Wilbur M. Smith 1894 - 1976 . "Athens knew about everything that was knowable, except the most important things: she did not know God, she did not know what to do with her sins, she did not know where to find a life of peace and joy and victory, she had no hope, and she knew nothing of a life to come. That is exactly where men are today who have excluded God from their thinking, who deny the Bible to be a divine revelation, and who are stumbling and groping about in the twilight, or even deeper darkness, of the mind of fallen nature.” Wilbur Moorehead Smith was born in Chicago in 1894. His father was a prosperous fruit dealer with several orchards and farms, on which Wilbur sometimes worked while growing up. His mother was a great reader with a sizable library, and she taught her son to read at age five. This love for books would characterize his life, as he built a personal library of over 25,000 volumes. A high school botany teacher impressed Smith so much that he thought to make botany his life’s work. However, the Lord had other plans for his brilliant mind. After high school, he briefly attended Moody Bible Institute, where he became acquainted with such preachers as Torrey, Sunday, Ironside, Trotter, Gipsy Smith and others. He then attended the College of Wooster, but the future professor neither attended seminary nor received a theological degree. He held four pastorates over a twenty-year period before becoming a teacher at Moody Bible Institute for a decade. He was then one of four fundamentalist scholars recruited by Charles Fuller to be the founding faculty for Fuller Theological Seminary. He taught there from 1947 until 1963. During his first pastorate, he had become friends with Dr. J. Gresham Machen, the conservative theologian at Princeton who resigned in protest in 1929 as the seminary became increasingly liberal. Now, in 1963, Smith faced a similar situation at Fuller. Because the seminary would not stand for biblical inerrancy, he resigned and taught at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School until retirement in 1971. He wrote more than two dozen books, perhaps the best known of which is Therefore Stand, in which he called upon the church to vigorously combat the modernism that was becoming so rampant in institutions of Christian education and training. He was called to Glory in 1976.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:51:19 +0000
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