A. J. Gordon was born on his day (April 19) in 1836. His father was a deacon in the Baptist church in New Hampton, New Hampshire. Dad was named after the nineteenth century reformer John Calvin, but the son was given a name honoring the Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson.
A.J. Gordon was born again when he was fifteen-years-of-age. He attended Brown University, a school for which he eventually became a trustee. He completed his education at Newton Theological Institute. For more than a quarter century he was one of the leading Baptist pastors in the country. Heretics and cultists feared his tongue and pen. Not only did he pastor one of the foremost churches in New England, the Clarendon Street Baptist Church, Boston, but he edited an influential weekly paper and published book after book, many of which are still widely read today. He attacked agnosticism, Unitarianism, evolution, baptismal regeneration, Arminianism; Hyper-calvinism; post-millennialism and post-tribulationalism, Christian Science, transcendentalism and the growing attacks upon God’s Word by the higher critics and mis-translators of his day. Gordon was a fundamentalist before the rise of fundamentalism. He once wrote, “The world’s motto is, ‘In union there is strength,’ the church’s motto is, ‘in separation there is strength.’”
A.J. Gordon died in 1895.