In one sense, the years immediately following the close of World War II were amongst the most harrowing of the century–the Nazi threat was ended, but an open question remained of what new horrors would be visited on the world by the new weapon unveiled by America in the shocking and devastating horrors visited on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945.
What Camus said of the disease ravaged city of Oran at the end of his post-war novel The Plague could be said of the post-war world as well:
None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.
And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linenchests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.
What precisely were the questions threatening that world?
One question, of course, was whether America would use such weapons again.
Another obvious question followed: What would happen when other nations inevitably developed their own versions of the bomb, as the Soviets did only a few short years later thanks to some highly effective espionage work targeting the Manhattan Project?
The final days of World War II showed us not only the depravities that mankind was capable of, but also suggested that our growing technical acumen might make previously unimaginable evils suddenly imminent and plausible. It was a harrowing time.
Discovering the full extent of the Holocaust would permanently change the philosophical trajectory of major thinkers such as Phillipa Foote and Iris Murdoch, for example. And the advent of the bomb would provoke American evangelist Billy Graham to claim in a sermon that our quest to create “frankenstein monsters that will destroy civilization” was simply the latest instance of mankind turning their back on God and pursuing their own wisdom set against that of God.
What is striking, however, is that alongside the deep despair that pervaded the era is a surprising sense of openness as well. One side of cataclysm is the realization that humanity is deeply perverse and possesses a capacity for wickedness that could break any of us were we forced to behold it truly. As Camus said, the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.
The other side, however, is a sense that something horrific has exhausted itself, that there is now little to lose, and so perhaps we need not only fear evils we had not previously thought possible, but we can also dream of futures we had not dared to hope for thus far.
That is the note one detects in the recollection of editor Judith Jones as she recalled her time in post-war Paris for her biographer Sara B. Franklin. For Jones, having grown up in a highly status conscious New York family the escape to Paris felt thrilling. The pressures of upward mobility forced on her by her vain and ambitious parents fell away when she left America. And what did she find in Paris? She found… everything:
These people, Judith saw right away, were different from those she knew back home. Friang, Ceria, and their friends were clear-eyed about the world. Their ideals remained intact, but the war had scrubbed them of any naivete. They were curious. They read. They argued. Their hunger for ideas seemed endless. They seemed so alive. Judith knew she’d been right to come to Paris. “Well,” she told me decades later, “a world opened up!”
To encounter a new idea can sometimes feel like that: a world opens up.
And when you pause to consider what exactly she found in Paris and to recall that she was an aspiring writer and editor, it is not hard to understand the thrill. She is describing a particularly potent and idyllic form of one’s grad school days when the books and arguments and ideas all seem to come non-stop, when conversations are charged and snap with an energy and joy that was likely all the more potent coming as it did in a city only recently freed from the Nazis. It was the intellectual ferment of the place–a new world seemed possible, not because people were naive or utopian or foolish, but because we had passed through a great evil, come out on the far side, and… now what? That would be heady enough, of course, to a young American only recently released from a hyper-status conscious New York household. Now add the appeal and romance of the City of Light on top of all that?
One might say that Jones found herself living in interesting times.
That’s a phrase that has come up more and more lately, of course. For many it is used as a glib joke about how the speaker would rather prefer to go back to the boring times that came before Trump, before Brexit, before COVID, before mobs stormed the nation’s capital, before land wars in eastern Europe broke out anew, before resurgent anti-semitism in the west, and before the massacre of innocents in Gaza and Israel. (We can easily forget, of course, that those times did include rampant abortion in America, rapidly escalating wealth inequality, financial corruption, and no shortage of American misconduct abroad as well as often quite cruel neglect of traumatized veterans at home. Our times now are worse, I think, but we should not cover the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years in a romantic sheen either.)
“Interesting Times,” of course is also the name of the best new podcast to launch in 2025–Ross Douthat’s show for the Times in which he interviews the people whose response to our current moment is not dismay or regret but… excitement. The thinkers Douthat has interviewed include technologists who are unsure if the continued existence of humanity is good, other technologists who have a wonderful plan for your child's genetic code, and a variety of other political activists of all sorts who are not sure if error has any rights and seem to think bringing back the various charnel house horrors of the 20th century, be they from the far right or far left, might actually be a cool idea.
