W. Robert Godfrey has served the confessional Reformed and Presbyterian churches and the broader evangelical community as a leader, teacher, and scholar for more than 35 years. Old Life’s own Darryl G. Hart and John Muether have contributed to Always Reformed, a festschrift in honor of Dr. Godfrey.
Old Life 
I received a copy of “Always Reformed” as a Christmas gift this year. Last night I read the essay by Darryl Hart entitled, “Make War No More? The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of J. Gresham Machen’s Warrior Children.”
I’m a relative newcomer to Reformed theology, having been raised Lutheran (LCMS) and am slowly in the process of “second-guessing” much of what has been taken for granted (or simply unknown) by many Lutheran laymen…and probably clergy, alike.* However, I much of what I’ve read about struggles within Presbyterian/Reformed communions in on-line blogs became instantly clear in Hart’s essay. What seemed like many pieces of a vast puzzle for me concerning issues such as the Fundamentalist controversy, the OPC’s origin, the Westminster seminaries and their establishment, and current-day issues such as FV, NPP, etc., now all fit nicely together. This is an excellent work and I look forward to reading through the rest of the book.
It is also worth noting that the OPC (as well as other sideline Reformed communions) have not been alone in their struggle against modernism and liberalism. Confessional Lutherans, too, have had their internal struggles through most of the twentieth century (especially the latter half), the result being the LCMS (which is now clearly divided evenly between confessional and liberal congregations) along with a few smaller synods (WELS, ELS, etc.) versus the infamous among mainline Lutherans, the ELCA.
*A summary of divisive issues between Lutheran and Reformed camps may be found in the Saxon Visitation Articles of 1592. Clearly, the effort here was to set up as many boundaries against the “crypto-Calvinists” as possible and it’s highly like that not even Luther would have agreed with some of these statements concerning Baptism, especially.
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George, for what it’s worth, I’ve learned much from Lutheran church history in the U.S. I reveal part of my debt in The Lost Soul of American Protestantism.
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