The Confessional Presbyterian

The 2008 issue of The Confessional Presbyterian is at the printer and Lord willing, should be ready to mail to subscribers in early December. The following is the opening editorial.

The space required to detail the wonderful and varied contents of this the fourth and largest installment yet of The Confessional Presbyterian journal, has not left much room for editorial comment! We commend all of it, and particularly note with thanks permission to reprint Guy Richard’s Samuel Rutherford’s Supralapsarianism Revealed, which appeared some years ago in the Scottish Journal of Theology, and note as well that the T. & J. Swords series in Antiquary, is concluded in this issue. Unhappily, the John Brown of Wamphray on Psalmody must wait to complete in a future volume under a new translator; meantime, Dr. Richard was also most kind in providing an extract from Samuel Rutherford’s Examen Arminianismi on the subject of the civil magistrate as an In Translatiōne entry for this issue. Dr. Frank J. Smith’s work reviewing material on Reformed worship will continue as the Lord wills in the Reviews section, where he has covered a number of works this year. Speaking of which, amongst the several fine reviews we single out and commend the important research and argumentation in Matthew Winzer’s somewhat lengthy critic of Nick Needham’s work on the Westminster Assembly and Psalmody (253–266). It is true the position of exclusive psalmody is a minority view in the Reformed churches today, and perhaps this question about what the assembly meant is simply an arcane matter to many. Be that as it may, we believe Mr. Winzer rather soundly shows that Mr. Needham missed the mark in his analysis of what the Westminster divines meant by “singing of psalms.” And finally, in closing, the editor hopes to continue the critical text work on the Larger Catechism in subsequent issues (D.V.); space and time did not afford covering a set of questions for this volume of The Confessional Presbyterian. ■