If there is a hopeful word I can speak amidst all of that, it is this: The example of the post-war years is a reminder that we are not the first to live in interesting times. The post-war years saw similar intellectual ferment for similar reasons: new technologies (in this case paperback books) and economic policies (the GI Bill) made books and ideas and the intellectual life far more accessible, which also meant that radical ideas became far more accessible.
And, of course, the powers that be in the post-war world were often ready and willing to promote quite horrific violence to advance their own ends. The evils of the Soviet system are extensive and horrifying, of course, but then it is perhaps worth remembering that the “good” side of the Cold War had only recently incinerated several hundred thousand civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to say nothing of the almost equally murderous (and largely forgotten) fire bombing campaigns that came before the atom bombs. Graham’s anger and rage he expressed in that forgotten San Francisco sermon were not for nothing.
Thus the post-war intellectuals found themselves in their own version of “interesting times.” Eventually it would become clear that the leading philosophers of Europe at that time were generally not any more morally serious than many of our own day’s leaders. The same philosophers Jones encountered so eagerly during her time in Paris would go on to tacitly defend gulags (and later condemn laws against having sex with minors). Indeed, if you are rightly scandalized by the sexual abuses committed by today's leaders, just wait till you read about Michel Foucault. Nor are the similarities between the decades after World War II and our own day limited to the sexual abuses commonly committed by our elites. Then, as now, political liberties were sometimes under threat in the west. And then, as now, no one quite knew what the shape of the world to come would be–or even if there would be a world to come, given the threat of nuclear war.
In such an environment, the purpose of a magazine is to articulate within itself the picture of a world that might be. If successful, a magazine ends up being an anticipation of the world that eventually comes to exist.
Thus The New Republic played a part in the creation of the New Deal, although in the end they found Roosevelt's proposals too moderate. Partisan Review defined the post-war left. Encounter showed how to be both of the left and anti-totalitarian. National Review birthed the conservative movement, which eventually culminated in the Reagan presidency, an administration that defined America’s political life for nearly 40 years.
Small magazines are a bit like a sandbox for imagined social projects, sometimes even entire social orders. Thus we come to the work of an institution like Mere Orthodoxy, which is a small Christian ideas magazine and media organization.
If one sort of world opened up for Jones in Paris, many other sorts of worlds are opening up for people today. There are far-right worlds that bear a disturbing resemblance to the far-right worlds of the interwar period when alienated young people across Europe lamented their situation and went searching for someone to blame. There are far-left worlds that bear their own disturbing resemblance to a kind of latter day Bolshevism. And there are many other variants in between those extremes.
Our task is to articulate one such world and then work to see it come to fruition. So what is the world that a small Christian magazine ought to imagine and articulate and contain within itself?
At risk of stating the obvious, it is a Christian world. And so certain things are taken as axiomatically true:
The good life is bound up in practices of love and generosity and mercy.
The good life includes time devoted each week to public gathered worship with other Christian believers, united around Scripture, sacrament, and prayer.
The good life generally (though not always) involves marriage, a life of covenant fidelity, love, and devotion to one’s spouse, and begetting, raising, and caring for children.
The good life is shaped and guided by the teachings found in the Apostle’s Creed, Lord’s Prayer, and Ten Commandments.
The good life is not measured through the accumulation of wealth, the acquisition of power or influence, the obtaining of personal peace and affluence, the cultivation of one’s authentic self via self-expression, or the mere maximizing of lifestyle choices.
In all these ways, the world that a Christian media organization seeks to define within itself and articulate to the present world is one radically at odds with the dominant powers and principalities of our day, proposing quite different understandings of justice, greatness, and the shape of a worthy life than what is typically proposed by others.
Yet we must say more. For if we stop there one can come to the conclusion that the world we articulate is essentially one in which life is lived in church, such that we either relegate the rest of life to the category of “necessary evil” or simply seek to withdraw from the rest of the world as it exists outside the church so much as we possibly can while constructing a kind of parallel society that is suitably safe and reserved only for other people who believe as we believe. This is not the way forward. For the world a Christian magazine will define is not only a Christian world, but is also a Christian world, not merely a church.
This is what I needed Martin Bucer to teach me when I first encountered him as a college student studying at the University of Nebraska.
That is probably not where you expected me to go.
