August–September 2016 Ordained Servant

From the Editor. As many of you are aware, the Committee on Christian Education sponsored a pre-assembly conference on June 8: “Marriage, Sexuality, and Faithful Witness.” In this issue of Ordained Servant we have published summaries of those addresses. The committee hopes that these addresses and their published form will assist the church in navigating the present challenges in our culture to a biblical view of marriage and sexuality.

Both general and special revelation are clear on the existence of two and only two sexes. However, in its fallen condition humankind have tended to distort the gift of sexuality through a variety of sexual sins. What is unique to the present Western context is the attempt to reinvent the institution of marriage and gender itself.

Rev. Dr. Carl Trueman, professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, looks at the subject of modern sexuality and identity politics in “The Path to—and from—Here: Reflections on Sexual Identity Past and Present.” Elder Randy Beck (PCA), the Justice Thomas O. Marshall chair of constitutional law at the University of Georgia School of Law, looks at the legal history that led to the recent Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage and at related religious liberty issues in “Living under Foreign Law.” Rev. Tim Geiger, president of Harvest USA, a ministry that equips the church to care for those who are struggling with sexual sin, gives practical instruction on how the church can pastorally minister to people who are struggling with same-sex attraction and gender confusion in “Speaking the Truth in Love.”

Pastor Stephen Tracey reviews The Gospel and Sexual Orientation, the 2012 report to the synod of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, and Rosaria Butterfield’s Openness Unhindered in his review article “Sexuality These Days.” Joel Carini reviews Sherif Girgis, What Is Marriage?

On a completely different topic, John Milton’s “On His Blindness” deals with the suffering that began when he became totally blind at age forty-four. This poem was originally titled “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.” The last two decades of life, spent in darkness, however, proved to be well spent, since his greatest poetic production was during that period.

Blessings in the Lamb,
Gregory Edward Reynolds

FROM THE ARCHIVES “APOLOGETICS”

Subject Index

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• “Ministering to Homosexuals in San Francisco.” (Charles A. McIlhenny) 6:1 (Jan.

  1997): 10–12.

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.