On Saying Good-Bye

Time is not always a genial host that gently shakes its parting guest by the hand. This is my final Footnotes in CHRISTIANITY TODAY. At the behest of the retiring editor, who wishes to give his successor liberty in soliciting magazine features, I bid this page a prompt farewell.

Since 1969 this evangelical commentary has appeared monthly. From the outset the title reflected frankly that my views were simply my own meanderings and merely marginal to the magazine’s editorial policy. Dispatched from every quarter of the globe, reporting evangelical strengths and weaknesses first hand, the page has reached for objectivity, fidelity, and balance.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY had not a single subscriber, not even an office, when God had led me in 1956 to accept the proffered editorship. On a beautiful California night my wife Helga and I drove, in silence and with clasped hands, to post the acceptance in the last outgoing mail. The magazine’s intended audience was clear. Sample issues went to Protestant clergymen of all affiliations, and then to intellectually alert lay leaders who, by keeping abreast of theological trends, might join in the battle for modern man’s wavering mind.

For the first Eutychus we narrowly missed enlisting C. S. Lewis. The ablest evangelical names on the Continent and in Britain joined prestigious American scholars in theological witness. Three years after our beginnings, a former religion editor of Time magazine acknowledged that to his surprise CHRISTIANITY TODAY attested the existence of an international interdenominational scholarship supportive of rational evangelical theism. Rewarding indeed it was, after hard editorial work, to win a listing of magazine articles in Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.

One of my life’s choice privileges has been face-to-face friendships with a worldwide vanguard of gifted evangelical scholars. Those abroad included Sir Norman Anderson, G. C. Berkouwer. F. F. Bruce, J. D. Douglas, Derek Kidner, Leon Morris, Donald Wiseman, and many others. They supplemented a galaxy of competent American participants spanning the alphabet from Gordon H. Clark to Cornelius Van Til and include former Britons like Geoffrey Bromiley and Philip Hughes. Others have gone ahead to Christ’s more intimate presence, among them Addison Leitch, Wilbur Smith, and Johannes Schneider who fled the Eastern European communists to find refuge in West Berlin. We were a sturdy team, welding evangelical links in a time when liberalism was unraveling and neo-orthodoxy was sounding increasingly discordant notes soon to signal God’s presumed death in neo-Protestant theology.

In American Christianity, An Historical Interpretation With Representative Documents (Scribner’s, 1963), H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher singled out and reprinted much of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S series of essays on “Dare We Renew the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy?” (June 10–July 22, 1957) as best reflecting the evangelical thrust to the post-liberal mind. I have discussed the issues of faith earnestly with nonevangelicals and quasi-evangelicals running the spectrum from Barth and Brightman and Bultmann to many others, the dialogue being sometimes carried on in closeted quarters.

Former staff colleagues dating back to the early era are now scattered far and wide in prestigious posts. Frank E. Gaebelein, among other efforts, carries on a brilliant editorial career as general editor of the twelve-volume international Expositor’s Bible Commentary. Richard Ostling is religion editor for Time magazine, and Russell Chandler a religion editor for the Los Angeles Times. James Boice is the gifted minister of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and radio speaker on The Bible Study Hour. Others have gone to important campus posts, Robert Cleath as professor of communications in California Polytech, James Daane as professor of practical theology at Fuller Seminary, and Frank Farrell to Simpson College after some years as editor of World Vision magazine. One of the ablest copy editors I know, Carol Friedley Griffith, remained with the staff full-time until the magazine’s Carol Stream relocation. Of the early editorial staff only David E. Kucharsky, who came from UPI’s Pittsburgh bureau, now remains. These were persons of dignity, scholarship, evangelical insight, and writing ability, and not easily given to pressure on editorial opinion; it was a privilege to serve with them. John Lawing, now with National Courier, came from Presbyterian Survey to add his artistic gifts and cartoons to these pages. For these individuals the demanding duties at CHRISTIANITY TODAY constituted a calling and ministry that fell notably even upon the secretarial staff then led by Irma Peterson who remained twenty years until retirement.

Nor shall I forget the day when, at Tyndale House, Cambridge, I enlisted that gifted Scot and church historian J. D. Douglas as editor of the British edition of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, which came to an untimely end when American supporters found it not promotionally serviceable.

Two associates from the first were Dr. L. Nelson Bell, executive editor, and J. Marcellus Kik, associate editor, both now deceased. I shall need to leave for another time the recounting of memoirs.

Across the years I have had reason to remember an experience in my pre-Christian teenage days. I once lost a job as a painter’s helper when I tried to straighten a three-story ladder. Perched uneasily aloft, my boss was retouching some windows when the ladder moved disconcertingly to the right. My instinctive effort to rectify the misalignment separated me from my job more quickly than it takes to say good-bye. I had learned that lesson well, I thought: don’t straighten tilting ladders, particularly not if they tilt too far right.

Leave-taking from a familiar setting can spell an indefinable emptiness. But someone has said that “it is never any good dwelling on good-byes.” Jerome Jerome put it even more bluntly: “Leave-takings are but wasted sadness. Let me pass out quietly.” Make the good-bye simple and sober, said Eugene Field: “I’m sure no human heart goes wrong that’s told ‘good-bye—God bless you!’ ”

To the many readers of this page, good-bye and God bless you. I wish CHRISTIANITY TODAY well. I wish Dr. Lindsell happy retirement. I wish his successor a distinguished career as literary spokesman and leader of the evangelical movement in a critical turning-time. Let us lengthen ladders to rest on the invisible Infinite, so that no shaking of other supports can threaten us. Sooner or later we must all reckon with Christ’s own plumbline—nothing more, nothing less.

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