Some thirty college and university libraries now make CHRISTIANITY TODAY available on microfilm (a service provided by University Microfilms Inc., 313 N. First Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48107). Across the years this magazine has won its way as a thought journal; our readers are interested, not merely in entertainment or polemic, but in a vindication of the truth.
Some people live their whole lives just around the corner from the world of truth. Yet active engagement in the realm of ideas is one of man’s unique privileges.
The other night I was thumbing through the Great Books Syntopicon, that eight-year achievement by 100 scholars at the cost of $1,000,000. (When first projected, its cost was estimated at $60,000; someone apparently had a wrong idea about the price of publishing.) What a good dictionary is to the world of words, the Syntopicon is to the world of important ideas. From this idea-index to the “great books,” any student can discover whose ideas he has been using and—if he reads long enough—what ideas he ought not to be caught with.
Although the Bible is not included in the set of “great books” (literate readers were presumed to own a version of their preference), the Great Book is nonetheless “idea-indexed” (along with the Apocrypha). The Bible has its say, in fact, on virtually all the Syntopicon’s 102 “great ideas.” Anyone who thinks revealed religion requires a “ghetto”-epistemology should ponder this challenge to get into the “great conversation” of our times.
