March 16 Today in OPC History

On March 16, 1902, Paul Woolley was born. Three days later, Ned B. Stonehouse was born on March 19, 1902.

The two would meet as students at Princeton Theological Seminary, and they would join J. Gresham Machen in the founding of Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929. There they enjoyed over thirty years of fruitful service as part of the original faculty at Westminster Theological Seminary (Stonehouse in New Testament and Woolley in Church History). Both men numbered among the 34 constituting ministerial members of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936.

Each man also contributed toward the development of a greater historical consciousness within the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Stonehouse's 1954 book, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir, was for many Orthodox Presbyterians their introduction to the life of Machen and the founding of the OPC. The OPC General Assembly acknowledged Woolley's gifts to the church by appointing him as the denomination's first historian, in 1974.

Picture: Ned Stonehouse and Paul Woolley at the Pine Street campus of WTS in the early 1930s.