So let me explain: When I came to college, I had seen enough bad behavior in the world and bad behavior in the church that I thought something radical was needed to sustain healthy common life. And so, like many my age (I matriculated at the university in 2006), I gravitated toward a kind of soft radicalism that was downstream of Stanley Hauerwas, though it would be some time before I would read Hauerwas himself. (I likely would have done far better to just skip most of what I was reading and go straight to Hauerwas, but alas.)
The solution, I thought at the time, was for a Christian community of character to arise that would set itself against the many communities of violence and mistrust that existed in the world (and sometimes in professing churches!) and articulate an alternative vision of life, governed by the plain teachings of Jesus found in the Gospels, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. This was the moment when “radical” books were flooding the market and many an eager, zealous young evangelical read books like David Platt’s Radical or Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution and wanted to do something great for God, in the mold of Jim Elliot or William Carey.
There were problems, however.
In the first place, having grown up in a cult in which the only genuinely healthy expression of Christian faith I saw was not at church but at home with my parents, I had to ask why I hadn’t found God in the church but had found him outside it. What nearly drove me to apostatizing was a local church. What kept me from that for many years was a home and then an ecumenical residential Christian community, both of which exemplified Christian belief and character far more faithfully and consistently than anything I had ever found in the church. For someone dabbling in Anabaptist-style radicalism that placed such heavy emphasis on the church as the locus of the good life, that was a problem.
There was a second problem too, which stemmed from the first: A great deal of the life a person lived did not take place inside the church. Moreover, a great deal of people in the world would never pursue a life as enmeshed with the work of the local church, both for reasons of calling and other reasons too.
It was as I sat with these questions and struggled with them that I signed up for a reformation/renaissance survey course at the university taught by a reformation historian at the University of Nebraska named Dr. Amy Nelson Burnett. I did not know it at the time, but Burnett is one of the preeminent reformation historians in the world with a particular expertise in early modern Protestantism in Germany and Switzerland. As she told the history of the Reformation in her lectures, one name kept coming up along the margins of the story–Martin Bucer.
When Luther disputed Eck in Heidelberg in 1521, Bucer was there as a Dominican monk. Several years later as radical reformers came to Strasbourg and sought to draw the city into the anabaptist cause, Bucer was there to oppose them. In 1531 when Philip of Hesse sought to bring together the early Protestant leaders around a common confession and called those leaders to his castle in Marburg to meet, Bucer was there. In 1539 when John Calvin was kicked out of Geneva and needed a place to shelter and work, he went to Bucer. In the 1540s when for a moment it appeared that a concord within the German church might be possible, it was Bucer and Melanchthon who met with Catholic leaders at Regensburg. And in the early 1550s when the reform movement was taking root in England and young leaders were seeking guidance, one of the men they turned to was Martin Bucer, who had moved to England after Strasbourg had been retaken for the Roman church in the First Schmalkaldic War.
I found myself feeling a bit stunned that someone could have been so active in so many key moments in church history and I, a child of the church who had been taught a fair bit of church history, had never heard of him. So I asked Professor Burnett to supervise an independent study paper on Bucer, not knowing she was the preeminent authority on Bucer in North America. And so began a continuing conversation I have had with the great Alsatian Dominican turned Strasbourg reformer.
The thing I saw almost immediately, because you cannot read Bucer for five minutes without seeing it, is that he had a deep concern with the public expression of Christian faith. For Luther, the chief problem was how sinful people can be made right before God. But for Bucer the chief problem was Christian love, particularly love of neighbor: why did the church so often fail in it and what could be done to call Christians back to it?
Bucer's proposal was not that the true Christians should withdraw from every form of civic society aside and devote themselves to a sufficiently "pure" church made up only of those who voluntarily asked to be baptized as adults. If he wanted to go that way he could have done–he was in constant communication with anabaptist reformers making precisely that move; he was friendly with many of them and loved and respected many. But he thought they were wrong to withdraw from the state church and civic life and he opposed them consistently throughout his career.
