Palmer-Murray Collection (#010), 1947 - 1949

Unfortunately for scholars of John Murray and his contribution to Reformed theology, when Murray retired from WTS in 1966, he felt that his published works constituted the totality of his thoughts and opinions—and so he made a bonfire of his manuscript papers(!) Only a few Murray papers, gathered by Stanley Hagberg, Peter Smith, Elsie Palmer, and Whitman (unknown forename) have survived. Their collections are held in the Special Collections of Westminster Theological Seminary. Anyone who is familiar with John Murray and his career as a Reformed theologian and seminary professor will immediately recognize the contents of his papers. His papers contain materials from his days at Princeton Theological Seminary, both as a student and the one year as a professor there before moving to Westminster Theological Seminary. These include such things as lecture notes, class research papers, and syllabi. Unfortunately, this collection contains almost no correspondence. The one item of correspondence in this collection is a letter from J. Oliver Buswell, dated February 23, 1937, and concerns Murray’s review of Buswell’s booklet, Unfulfilled Prophecies. As a devoted member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Murray took an active part in its administration. He attended the OPC General Assembly from 1942 and 1946. He may very well have attended the GA in other years, but these are the only two years for which we still have documentation of Murray’s attendance. Living and working in the Philadelphia area, Murray’s church-of-membership was in the Presbytery of Philadelphia, and it is evident that he served on the Committee of Local Evangelism in that Presbytery. As a seminarian and professor of theology, it is only natural that Murray would have accumulated literary materials from, or about other theologians, and a series in this collection, entitled “Scholars and Associates” contains such materials. The extant materials in the Hagberg-Murray collection from Scholars and Associates were from Gordon H. Clark, Floyd Hamilton, and L. M. Moore. Murray also collected materials concerning various subjects that were important to Reformed theologians in the mid-twentieth century. In this collection, these consist of papers on the Auburn Affirmation (including material about modernism in the Presbyterian Church), a Greek word-study on the word “begotten,” and the Ministers Letter Exchange in 1945. In any manuscript collection, nothing contains the intellectual indicators more than those papers written by the subject, himself. The last series in this collection contains the writings of John Murray. These include a wide range of materials, and the nature of these papers is rather fluid. In this collection, Murray’s writings are identified as “essays.” These may have been intended to be articles for journals, or magazines, or as sermons, or class lecture notes, or as chapters in books or anthologies. An essay originally intended for one purpose may have been adapted for another at a late time. In this collection, they are identified by title and arranged in alphabetical order.