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It’s Not My Magazine, But

 I think I could be forgiven for thinking that Christianity Today doesn’t have anything to offer me. What is an “evangelical” anyway? Personal conversion could never be dispositive of the description, because Protestants mistakenly believed that Catholicism and Orthodoxy have no such analogue. Granted, we cannot rest chiefly in a feeling, but if I have “inspirations” and “resolutions” as Escriva would call them, and I act on those in accord with the word of God, I do well. I defy anyone to hear Blessed Fulton Sheen and say he was being observant in some sterile way. “The life I live, I live to God” and “The life I live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Galatians 2:20. You could get saved just reading or hearing that.

You can’t say biblical inerrancy and infallibility is exclusively evangelical Protestant, because the Catholic Church taught it first, and still does. You can’t say that an inward testimony by the Holy Spirit belongs to justification for an evangelical Protestant alone, because although such a feeling could be in error, “by their fruits you shall know them” and, “The Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are children of God” and “Wisdom is vindicated by her children.”

But I will tell you what would compromise a longstanding evangelical Protestant magazine: an inability to deal coherently with dogmatic and ethical variance. To then water down faith itself, as well as its content, for an arbitrary “unity.”

I know that the economics of print media are impossible, pretty much. But isn’t this a story of evangelicalism’s “via media” that has no principled basis? What if the interference of senior editors isn’t an example of uniquely personal failures, but the fruit of a center that cannot hold?

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