Machen, John Gresham

Machen, John Gresham (grĕ`səm mā`chən), 1881–1937, American Presbyterian clergyman, b. Baltimore. Ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1914, he became a leader of the fundamentalists in his denomination. He objected to the liberalism of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions and in 1933 set up an independent board. Suspended (1935) from the ministry for this action, Machen, with certain ministers and lay groups, established in 1936 an independent body that later took the name Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Bibliography

See biography by N. B. Stonehouse (1954).

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Machen, John Gresham (1881–1937) Protestant theologian; born in Baltimore, Md. A graduate of Johns Hopkins (1901) and Princeton Theological Seminary (1905), he taught at Princeton and was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1914. He served overseas with the Young Men's Christian Association during World War I. A leading conservative during the controversy over fundamentalism in the 1920s, his Christianity and Liberalism (1923) argued that liberal theology and Christian faith were incompatible. In 1929 he was forced out of Princeton for his views and was suspended from the ministry as a schismatic in 1935.