What the Old Testament Means To Us . . .
Restoration Review · 1991-92
(Volumes 33, 34)
PREFACE
With this double volume, which contains all the issues of Restoration Review for 1991 and 1992, I conclude forty years as an editor. That is long enough to test the mettle of any would-be writer. It may call for a degree of arrogance to impose one's thinking upon the public year after year, decade after decade. Or it may be doggedness that does it. Or it may be the papers that fail, not the editors.
I have given some thought as to why so few editors, especially of religious publications, survive beyond a few years. I don't think its intelligence or ability, for many editors who are both very smart and very able are soon gone. I rather think it is the inclination to underestimate the difficulty of the task of surviving as an editor. This may be a clue to success in general: the mentality that underestimates the impossible.
It is almost impossible to keep a religious paper going for long, especially when it is a one-man operation and has no denomination to support it. The few who manage to do it are not brighter or abler or wealthier, but they underestimate the impossibility of their undertaking. They do the impossible by failing to see the impossibility. It may be a questionable virtue.
But there is something else: an editor has to be a believer. He has to have implicit faith in the mission of his paper. Neither a paper nor its editor will survive long if it has only an axe to grind, some "issue" to champion for some sect. But when principles are at stake there is reason not only for survival but for a vigorous presence. He must believe in himself as an authentic voice of those principles.
As I look back over these forty years I ask myself what it is that I have "most surely believed," to use a biblical phrase. I will risk being overly brief as I list some of them.
In saying, first of all, that I believe in God, I mean that I not only believe that God is but that He cares. Even when He may appear absent in a world of trouble and heartache, still He is with us and He cares. This is the great truth upon which all else hangs, God is with us . And, as the Bible puts it, if God is for us who can be against us? I like to think of God as struggling with us in the business of making a world like ours work. He works with us in "doing life," and He needs us in carrying out His purposes. It is a great liberating truth that we are "workers together with God" as 2 Cor. 6:1 puts it.
I not only believe in Jesus as the risen Christ and Savior, but also in the Jesus of history. He was a person like me living in the kind of world I live in, and subject to all its cruelties and outrages. I could believe he lived in history even without the New Testament, for such writers as Josephus and Tacitus refer to him as a historical character. It is the New Testament that tells us the kind of life he lived. That such a one through faith can be not only my Lord but my dearest friend is the most precious of truths. It is a transforming friendship.
While I believe in the Holy Spirit, it is in reference to the person of Christ. Practically speaking, if not theologically, the Holy Spirit and Christ are the same, at least in their ministry to the believer. Or as Paul put it, "Now the Lord is the Spirit" (1 Cor. 3:17), and the Spirit is the Lord. We might think of the Spirit as Christ's alter ego. The Holy Spirit within us, which we receive as a gift when we are baptized, is the spirit of Christ within us. The Spirit's mission is to make us more and more like Christ. To put it another way, Christ is in us, the hope of glory, to make us more and more like himself.
While I am a realist in reference to the fallenness of humankind, I can still say that I believe in the basic goodness of men and women. Like Reinhold Niebuhr, I believe people are a strange mixture of good and evil, and it depends on the education one gets and the choices she makes as to which will dominate. But I believe that we are tilted toward the good, though evil has a drag on us. We obviously cannot make it on our own. Sin does us in, and so God has made the gospel the power to save.
I believe in much more, including the world in all its beauty and all its diversity. I believe in work. When I can no longer work I would want to be taken. I believe in my country, in marriage, in the family, in old-fashioned values, in books, in music. I believe in the church, even when it is far from what it ought to be, which, I suppose, has always been the case.
And I believe in change, though we are all, including the church, reluctant to change. But change is what this volume is about. Change is what this journal has been about all these forty years. — Leroy Garrett, Editor