Editorial
A Necessary Anniversary
The Contemporary & the Timeless Intersect for 30 Years by James M. Kushiner
Thirty years ago last October, a few hundred copies of a new 12-page newsletter called Touchstone were printed. The name Touchstone was chosen because it pointed to the existence of a timeless standard against which to test the quality of contemporary Christianity.
Touchstone emerged as a natural expression of a local Evangelical Christian fellowship's concern to follow what is called in Jeremiah 6:16 the "ancient path," which promises rest for our souls, the same path that is called "the faith once for all delivered to the saints."
Young and idealistic, we were looking to discover for ourselves the contours of an ancient Christian orthodoxy to which all Christian communities today are heirs. We were dismayed that churches calling themselves Christian were being swept along in the currents of doctrinal deconstruction, sexual revolution, and secularist ideology. Churches did not respond with one voice to the crises. We considered the splintering of the one church in history as a source of the weakness of the Christian witness to the world. We felt handicapped by this history of tragic division, which included the aftermath of the council of Chalcedon in 451, the Great Schism of 1054, and the convulsions of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation nearly 500
years ago.
Thus, we sought to boldly go where many others had already gone before! Looking earnestly for answers to Christian disunity and infidelity, we were undaunted by the persistence of deep disagreements among those who name themselves Christians.
While we knew we could not settle our disagreements, we did hope to discover the highest possible level of common ground in creed and Scripture, and on that basis come together as Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians who believe that the way forward must include fidelity to the ancient apostolic deposit. Our work together in Touchstone on pressing issues of the day from this perspective became an expression of what the late Richard John Neuhaus called "the new
ecumenism."
Anniversary Dates
And so with this issue we celebrate the 30th anniversary of this unique ecumenical journal of mere Christianity. But what does the word anniversary mean in this context? What exactly are we celebrating?
Anniversaries come in several varieties. There is the anniversary of a singular event, such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the armistice ending World War I, or the attack on Pearl Harbor. While each event had ongoing consequences—such as the effect of the Pearl Harbor attack on the families of those who died and on the nation as a whole—we primarily remember the historical details of the event itself, marking them appropriately.
Another kind of anniversary is the institutional anniversary. It is fixed to a specific date, but it is primarily concerned with what came after the event. While details of the wedding day itself may be remembered on a wedding anniversary, the initial event created something new by design: a marriage, a household. When a couple celebrates a 40th wedding anniversary, they are celebrating 40 years of a marriage they purposefully inaugurated. The anniversary of that marriage celebrates the full 40-year story of the husband and wife's life together, through good times and bad. The story and celebration grows with each succeeding anniversary.
The anniversary of Touchstone is not quite like either of these two kinds of anniversaries. No one remembers the details of Touchstone's first appearance (not even the day or the hour!). So we are not really thinking about a particular event. Nor is it like celebrating the anniversary of a wedding. A wedding has a goal: a marriage and, God willing, the begetting of offspring. A new household is born on the wedding day by intention. When Touchstone first appeared, there was no commitment to an ongoing institution.
James M. Kushiner is the Director of Publications for The Fellowship of St. James and the former Executive Editor of Touchstone.
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—Alice von Hildebrand
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