But his solution was not an opposite sort of error either, in which he adopted a simplistic sort of theocratic aspiration to dominance in which the church held civic society together via the threat of the sword. It couldn’t be, given that Bucer only narrowly avoided such coercive punishment from Christian authorities on multiple occasions in his life. Indeed it is striking that Bucer's Strasbourg did not to my knowledge execute anyone over religious beliefs during the entirety of his time in the city. Their record is not perfect on this front, for they did banish several Anabaptist leaders from the city and they imprisoned a small number. But when set against Zwingli's Zurich, much of Catholic Europe, Elizabeth I's England, or even Calvin's Geneva, Bucer's Strasbourg looks positively liberal by comparison. So what was Bucer's project, then? It was simply this: Bucer felt that the creation of Christian society was a matter of Christian love. He sought a Christian society–cultural Christianity one might even say–because he desired to see his neighbors loved and cared for and healthy, and he sought ways of making that society quite remarkably broad by the standards of his day.
But this turned my entire way of thinking on its head: My idea had been that cultural Christianity was harmful and wrong because it was artificial; it was not genuine, saving faith in Christ and so it was fake. What we needed were pure churches of genuine faith and obedience that focused on their lives of love and generous outreach to the world while remaining wholly separate from the world. Put another way, I only knew two options: The radical option which presupposed a purified church or a totalitarian cultural Christianity that sought dominance over any dissenters. It had not occurred to me, until reading Bucer, that there were other options.
Bucer helped me to see that my evangelical separatism was not synonymous with Christianity, but was simply one theory as to how Christianity expresses itself publicly. The theory Bucer set forth as an alternative, imagining an integrated Christian society in which the church was an essential part of civic society but not the sum total of it was something I hadn’t yet encountered. Crucially, for Bucer the upshot of his project was not Christian domination, the purging of wrong belief, or the coercive punishment of heretics. He mostly saw a Christian society as a desirable tool for aiding people in knowing God and for lifting up the poor and disadvantaged.
Bucer did not make me an establishmentarian, to be clear. Indeed, over time I have come to think that much of Bucer’s political vision is highly reconcilable with a form of political liberalism. But what Bucer did make me was a person who saw that Christian society could be good, that Christianity is expressed not only in the church, but in the broader world, and that Christians can become engaged in civic life as Christians and as a form of submission to Christ’s command to love neighbor.
And so a world is spun out from there–a world in which employers treat their employees equitably and justly, in which practices of mercy, forbearance, and generosity are normalized across society and regarded as morally good and even normalized in law, and in which the life of Christian discipleship does not merely drive us toward attending church on Sundays or toward evangelization and practices of personal piety, but also drives us toward engaging our professions in certain ways, using our finances in certain ways, and using whatever power we are entrusted with in certain ways. (It is striking to note how this vision would eventually win the day across much of Europe and even make its way across the Atlantic to America. Carved above the north doors of the Nebraska State Capitol you will find the words "Wisdom, Justice, Power, Mercy / Constant Guardians of the Law.")
Bucer’s view of a Christian society was unlike anything I found in the radical tradition, but it also was not at all the naked public square I had known growing up in America in the 1990s and 2000s. In short, Bucer gave me a way of imagining a world that seemed possible, good, and Christian.
One of the things that becomes rapidly apparent if you spend much time reading about the post-war era is that orthodox Protestants were broadly withdrawn and unengaged in the defining questions of the day. If you read a book like Cold Warriors, which considers the writers and editors and thinkers at the heart of the Cold War fight, you will not find many orthodox Protestants.
You’ll find a number of thinkers with complicated relationships to Christian belief–John Updike, who Jones edited, comes to mind, for example. You’ll find plenty of Catholics. You’ll also find mainline Protestants with complex relationships to traditional orthodoxy—Brunner and his denial of the virgin birth, Niebuhr and his indifference to the supernatural, and so on. But the orthodox Protestants are largely missing. What remains are various sorts of modernist Protestants, orthodox Catholics, lapsed Christians of all sorts, and a variety of religious non-believers.
The fame obtained by Francis Schaeffer during the tail end of that era is perhaps itself telling: Schaeffer shot to fame simply because he actually read the people defining the post-war intellectual world. He was not a specialist in any of these thinkers. He had no advanced training in relevant fields. He did not have any associations that gave him credibility or a platform. And he did not always read them particularly well. Indeed, in some cases he probably hadn’t read them at all. Schaeffer had very little money, limited access to books, and was dyslexic. What he learned of the post-war existentialists, for example, was as much a product of conversation with students from Zurich as it was his own reading, whatever he could manage given the many limitations he was facing.
