April 2022 Ordained Servant

From the Editor. Sometimes officers must read the works of others who are perhaps outside of the church or whose religious commitment is unknown but who are experts in a particular area of interest to our ministries. Such is Ryan Anderson, author of the controversial book When Harry Became Sally. Anderson’s 2014 doctoral dissertation is titled “Neither Liberal Nor Libertarian: A Natural Law Approach to Social Justice and Economic Rights.” His thoughtful challenge to transgender ideology is a useful and compassionate intervention into an area of ethics that is seeing tragic results in the lives of young people where the givenness of gender and the law of God are ignored. Andy Wilson provides us with a nuanced review article, “Exposing the Fragility of the Transgender Ideology.”

In several installments from the conclusion of Alan Strange’s commentary on the Form of Government, he offers explanation of the chapters on divestiture from office and missions. The resultant volume should be of great help to generations of officers.

I review Jeffrey Bilbro’s Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News in my review article “How the News and the Good News Shape Our Lives.”

Charles Wingard reviews the second volume of a fascinating trilogy about the literary life of C. S. Lewis. The Making of C. S. Lewis: From Atheist to Apologist (1918–1945) covers the heart of Lewis’s life with the dramatic conversion from avowed atheist to defender of the faith. His 1955 autobiographical work Surprised by Joy describes this transition beginning from an earlier time. The recent documentary film, starring Max McLean, The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C. S. Lewis, is well worth seeing. Lewis’s theology was not orthodox at every point; he was a scholar of Medieval literature and a masterful writer of every genre from academic treatises to children’s stories.

Our poem this month is Robert Herrick’s “To Daffodils” in honor of spring—well sort of. Twentieth century poet T. S. Eliot’s famous line “April is the cruelest month” echoes seventeenth centuries lamenting mortality, as many of his poems do, a theme in philosophy and literature known as Memento mori (Latin “remember that you [have to] die”). Eliot wrote this portion of The Wasteland after his recovery from the Spanish Flu pandemic.

The cover picture is the entrance to the extreme ski terrain Vallée Blanche, which descends the Mer de Glace glacier on Mont Blanc above Chamonix, France. One misstep at the beginning of this run leads to almost certain death. I recently took this dramatic picture as a tourist, not a skier, having taken the cable car to the pinnacle Aiguille du Midi. It is an astonishing revelation of God’s glory, and one might think man’s folly, considering the cover picture.

Blessings in the Lamb,
Gregory Edward Reynolds

FROM THE ARCHIVES “SEXUALITY, GENDER”

http://opc.org/OS/pdf/Subject_Index.pdf

• “The ESV and Homosexual Identity” (Andy Wilson) 29 (2020): 25–28.
• “Ministry to Those with Same-Sex Attraction and Gender Confusion” (Timothy J. Geiger) 25 (2016): 43–47.
• “The Path to—and from—Here: Reflections on Sexual Identity Past and Present” (Carl R. Trueman) 25 (2016): 32–38.

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 will endeavor to stimulate clear thinking and the consistent practice of historic, confessional Presbyterianism.