Loraine Boettner Pretends to Join the OPC…

…or, there’s one set of rules for the elite and another set of rules for us peasants.

Boettner did not hold ministerial credentials in the OPC, as he was never ordained to the gospel ministry.  However, he did join the OPC in 1965, albeit in a highly irregular manner.  As a member of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America [PCUSA], most notably at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, Boettner was alarmed by that chuch’s upcoming adoption of the Confession of 1967.  Consequently, he wrote his Princeton classmate, William Harllee Bordeaux, about being granted absentee membership at Westminster Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Westchester, Illinois.  The session accepted his request and, though he lived in Missouri and never moved to Westchester, he remained on the rolls of Westminster Church until his death.

From: “How Evangelical is Rome?  Van Til, Strimple, and Roman Catholicism” by Danny E. Olinger, in Confident of Better Things: Essays Commemorating Seventy-Five Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, edited by John R. Muether and Danny E. Olinger (Willow Grove: The Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2011), pp. 26-27, n. 5.

Loraine Boettner (1901-1990) was a conservative Reformed lay theologian and prolific author who was well-known and fairly influential during the middle decades of the 20th century.  The cynic in me says that no ordinary, normal, typical member of the OPC could have gotten away with this.

 

The Birth of the “Trinity Hymnal”

…by 1958, the musical contents of the hymnal were set.  The final tally was 728 hymns, complete with a subject index of 626 headings and 2,552 listings among these subjects.  The committee had assigned a Scripture text to each of the hymns.  It included a section of selections from the Psalter for responsive readings, forms for parts of the worship service (from profession of faith to the Lord’s Supper), and the Confession of Faith.  The only work to complete the contents was a list for opening sentences in worship.  As late as 1959, the committee was still uncertain about an apt title for the hymnal.  The one it had used throughout was “The Hymnal of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church” but it had regularly solicited suggestions from the rest of the church.  Only in 1960, on the eve of going to the publisher with final copy, did the committee recommend, with the Assembly’s approval, the name “Trinity Hymnal.”

The only remaining matter was how to pay for it.

From: Between the Times: The Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Transition, 1945-1990 by D. G. Hart (Willow Grove: The Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2011), p. 48.

 

Christ the Example; Believers His Servants

As believers in Christ, we make Him the constant object of our vision.  He is the great servant, and He is our great example.  But He is not only our example.  He is also the power in us to enable us by His Word and Spirit to follow His example and make us servants in His kingdom.

From: “Our Pattern of Servanthood,” by Lawrence Semel, in New Horizons, Volume 29, Number 2 (January, 2008), p. 19.  The Rev. Lawrence Semel is pastor of Reformation Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Morgantown, West Virginia.  New Horizons is the denominational magazine of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC).