February 3 Today in OPC History

On this day in 1977, J. Oliver Buswell died at the age of 82. Along with J. Gresham Machen, Carl McIntire and six others, he was suspended from the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in the USA in the spring of 1936, triggering the formation of a new Presbyterian body that came to be known as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

From 1926-1940 he served as president of Wheaton College. Holding strongly to a premillennial view of eschatology, and embracing a more traditional American Presbyterian ecclesiology, Buswell was attracted to the more evangelical and fundamentalist direction espoused by Carl McIntire. In 1937 he and McIntire and a sizable minority withdrew from the OPC to form the Bible Presbyterian Church. But in less than ten years Buswell found it necessary to separate from McIntire’s radical fundamentalist, anti-communist stance, resulting in the formation of what ultimately became known as the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod.

A consummate educator as well as a caring pastor, Buswell found himself in 1957 at the head of a movement to gather a faculty for Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, while at the same time he was the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Haddonfield (later Cherry Hill) New Jersey. It was there that he taught me, a ten-year old boy, to call him Uncle Buz, and he showed me how to set up folding chairs for church meetings in a rented Grange Hall. A frequent guest in our home, he would “talk theology” with us as easily as discussing the weather. And when his Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion was published in 1962, he presented my father with a signed copy.

J. Oliver Buswell was an evangelical leader during a tumultuous time in American Presbyterian church history. But it was my privilege to know him through many years as a warm and personal friend. He and his wife attended our wedding. He allowed me to interview him on audio tape about his leadership in the Bible Presbyterian movement. And when, as a student at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, I received an “A” in the very last course he taught in his career, I wrote him a note that simply said, “Thanks, Uncle Buz.”

Editor's Note: Today's guest author is the Rev. Ross Graham.

Picture: J. Oliver and Helen Buswell in 1969.