Harold Ockenga

Harold John Ockenga ( born June 6, 1905 in Chicago, † 8 February 1985 ) was an American evangelical minister and co-founder of Fuller Theological Seminary.

Life

Ockenga grew up in a world characterized by Methodism family in Chicago. His studies at Taylor University he graduated in 1927 successfully. Then he went to the seminary at Princeton Theological Seminary, but broke his education there to go to the Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where in 1931 he graduated. After that, he was the pastor of two Presbyterian churches in Pittsburgh, where he continued his studies alongside their employment at the University of Pittsburgh, and finally in 1939 to the Ph.D. received his doctorate. Ockenga went to Boston then on to work at the Park Street Congregational Church as a pastor. Through a radio program he founded, and his publications Ockenga gained national notoriety.

(Founded his hand as a counter-organization to the liberal National Council of Churches ) In the establishment of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE ), a response to the creation of Carl McIntires fundamentalist American Council of Christian Churches embossed, he was instrumental. From 1942 to 1944 he was the first president of the NAE, whose aim was to promote evangelism, to overcome divisions within the evangelical movement, and to engage in social and cultural matters.

He was one of the leaders of the realignment of U.S. evangelicalism after the Second World War, the one designated in accordance with an environment of Ockenga term as Neo - Evangelicals. To this group of U.S. Christian leaders belonged alongside Carl Henry, Harold Lindsell, Wilbur Smith and Edward John Carnell also known by the Christian radio broadcasts Charles E. Fuller. Fuller was the namesake of the eponymous Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. Ockenga belonged in 1947 to its founders and was both 1947-1954 and 1960-1963, its President, but remained during his tenures always in Boston resident. In 1956 he was involved in the founding of Christianity Today, and then led around 25 years to preside over the Board of Directors of the evangelical magazine.

1969 Ockenga moved from the community work of Park Street Church back into retirement, but assumed the presidency of Gordon College and Divinity School. The merger of Gordon Conwell Seminary and School of Theology Gordon - Conwell the Theological Seminary, whose president he then remained until 1979 finally emerged in the following years.