John Gresham Machen (1881-1937) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was a tremendous scholar who studied at Johns Hopkins and Princeton in the United States and at Marburg in Germany. Ordained in 1914 he became a professor of New Testament literature at Princeton Theological Seminary. He left the school due to his conservative theology and the school’s rapid drift toward liberalism. In 1929 he founded the Westminster Theological Seminary and became its president and professor of New Testament. He took similar steps when he resigned from the Presbyterian Board of Missions to found an independent society and when he and a group of like-minded clergy started the Orthodox Presbyterian church. He was a staunch defender of conservative Christianity at a time when scholars of his stature were nearly all liberal.
