O.T. Allis Collection (#029)

Oswald Thompson Allis was born September 9, 1880, in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia. His father, Oscar Huntingdon Allis, was a well-known physician in the city, and his mother, Julia, was the daughter of a Philadelphia judge. Oswald Allis was educated at home until age twelve, at which point he entered the Penn Charter School and then transferred to the Delancey School. In 1897 Allis enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, where most of his studies were devoted to science. In 1902 he matriculated at Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) and was graduated B. D. in 1905. He subsequently received an A. M. from Princeton University. After his time at Princeton Seminary and University, Allis went to Germany to study under Friedrich Delitzsch at the University of Berlin. He was graduated a Doctor of Philosophy in 1913.

Allis began his teaching career at PTS in 1910 as an assistant to John D. Davis (1854-1926) and then to Robert Dick (R. D.) Wilson (1856-1930). He was licensed in 1906 and then ordained in 1914 by the Presbytery of Philadelphia. In 1922, Allis was made an assistant professor of Semitic philology at PTS. Allis was also named the editor of the "Princeton Theological Review," though he received no compensation for this role. His students remembered Allis for his soft-spoken demeanor and kindness, as well as his thoughtful conversation. Despite his unassuming personality, Allis gave the PTS community a pleasant surprise by marrying Ruth Robinson on September 21, 1927. All signs would have pointed to the Allises enjoying a quiet life in Princeton. Events, both in their church and at PTS would conspire to prevent them having that repose.

In the 1920s the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. entered the larger religious conflict known as the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy. Though it began among Baptists, it spread to the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. after the delivery and publication of the sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) entitled, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Conservatives in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., including Allis’s friend Clarence E. Macartney (1879-1957), rushed to respond. Allis’s colleague J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) published his famous Christianity and Liberalism to rebut Fosdick’s assertions. Though Allis was by all accounts not the sort to rush into controversy, he did so with a sermon critical of theological liberals in Miller Chapel that was eventually published as Jericho Prophets. This action publicly aligned him with the conservatives like Machen and Wilson at PTS, and drew sharp criticism from those opposed.

The controversies at PTS were not merely external but also internal. Charles Erdman (1866-1960), Professor of Practical Theology, grew convinced that both Machen and Allis were conspiring against him, and the ensuing conflict led to a commission being sent by the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. to investigate the conflict on the faculty. Allis offered lengthy statements to the commission, which are preserved in the collection. The PTS controversy, along with the larger theological conflict in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., led to the reorganization of the seminary to curtail the conservative influences there. Allis, along with several of the other conservative faculty members, believed that their time to depart PTS had come, and so they founded Westminster Theological Seminary (WTS) in Philadelphia. Allis was heavily involved in WTS’s founding; he owned the Pine St. property where the seminary first met, and helped Machen recruit faculty members. Allis’s initial appointment was professor of Old Testament History and Exegesis, and then, upon the death of R. D. Wilson, became the professor Old Testament until 1936.

The departure of Princeton conservatives for Westminster did not end the controversies in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., however. Machen’s decision to found the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions escalated the conflict, unnecessarily in Allis’s view, and the faculty determined to pass a resolution in support of the Independent Board members. Allis, however, dissented. Though he was deeply concerned about the state of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and its Board of Foreign Missions, he was also deeply concerned about the modernists’ charge that conservatives were only schismatic. He did not want to support the faculty resolution, and so he tendered his resignation. Allis also chose to not join Machen’s new denomination, the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA, now OPC), but opted to remain in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (later United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.).

At this point, Allis ceased nearly entirely from his teaching labors and devoted the remainder of his life primarily to research and writing. He remained in the Philadelphia area, and though his resignation from Westminster did adversely affect his income, he was of sufficient means that he was able to live on investment and real estate income as well as that which came through the publication of books and articles. Among his works are The Five Books of Moses (1943), Prophecy and the Church (1945), and The Old Testament; Its Claims and Critics (1972). Allis also continued to be heavily involved in several institutions, most notably the American Bible Society, where he served on several committees and boards. He was a contributing editor to Christianity Today. He was also heavily involved in the Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company. He still found himself engaged in controversies in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A./United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., writing about his concerns over children’s Sunday school curriculum and the revised Westminster Confession of Faith in 1967.

Despite his mother and his doctor’s warning about over-exertion, Allis lived until 1973, dying on January 12. A festschrift was published in his honor, entitled The Law and the Prophets. He did not live to see the finished product, but was able to see an early draft. He is buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery with Ruth, who died in 1978.