Abstract
This article seeks to analyze Melvin Grove Kyle and the growth of the League of Evangelical Students (LES) founded by J. Gresham Machen and Princeton Seminary students in 1925. Both Kyle and Machen were scholarly leaders in the LES and served on the organization’s board together. This paper will establish the importance of Melvin Grove Kyle as a leading evangelical scholar and biblical archaeologist. It will also explain the origins and growth of the LES and how various Presbyterians influenced the organization and sought to advance a broader evangelical Protestant intellectual life in the difficult period of the 1920s and 1930s. Machen’s role will be highlighted, and the thinking of various evangelical scholars associated with the LES will be analyzed. This study is important because it helps us grasp how evangelical Protestantism rehabilitated and advanced itself intellectually in a period when the movement faced educational marginalization in the wider culture.
Highlights
IntroductionKyle wrote several books, edited a leading Christian academic journal, participated in many excavations, taught and lectured on biblical archaeology widely, established a Bible lands museum that still exists today, and belonged to various academic societies
On 21 October 1924, a meeting was held in Miller Chapel at Princeton Seminary to debate the founding of a new organization known as the League of Evangelical Students
The saga of the League of Evangelical Students (LES) reveals that secularization and liberal theology were not the only story
Summary
Kyle wrote several books, edited a leading Christian academic journal, participated in many excavations, taught and lectured on biblical archaeology widely, established a Bible lands museum that still exists today, and belonged to various academic societies. He was learned and diplomatic, but unwavering in his theological stance and his commitment to evangelical Presbyterian scholarship. The UP tradition, as exemplified by Kyle, combined with the efforts of Machen and the professors of Old Princeton in the LES reveal an important way evangelical scholarship organized itself and moved forward in the critical period of the 1920s and 1930s. Their work laid the foundation for a resurgent evangelicalism that was increasingly intellectually engaged
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