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"Fighting the Good Fight: A Brief History of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church," by D. G. Hart and John Muether (Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 217 pp.; $11.95, paper); "For the Union of Evangelical Christendom: The Irony of the Reformed Episcopalians," by Allen C. Guelzo (Pennsylvania State University Press, 404 pp.; $14.95, paper). Reviewed by Robert W. Patterson, a minister of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and writer in Cincinnati.

In the late 1980s, just when the last conservative evangelical in town had heeded Richard Niebuhr's call for Christians to suppress denominational peculiarities in order to participate responsibly in the transformation of culture, two United Methodist gadflies, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, had the nerve to publish Resident Aliens, a critique of the Constantinian assumptions of Niebuhr's 1951 classic, "Christ and Culture." Rather than encouraging believers to be good corporate citizens, the Duke University professors argued that Christians are called to be radically "sectarian," to think less in terms of a public church burdened with a sense of responsibility for America and more in terms of a tribal community of aliens responsible only to its King.

While the two Methodists failed to cite a concrete example of just what an island colony of Christians in a sea of unbelief might look like, they could have chosen two "sectarian" denominations par excellence, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) and the Reformed Episcopal Church.

By almost any standard, these churches are everything that sophisticated evangelicals bent on redeeming the culture for Christ would consider tacky: tiny, peculiar, marginal, schismatic, doctrinally or liturgically exclusive, socially awkward, and outright clannish. In addition, these two "storefront" denominations--whose sum total of 263 congregations in the United States claim not even 20,000 confirmed members--have observed more than participated in or benefited from the evangelical resurgence since World War II; not until this decade did the Reformed Episcopalians show good manners by joining the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), a relationship the OPC has continued to reject.

Even though these denominations are no more than a ripple on the evangelical Richter Scale, two recent books show that their history is far more significant than their limited numbers and lack of influence would suggest. D. G. Hart and John Muether, librarians at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia and Reformed Seminary in Orlando, respectively, have teamed up in "Fighting the Good Figh"t to stake the identity of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church as differentiated not only from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), from which she seceded, but equally from fundamentalism and modern evangelicalism, with which she is frequently confused.

Allen Guelzo, a historian at Eastern College outside Philadelphia, reveals in his award-winning "For the Union of Evangelical Christendom" not the identity, but the identity crisis of the Reformed Episcopal Church as a microcosm of the suppressed anxieties the entire Anglican Communion in the United States has experienced almost since the Revolution. In scope and purpose, the two books differ substantially, but in negotiating the dangerous intersection of theology, history, and culture, both volumes gather ample evidence that securing the legacy of the English Reformation on this side of the Atlantic has been far more elusive than is generally recognized.

While "Fighting the Good Fight" was written and published by Orthodox Presbyterians for in-house use, evangelicals should find some kinship with Hart and Muether, whose narrative opens with the northern Presbyterian crisis of the 1920s and 1930s, the watershed event in American church history from which the modern evangelical movement sprung. Central to that crisis was J. Gresham Machen, whose impact Hart has considered at book-length in "Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America" (CT, Nov. 14, 1994, p. 98). In a corrective to popular, ecclesiastical, and scholarly prejudice, Hart and Muether portray Machen neither as a fundamentalist nor as an evangelical. He was a traditional, confessional Presbyterian with "Old School" sympathies reflective of the old Princeton Theological Seminary, where he taught for nearly 20 years.

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February 5 1996, Vol. 40, No. 2