John A. Mackay - North American Educator

North American Educator

In 1936, Mackay reluctantly left the foreign mission field to become the third President of Princeton Theological Seminary which had recently been weakened by the secession of several professors, including his own former teacher, J. Gresham Machen. For the next 24 years as both President and Professor of Ecumenics, Mackay worked on many fronts to revive the institution’s health, inspiring it to evangelical dynamism and leaving it on a sound footing, with expanded faculty, student body, and campus plant. In 1944, Mackay founded the journal Theology Today to provide insights "into the life of man in the light of God". The editorial board included Robert Elliott Speer, Richard Niebuhr, and J. Harvey Cotton. By 1952 Theology Today was the most widely distributed religious quarterly in the world. After retirement from the Seminary, he served from 1961–1964 as Adjunct Professor of Hispanic Thought at American University, Washington, D.C.