William Henry Griffith Thomas
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William Henry Griffith Thomas (1861-1924) was an Anglican clergyman and scholar from Owestry, Shropshire, England. In addition to several pastorates, Griffith Thomas taught for several years at Wycliff College in Toronto. He was a co-founder with Lewis Sperry Chafer of Dallas Theological Seminary. He authored several books including a systematic theology text based on the 39 Articles of the Anglican Communion. Theologically conservative, Griffith Thomas was both a Calvinist and a proponent of the Pre-Tribulation Rapture system of eschatology.
William Henry Griffith Thomas (1861-1924) was an Anglican seminary professor and taught in England and Canada from 1905 to 1919. Gaining the reputation of a popular author and speaker in dispensationalism and victorious Christian life, he spent the last five years of his life writing and speaking at conservative gathering. Partially funded by the Milton Stewart Evangelistic Fund, Thomas and Charles G. Trumbull -- the famous editor of "The Sunday School Times"" traveled to Japan and China in the summer of 1920. In 1920 after returning to United States from China, he made a sweeping accusation of the modernist tendency among China missionaries in the famous speech "Modernism in China" to the Presbyterian Social Union in Philadelphia in January 1921 and caused a great deal of debate among the churches and mission boards in North America. Thomas was accused of being directly responsible for the founding of the Bible Union of China. His reply was that "I had nothing to do with the formation of the Bible Union, except in so far as my address seem to have been the immediate occasion for it." There is certainly no evidence that Thomas personally initiated the Bible Union in China, but his speeches in China during summer missionaries retreat, had the effect of significantly intensifying the conservatives negative sentiment toward modernism in the field and prompting them to take public action.
