| O. T. Allis | |
| Birth Date: | 9 September 1880[1] |
| Birth Place: | Wallingford, Pennsylvania |
| Death Date: | [2] |
| Occupation: | Professor, writer |
| Education: | University of Pennsylvania Princeton Theological Seminary University of Berlin |
Oswald Thompson Allis (September 9, 1880 – January 12, 1973) was an American Presbyterian theologian and Bible scholar.
He was born in 1880 and studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton Theological Seminary. He received a master's degree from Princeton University and a doctorate from the University of Berlin. Later, Allis received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Hampden Sydney College in 1927.
Allis taught in the Department of Semitic Philology at Princeton Theological Seminary (1910–1929). In 1929, Allis, J. Gresham Machen, Robert Dick Wilson and others founded Westminster Theological Seminary. Allis was independently wealthy and it was his property in Philadelphia which initially served as the home of the new seminary. He taught at Westminster for six years, and resigned in 1935 to devote himself to writing and study. Two of his more notable works are Prophecy and the Church (1945) and God Spake by Moses (1951). Allis was a conservative Christian theologian who believed in Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch as well as single authorship of the book of Isaiah. He served as editor of the Princeton Theological Review from 1918 to 1929. In 1946 he lectured at Columbia Theological Seminary.[3]
Allis also condemned dispensationalism as a modern error in his journal article, 'Modern Dispensationalism and the Doctrine of the Unity of Scripture,' published in the Evangelical Quarterly (1936): "[i]f Higher Criticism is the error of the Bible-disbeliever, “Dispensationalism “, as it is called, is the error of many a Bible-believer."
A festschrift in his honor was published in 1974 under the title The Law and the Prophets. Contributors included Cornelius Van Til, John Murray, R. Laird Harris, Walter Kaiser, Allan Harman, John Whitcomb, Meredith Kline and E. J. Young.