Guide to the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Special Judicial Commission: John Gresham Machen Case Records

J. Gresham Machen was born in Baltimore in 1881. He attended Johns Hopkins University as an undergraduate and for one year of graduate study: he then matriculated at Princeton Theological Seminary, earning a BD degree in 1905. After a year of advanced study of Greek literature in Germany, Machen returned to spend the next several years at Princeton Seminary, first as instructor and later as assistant professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis. He was ordained by the Presbytery of New Brunswick in 1914. During the First World War he did YMCA work with the French army and the AEF in France and Belgium.

In 1929, Princeton Seminary updated its curriculum to encompass what Machen saw as dangerously liberal theological views, and he and other conservative faculty members left Princeton and founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Machen taught at Westminster for five years and became its president in 1934.

Machen and his fellow fundamentalists charged the Board of Foreign Missions (PCUSA) with tolerating and encouraging "modernism" in its missionaries and its schools, and in 1934 they formed the rival Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. The General Assembly of 1934 proscribed the Independent Board, but Machen refused to sever his connections with it and he was tried and suspended from the Presbyterian ministry in 1935. In 1936, Machen founded the Presbyterian Church of America, a fundamentalist alternative to the PCUSA. In 1939, the Presbyterian Church of America adopted its current name, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Machen died on New Year's Day, 1937.