Editorial
Serving the Children of Light
A Deeper Subtitle
On the seventh of June, 2020, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former papal nuncio to the United States, now in virtual exile because of his opposition to the liberalizing program of Pope Francis and his allies, published a letter to President Trump—an analysis of current events, particularly of the politics of the Covid-19 virus and the riots fomented by anarchists in the name of racial justice. In this letter the archbishop spoke in terms of the struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness. The week before, in our own corner of the world, I had been asked by my Touchstone colleagues to formulate a brief description of the journal's character—something like "mere Christianity" or "ecumenical orthodoxy," but unburdened by the need to explain these involved terms.
It occurred to me that, in his letter to the President, the archbishop pointed toward the words for which I had been casting about in those of the Lord himself. In the Parable of the Unjust Steward found in Luke 16, Jesus commends the thieving manager for his practical grasp of how the real world operates, while pointing out the comparative unsophistication of believers, for, the Lord says, "the children of this world are, in accordance with their type, wiser than the children of light." Once again, as he does in many places, he divides the human race in two, with God's judgment on their essential beings, without reference to the signs upon which we, who see only outward appearances, must rely to make what seem unavoidable classifications. Anyone who knows the facts of the case can see that the steward of Luke 16 is a liar and a thief, but we would not know with certainty that he was primordially a child of darkness unless the Righteous Judge had told us he was.
Against this sort, Jesus places the "children of light"—people who are his redeemed, whatever we may be able to see of their sins and errors, including their religious ones. Later on, the New Testament's Great Convert,
St. Paul, shows himself to be, as best we can make out, a child of darkness: murderous ethics following upon fanatical certainty that the followers of Jesus were corrupters of true religion, manifest in persecuting the Messiah through attacks on his people, but who in the eternal moment of meeting the Lord was manifest in his deepest self as something radically different, as the evil self wilted and blew away in the light of his Maker.
A Deeper Intuition
Behind the appearances we have identified as mere Christianity or ecumenical orthodoxy—because these terms were at hand and it is hard to do better with our limitations—lies the intuition of something deeper and more difficult but less descriptively burdened, of something God knows perfectly and we can only guess at, which is the existence in the vision of God of children of light and children of darkness as he knows them, none of whom may be finally, but only preliminarily, identified by external appearances. Relying on these external identifications is one of our greatest temptations, to which I believe the Lord referred in his warning not to "judge" others. He is not adjuring us to cast reason adrift, or to fail to give proper place to intelligent observation, but rather not to attempt ourselves something that he only can do with regard to the identification of the saved or the lost, whose true selves only God knows.
Thus perhaps a simpler subtitle for this journal may be proposed, and while, perhaps, not appropriate for the masthead, it may be the best statement available for what we are trying to do: Serving the Children of Light, and in that context, Against the Darkness. These most general of rubrics should be immediately understood by the people we are interested in interesting. This is because we believe, and have always believed, that the boundaries of our service are not described absolutely by the divisions in which believers are found.
The Catholics among us, for example, believe there is reason behind the conciliar judgment that there are Protestants who may be "honored with the name of Christian." The Protestants among us believe the same of the Catholics and are happy to recognize many as true brothers in the Lord, while the Orthodox profess that, while knowing where the Church is, they cannot say where it isn't. The rather apophatic constitution of the fellowship is based upon observation legitimized by the intuition of something not yet realized in the world, but sustained by faith in the hope that it reflects an eschatological reality and pleases the Lord.
Accordingly, when we go searching for the wisdom of God, the whole world is our field, for he works in every place, and we perceive that "God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him" (that is, is a child of light)—an almost intolerably broad attitude for an orthodox-minded Jew or Christian.
But we note that when Peter, having been enlightened on the point by the Lord himself, made this pronouncement, he thereupon presented the Roman sergeant-major Cornelius with the equally intolerable narrowness of the Gospel of Christ, declaring him to be the only way to God and the deepest desire of his hungry and believing heart, of whom we unreservedly confess with the same apostle, "There is no salvation in any other: for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved." Those who find salvation must find Christ—and although we cannot yet know their stories, we know they will do it, every last one of them, for the Lord knows his sheep, they hear his voice, and not one of them shall be taken out of his hand.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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