March 2016 Ordained Servant

From the Editor. The robust doctrine of the magisterial Reformer John Calvin, adoption, was largely eclipsed due to the conflation of adoption with the doctrine of justification, according to David Garner. Thanks to the Puritans it was recovered and embodied under its own rubric in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms. Garner’s article, “Beloved Sons in Whom He is Well-Pleased,” reminds us of the pastoral and homiletical importance of this oft-forgotten blessing. He also offers a useful selected reading list.

In this season of intense discussion of politics and culture, two important books are reviewed by Darryl Hart and Douglas Felch. Hart’s review article, “Some Pluralisms Are More Inclusive than Others,” explores issues about the cultural shift from the fifties to the present raised in George Marsden’s latest book, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief. Felch reviews Mark Larson’s Abraham Kuyper, Conservatism, and Church and State, in which Larson compares American conservatism with Kuyper’s political thought, both in many ways similar to Edmund Burke’s political principles.

John Muether reviews Naomi Schaefer Riley’s Got Religion? How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back. As with many books of this kind, as Muether observes, its strength of analysis is not matched by its poverty of solution.

Finally, don’t miss the gorgeous George Herbert poem, “A True Hymn.”

Blessings in the Lamb,
Gregory Edward Reynolds

Ordained Servant exists to help encourage, inform, and equip church officers for faithful, effective, and God-glorifying ministry in the visible church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Its primary audience is ministers, elders, and deacons of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, as well as interested officers from other Presbyterian and Reformed churches. Through high-quality editorials, articles, and book reviews we endeavor to stimulate clear thinking and the consistent practice of historic, confessional Presbyterianism.