This week in Christian history: ‘Left Behind’ released, ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem,’ John Machen

By Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editor Sunday, December 27, 2020

Prominent fundamentalist Christian theologian dies — January 1, 1937

John Gresham Machen (1881-1937), fundamentalist Christian leader and New Testament scholar who helped to found the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. | Wikimedia Commons

This week marks the anniversary of when John Gresham Machen, a fundamentalist Christian scholar and theologian who helped create the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, died.

Machen was an apologist for fundamentalist Christianity and opposed the liberalization of Princeton Seminary, where he had served as an expert on the New Testament.

After leaving Princeton, Machen helped to found the OPC and passed away less than a year later in Bismarck, North Dakota, while trying to raise support for the new denomination.

“He was arguably the most important conservative Protestant thinker of the first half of the twentieth century and the guiding light for the first generation of Orthodox Presbyterians,” stated the OPC.