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This partly literal, partly metaphorical view of the globe must seem like the old Sherwin-Williams ,paint advertisements, in which everything viscous lipped southward. To bring the fervency of evangelism to evangelicaldom then looks like defiance of the laws of mapmakers' gravity. To bring something of worth from the old evangelical formulas and achievements to the enthusiasts looks like defiance of the laws of personality and taste. But in both cases, the magazine contributed to and chronicled some successes.

Achievements and Failures
Four achievements stand out, the first being so obvious it needs no more than a mention. The editors consistently saw their theological refurbishings of evangelicaldom's heritage to be most urgent. Even if their representations of these were sometimes stodgy and unnecessarily crabby, they did retrieve and restate selective elements of a larger tradition and made them plausible in a time when "modern man" was supposed to have moved beyond them.

Second, they re-presented the piety-and-moralism blend of evangelicaldom's prime. Once again, choices between Vice and Virtue would determine a culture, and Duty would serve as an impetus in personal life. Piety? Much of the magazine's devotionalism has been dull and drab, the kind of "gray print" that the pious expect to find in a religious magazine. It has seldom reached creative heights. Moralism? To its critics the journal's moral outlook often looked bourgeois as much as biblical. The blend? It looked somewhat grim; self-perspective and humor, even in the humor sections, have not been Christianity Today's strong points. "What if..?" But in a time of chaos, many found the magazine's reformulations assuring.

Third, more surprising and refreshing has been the magazine's constant concern for the Christianity-in-culture motif, one that many in the tradition as of 1956 were slighting. Sometimes the editors confused faddish Muggeridgean world weariness—perhaps because it came stated with such elegance-with judgment on culture. But often they were more subtle and more constructive. This world—which God loved so much that he sent his Son to it—does not exhaust God's possibilities, the editors kept saying: this is the world in which he is incarnate, in which the Holy Spirit risks.

Evangelicalism has not been culturally as productive as Catholicism, at least not for centuries since, at its edges, Bach erupted in music, Rembrandt and Durer in art, Bunyan and Milton in literature. A review of the magazine's indexes confirms the impression that its editors and writers would have been lost without their overworked C. S. Lewis wind-up doll. Yet their overall effort has been valuable. The editors have kept suggesting to the "One Way" people the amplitude of that Way in a complex culture, and to the "One Book" people that the Bible gains in the context of the biblia, which also must be known.

Fourth, thanks originally to founding editor Carl Henry's uneasiness about evangelicalism's social conscience, there has been concern about the confrontations of Caesar and Christ, Mammon and Christ, Prometheus and Christ. A model for editors was nineteenth-century English evangelicalism as it took on slavery, inhumanity in prisons, and the plight of industrial workers. Christianity Today moved beyond talk of merely personal Vice and Virtue to societal issues as well. Never quite sure whether to settle for a Christian voice in a pluralist culture or to push for Christian privilege, the editors showed abilities to change and to learn on this ever-troubling front.

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January (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48