John A. Mackay (May 17, 1889 – June 9, 1983) was a Presbyterian theologian, missionary, and educator. He was a strong advocate of the Ecumenical Movement and World Christianity.
Early life and education
John A. Mackay was born on May 17, 1889, in Inverness, Scotland, the eldest of five children. The family attended the Free Presbyterian Church, a very small denomination. At the age of 14 at a communion service at Rogart, Scotland, Mackay had a profound religious experience that influenced the remainder of his life.
As a youth he attended the Inverness Royal Academy, where he was a good student, winning several academic prizes upon graduation in 1907. Mackay then studied philosophy and logic at the University of Aberdeen, leaving for a time to pursue theological studies for the Free Presbyterian Church ministry. He returned to Aberdeen to complete his honors degree which he received in 1913. That same year Mackay crossed the Atlantic and enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary. When he was graduated in 1915, he won a fellowship in didactic and polemic theology, which he used toward studies in Spanish culture at Madrid, Spain, to prepare for missionary work in Latin America.
Mission Field
In 1916 Mackay and Jane Logan Wells, who had been recently married, sailed to Peru where they founded a school, Colegio Anglo Peruano, in Lima, Peru, under the auspices of the Free Church of Scotland. The school was a center for progressive ideas during a period when social and educational reforms were sweeping through Latin America. Haya de la Torre, a political leader in Latin America, taught at the school. The mission also started a mission station at Cajamarca in the northern Peru.
From his position as school master, Mackay entered intellectual circles and became a member of a literary group that included Victor Andres Belaunde, Professor of Philosophy at San Marcos University. Francisco Garcia Calderon Rey and his brother, Ventura, were the group's European correspondents. Five members were corresponding members of the Spanish Academy. In 1925 Mackay was appointed to the Chair of Modern Philosophy at San Marcos and also accepted the chair in Metaphysics.
In 1926 the Colegio was sufficiently rooted to survive without his leadership. Mackay joined the Y.M.C.A. as an evangelist and religious teacher moving his family to Montevideo, Uruguay, where the Y.M.C.A. operated a leadership institute. During the next seven and one-half years, he traveled widely through Chile, Brazil, and Argentina as an evangelistic speaker. He attended the Jerusalem Conference of 1928 and traveled extensively in Europe during his furlough in 1930. From April to July 1930 Mackay and his family lived in Bonn, Germany where he attended the lectures of Karl Barth and began a friendship with him. Under the auspices of the Y.M.C.A. Mackay made many significant addresses in Mexico during the revolutionary period of religious persecution, including an address to over 2,000 men and women in the largest theatre in the town of Chihuahua. Over the years he was invited to speak at 35 Latin American universities.
North American educator
In 1936, Mackay reluctantly left the foreign mission field to become the third president of Princeton Theological Seminary which had recently been weakened by the secession of several professors, including his own former teacher, J. Gresham Machen. For the next 24 years as both president and professor of ecumenics, Mackay worked on many fronts to revive the institution's health, inspiring it to evangelical dynamism and leaving it on a sound footing, with expanded faculty, student body, and campus plant. In 1944, Mackay founded the journal Theology Today to provide insights "into the life of man in the light of God". The editorial board included Robert Elliott Speer, Richard Niebuhr, and J. Harvey Cotton. By 1952 Theology Today was the most widely distributed religious quarterly in the world. After retirement from the seminary, he served from 1961 to 1964 as adjunct professor of Hispanic thought at American University, Washington, D.C.