November 2018 Ordained Servant

From the Editor. Although I’ve thought and written in past years about the importance of leisure I found myself renewed in my thinking and practice by Leland Ryken’s superb article “Leisure as a Christian Calling.” He lays out a convincing case for thinking of leisure as a calling rather than an optional activity. In our frenetic and distracted culture important aspects of our redeemed humanity are undernourished by our neglect of leisure. Ryken provides a stimulating correction to an important failure in our cultural moment.

In my review article “Are You Woke?” I summarize and review an important new book, Alan Noble’s Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age. Noble’s penetrating analysis and detailed prescription for change offers a thoughtful perspective on the challenges of witnessing the gospel in the modern world, especially analyzing the uniqueness of the electronic environment in cultivating an almost impenetrable buffer against the truth of the gospel. I say almost impenetrable because Noble believes that returning to several central Christian traditions will be used by God to penetrate the buffered souls of moderns. While perhaps underestimating that problem’s presence throughout all of fallen history, Noble, like Francis Schaeffer, takes note of various ways in which modern culture channels those old human tendencies.

Ryan McGraw reviews another book in an important new series published by Reformation Heritage Books: The Westminster Studies Project: Studies on the Westminster Assembly. Whitney G. Gamble’s Christ and the Law: Antinomianism at the Westminster Assembly is a detailed study of how the Westminster Divines handled the antinomianism of their day. It is a highly relevant topic in every age.

Another book in an important new series reviewed by Ryan McGraw: New Studies in Dogmatics. Michael Allen’s Sanctification is a work of systematic theology that lays a fine foundation for the actual practice of holiness by the believer.

Finally, Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband” reminds us that those Puritans were not prudes. Their marital love was passionate and romantic in the best tradition of the Song of Solomon, as Leland Ryken reminded us in his book Worldly Saints.[1] After all, our marriages are meant to be imperfect but real pictures of the relationship between Christ and his bride, the church.

Blessings in the Lamb,
Gregory Edward Reynolds

[1] Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986).

FROM THE ARCHIVES “LEISURE, REST, SABBATH”

Subject Index

• “Changing Pace: The Need for Rest in a Frenetic World.” (Gregory Edward Reynolds) 18 (2009): 14–17.
• “The Value of Daydreaming” (Gregory Edward Reynolds) 21 (2012):18–20.
• “Whither the Sabbath?” (Terry Johnson) 8:3 (Jul. 1999): 69–70.

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.