50 Years Building His Kingdom - Far Eastern Bible College

inerrancy of Holy Scripture, the Virgin
Birth of Christ, His vicarious atonement,
His bodily resurrection and His miracles.
These were deemed essential to the Christian
faith, to which all ministerial candidates
must subscribe.
God’s Man
God’s man of the hour to defend and
preserve the precious ‘faith once delivered
unto the saints’ was Dr J. Gresham Machen
in the early part of the 20 th century, as was
Martin Luther in the 16 th century. Dr
Machen considered liberalism another
religion in his thesis ‘Christianity
& Liberalism’. He lost
Princeton Seminary to the
modernists in 1929, and left
with four loyal professors,
including Dr Allan A.
MacRae to found Westminster
Theological Seminary.
Among the senior students
who joined him was Machen
Carl McIntire.
Separation Struggles
The conflict against unbelief
waged on in the Church, spreading to the
seminaries, and inevitably into missions.
The Auburn Affirmationists, the modernists
and liberals dominated the Foreign
Missions Board of the Presbyterian
Church, U.S.A. by 1932.
The first voice of dissent came from
Dr J. Gresham Machen, who formed the
Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign
Missions ‘to promote truly Biblical
and truly Presbyterian work’ on 27 June,
1933. Immediately, the constitutionality of
the new Board was challenged and a mandate
taken for its dissolution. Rather than
‘obeying human councils acting contrary
to the Bible’, the Board members stood
firm, were persecuted ecclesiastically, tried
and found guilty of disobeying the order
of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian
Church by 1935.
The Elisha
The young freshly-graduated ordained
Carl McIntire was invited to sit on
the Independent Board for Presbyterian
Foreign Missions in 1934. For that, he was
excommunicated by the ‘high priests’ of
Presbyterian ecclesiastical powers, but
soon he would become Machen’s Elisha.
A complete break came in June 1936
with the establishment of the Presbyterian
Church of America, which was changed
to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church because
of legality in the name. As the infant
Church was amillennial and liberal in matters
of smoking and drinking, a group, who
were premillenial and living a separated
life, withdrew to form the Bible-Presbyterian
Church and the Faith Theological
Seminary to train ministers
for the new denomination,
taking with them the Independent
Board for Presbyterian
Foreign Missions.
With the homegoing
of Dr Machen in
1937, Dr Carl McIntire
took over the helm in the
struggle for the Faith.
B-P Doctrines
The Bible-Presbyterian
Synod was humbly inaugurated
on 4 June 1937 by a small but prayerful
group of ministers and ruling elders for the
Word of God and for the testimony of Jesus
Christ against the blatant unbelief and
apostasy of the Presbyterian Church.
The Synod believed ‘the Scriptures
of the Old and New Testaments to be the
Word of God, the only infallible rule of
faith and practice’, reaffirming their ‘faith
in the system of doctrine set forth in the
Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms’.
Subsequently, they adopted a
Confession of Faith, Larger and Shorter
Catechism, a Form of Government, and a
Book of Discipline. They were ‘against
modernism and unbelief of all kinds’. They
believed ‘the great battle in the world today
is the faith of our fathers versus modernism,
compromise, indifferentism, and
worldliness’. They endeavoured to win
‘lost souls to Jesus Christ by the Gospel of
the Grace of God’.
The Confession of Faith, Larger and
Shorter Catechism, Form of Government
and Book of Discipline of the Bible-Pres-
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