April 11 Today in OPC History

On Tuesday, April 11, 1933 at 2:30 P.M. at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Trenton, J. Gresham Machen and Robert E. Speer, director of the PCUSA Board of Foreign Missions, engaged in a debate at the meeting of the Presbytery of New Brunswick on the topic, “Modernism on the Mission Field.” At the previous meeting of the presbytery, Machen had presented an overture for the Presbytery to bring to the General Assembly. The overture urged the assembly to take care to elect to positions on the Board of Foreign Missions only persons determined to insist upon such verities as the full truthfulness of Scripture, the virgin birth of our Lord, His substitutionary death as a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice, His bodily resurrection and His miracles, as being essential to the Word of God and the Westminster Standards and as being necessary to the message which every missionary shall proclaim.