Conference Talk
On Mrs. Jongke's Porch
The Basis of the Fellowship in Real Time by S. M. Hutchens
I am pleased to return after many years to Trinity, from which I took degrees in the early eighties, and served as Harold O. J. Brown's assistant. Assisting Dr. Brown meant doing things like fetching his lecture notes from a dusty pile on his office floor while he waited for them in front of a class. He had assured me they were right on top of his desk. When I finally found them and carried them in to him, he could not believe that this otherwise upright young man would deliberately lie about their whereabouts, since they were, in point of fact, in clear sight right on top of his desk. Well, no part of the teetering piles balanced up there was in clear sight either. I think he must have been teaching me humility, for he did not allow me any measure of triumph in the accomplishment of finding those notes.
The truth of this story is readily believed by anyone who knew Joe, this humble, lovable, absent-minded genius that I had come to Trinity to study with. I was never called upon to put out any of the fires he started in his office with that dangerous German coffee pot of his, but Trinity survived them—unquestionably, in the providence of God, so that it could host this conference.
On the Same Road but Differently Shod
Called upon numerous times to explain the basis of the Fellowship of St. James and its principal journal, I have most often found myself attempting to describe what might be called its dogmatic constitution—to give a rational, descriptive apology for what we are and are about. Such things have their place, but they never fit with entire satisfaction—indeed, they must be made to fit, for even agreement on the Creed, while standing truly for the fides quem of Christianity, has limited durability as a binding force among those who believe and confess it.
When Luther described the Church as a Haufen, a "heap" that gathered wherever the gospel was preached, he was attempting to bypass the technical, dogmatic, confessional approach in the service of accuracy, of a better fit, by use of more phenomenological than theological language. Others, like John Bunyan and C. S. Lewis, described Christian fellowship in terms of pilgrims falling in with each other on a road, so that their being-with each other may be thought of as the providential sum of an infinite complex of directed experience from a God who does all for each,and as a finding of the self in the faces of other selves, a definition of fellowship with strong mystical and Trinitarian overtones.
Indeed, if you were to ask me how I recognize the members of this fellowship, and gave me a little time, I would not cite you the description I wrote for the journal's masthead many years ago, but refer to our falling in with each other in terms of the recognition that we have been in the same school and studying under the same Teacher. I might tell you of misinterpreting Tony Esolen's smile when he first met us as one of detached amusement instead of, as he corrected me, happy relief at finding a group of men with whom he was fully at home.
One recognizes a mind formed in the same press, with the same concerns and disciplines—and most especially with the same loves. We are not so fortunate as to have our Eagle and Child, but we have Touchstone. It is the kind of friendship in which the central love and its flashes of recognition are so strong that differences can be moved to the margins, not as insignificant, but for later resolution. Often the accent we hear is foreign and the vocabularies are different (vocabularies we work on learning), but the same Lord is manifest in and magnified by these differences—and it is quite clear that we are trying to get to the same place by the same road, although, let us say, differently shod. And I will add that while Touchstone is and will remain a Christian project, we have seen non-Christians on this road as well, heading in same direction, toward the same Light, the Light that "lighteth every man coming into the world."
Another Necessity
It is not just this recognition of having the same Teacher that has been necessary for the formation of such a fellowship, but also the more detailed perception necessary for journalistic collaboration, perception of a similar level of aptitude, accomplishment, and yes, opinion, in the school, and it is this analogy by which I will explain what is to a good number of people the least explicable and least satisfactory thing about the association. We have even been accused of hypocrisy when we do not offer a place beside us to those who are perhaps of the same school, but whom we perceive as poor students, or who remain in the earlier forms (and are thus not very conversable) either because they lack understanding or have been hoodwinked, temporarily one trusts, by the Spirit of the Age. Because the spiritual hemorrhaging we must deal with is caused by this particular spirit, which is peculiarly that of our age, it is most acute, and in our triage operations here the wounds this spirit causes have first priority, while the treatment of other, older wounds are put off—we can only do what we can do, nor do we feel obliged to operate on every front.
This concentration and exclusivism is not popular in times when everyone's ideas are to be considered and affirmed and everybody gets prizes. I think all of us feel weighted in our work with the intuition that we are standing in what may turn out to be a historically important place. Nor can we escape the rather fearful perception that we are operating here as teachers, more responsible for guarding doctrine than for "dialoging" or valuing opinions because they are sincere, much less contemporary. What drew us together in the first place limits and controls our opera ad extra—our publications and conferences. Surely we are no more, but also no less, than a temporary conjunction meant to give place to other and greater works of God. The useful life of the fellowship may be expected in course to end, like that of the Ring.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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more on 2016 Conference from the online archives
more from the online archives
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