September–October 2026 Ordained Servant

From the Editor. Why Tyndale’s New Testament at 500? Normally I have focused on important theologians’ and preachers’ birth or death anniversaries as a reason to write about them. The year 2026 represents a different kind of anniversary—the birth of a book, Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the New Testament from Erasmus’s third edition (1522) of the Koine Greek New Testament to English. It was the first of its kind. In my penultimate publication of Ordained Servant as its editor since October 2005, I want to emphasize the foundations of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. God’s Word consisting of the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments is the source of our secondary standards as well as the faith and life of our church. At the heart of translation is a thorough knowledge of the original languages, which are still required for ordination to the ministerial office in the OPC. It is also significant that the central founder of our church, J. Gresham Machen, was the premier New Testament scholar of his generation. Both Machen and Tyndale in different ways risked their lives for the cause of the gospel. As scholars they gave their life’s work and energy to the New Testament and its centrality to the life and preaching of the church.

Leland Ryken is known as a master English professor and an expert on the history and nature of Bible translation. He has written five books on the subject since 2002 and was literary stylist for the English Standard Version. It is thus fitting that he should write an article on his favorite translator William Tyndale. This article in turn is based on his new book on Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the New Testament, William Tyndale’s New Testament: A Biography of the Book that Changed Our World, which I review in this issue.

Darryl Hart contributes an article, “The Voice Vote That Launched the OPC,” highlighting Machen’s opposition to politicized Christianity. Church authority and power are, as Machen believed, essentially spiritual, scented by the sweet fragrance of the gospel.

Charles Wingard reviews The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams, by Richard Hughes Gibson. This book about a book “tells the story of how three twentieth-century authors—C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Charles Williams—came to write and lecture on Dante’s Divine Comedy.”

Bulut Yasar reviews Biblical Critical Theory by Christopher Watkin. This is a comprehensive coverage of critical theory as it has impacted every discipline in the modern Western academy for decades and is now negatively affecting many institutions in the West.

David Noe reviews Augustine the African by Catherine Conybeare. The nature of Augustine’s North African origin adds a fascinating and important dimension to our understanding of his life and theology. Noe brings his own classical knowledge of Augustine to bear on this excellent new biography.

Since I edit only one more issue of Ordained Servant, I want to take advantage of the space for poetry. Our poems this month include two by John Donne (1572–1631), Holy Sonnet #6, “This Is My Play’s Last Scene,” and Holy Sonnet #10, “Death Be Not Proud.” Inspired by this sonnet, I offer “Death Is but a Comma.” Finally, a favorite sonnet of mine is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29. Why? It is an encouragement to the discouraged. Francis Turner Palgrave in his famous anthology of English poetry The Golden Treasury (1861) alters the Bard’s original by capitalizing “Thee” in line ten. Although it may originally have been meant to refer to Shakespeare’s dear friend, Palgrave took it to refer to our Lord. I agree, no human love could lead me to “sing hymns at heaven’s gate.”

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on Thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

The cover photo is of the woodshed looking east at Camp Shiloh in Jefferson, New Hampshire, where many OPC congregations and organizations hold various events, including the Orthodox Presbyterian Shiloh Institute (OPSI).

Blessings in the Lamb,
Gregory Edward Reynolds

FROM THE ARCHIVES “BIBLE TRANSLATION, MACHEN”
/OS/pdf/Subject_Index.pdf

• “The King James Version in the Church: Past, Present, and Future.” (Leland Ryken) 20 (2011): 41–46.
• “Van Til on the Reorganization of Princeton.” (Cornelius Van Til) 6:4 (Oct. 1997): 75–76.

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.