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Fighting the Good Fight: A Brief History of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. By D. G. HART and JOHN MUETHER. Philadelphia, Pa.: Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1995.217 pp. $11.95.
The Presbyterian Conflict. By EDWIN H. RIAN. Philadelphia, Pa.: Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1992 [1940]. v + 242 pp. $11.95.
Whatever happened to the Old School Presbyterians? Some of their heirs are alive and well in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), a denomination of some twenty thousand members. What the OPC lacks in popular appeal it makes up for in tradition. Headquartered, as the Old School always was, in the vicinity of Philadelphia, it is proud of its history and unusually articulate in recounting it.
These two volumes represent the earliest and the latest of major efforts to recount what defines the denomination historically. The Presbyterian Conflict is a reissue of Edwin Rian's 1940 account of the denomination's origins. The central figure is J. Gresham Machen, who led the struggle against tolerance of theological liberalism in the Presbyterian Church in the...