1935 and 1936 it provided the logical criteria for the formation in 1936 of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Only six months, after having begun the new denomination, Machen died in Bismarck, North Dakota, while it was treating to obtain economic support for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He was, indisputably, the most important Presbyterian conservative thinker in the first half of the 20th century, and the light that served as guide to the first generation of Presbyterian Orthodox.