I say that not as a criticism, to be clear: We now take for granted that it is easy to access certain books and thinkers. But for a poor American missionary living in a remote part of Switzerland in the 1950s and 60s who had a significant reading disability, it was not at all easy to access those thinkers. I am not aware of any scholarly work trying to determine if or how Schaeffer would have accessed these texts, but from everything I know it is most likely that Schaeffer would have encountered much of the post-war intellectual world via second-hand conversation with students as well as whatever books he could acquire from Zurich, where his oldest daughter attended college. Really, the best way to read Schaeffer is not even to regard him as an intellectual himself, so much as someone who attempted to relate to intellectuals in the same way that someone like Hudston Taylor related to the Chinese. In other words, Schaeffer was less an intellectual himself and more a very sensitive and shrewd missionary to readers of the intellectuals.
So what does it imply about evangelical engagement with intellectual life at that time that a man with all of those limitations and challenges could stand out as one of the most obvious evangelical interlocutors for that world?
There were other Christian thinkers doing better work, to be clear, but the closest thing I can think of to an orthodox historic protestant who had a significant platform at that time and who wrote on the day's defining debates regularly would be C. S. Lewis, who was often unfairly dismissed by academic colleagues because of his popular level writing, and T. S. Eliot. Once you move past them, you’re basically left with Catholics and various sorts of modernist mainliners.
The evangelical energy was almost entirely concentrated around revivalism and the creation of parallel institutions that explained themselves precisely in terms of their choice to stand outside the mainstream and not participate in much of civic society. Put another way, virtually all the evangelicals had become a kind of bourgeois iteration of radical Christianity rather than anything like Bucer's model. Recall, for example, that when Schaeffer spoke at Wheaton in 1968 on the films of Bergman and Antonioni (to an audience that may have included both John Piper and Mark Noll, both of whom were Wheaton students at the time) he was speaking about avant garde filmmakers to students whose college’s honor code forbade them from attending movies at all.
Go back and re-read the chapters of A Severe Mercy when Sheldon and Davy Vanauken return to America after their conversion to Christianity at Oxford. Recall their bewilderment at the American church scene, where their only options seemed to be mainline churches that weren’t sure that Jesus actually rose bodily from the grave or evangelical churches that seemed more interested in policing one’s consumption of alcohol than in extending Christian love to the world.
I say all of this to make a simple point: While I think the evangelical intellectual world we now have for today’s interesting times is far more vibrant and healthy than it was during the last such era, we began from a deficit and have struggled to know how to engage in civic life and mainstream intellectual conversations. The problems Noll addressed in his much discussed book on the scandal of the evangelical mind are not problems that are solved in a year or even a decade.
So go back to Judith Jones and Paris and the post-war ferment and enthusiasm of the City of Light. How should orthodox protestants be present in that world? Well, to begin, we should be present in it.
Ultimately, the conversations they were having concerned questions of meaning and evil and belonging, all of which are things our God has spoken to and with which he is concerned. So why would we not be present? We belong there as much as Sartre or Camus did. Yet many Christians, when beholding that world, shrink back. The intellectual world of elite media culture seems foreign and remote and inaccessible and hostile. Better just to keep one’s distance, they think.
Other Christians adopt a different sort of posture. They wish to be present in that world, but they do not want to understand that world. They love it as a gathering place of potential converts, but no more. So they do not talk about the books or ideas or debates that that world speaks of. Instead, they simply spend their time asserting that true Christian doctrines are actually true and demanding that anyone who engages with them would engage on their terms, asking questions and thinking about issues that many people outside the church simply do not care about. This is the method of your typical campus street preacher, for example. But your average university student hasn’t thought about whether or not the Bible is God’s Word, for example.
If the condition for your talking to them as a student is that you argue with them over that proposition, you are most likely to receive indifference in response, not because the student hates the Bible or has a pronounced hostility to Christianity, but simply because they have no prior framework for understanding why that question matters at all. This, of course, is simply what it means to live in a post-Christian society: the animating questions of our moment certainly involve Christian themes, but they are not posed in Christian terms nor are their immediate topics specifically Christian in nature. So to enter the conversation, one must be comfortable with that and willing to speak with people about the things they actually care about and in terms they actually understand.
The problem for a Christian magazine in this moment is, at least in part, how to articulate a Christian world in a way that is actually engaging, accessible, and imaginable for a typical person living in a post-Christian society. And the added difficulty here is that we don’t necessarily have obvious guides to help us or pre-made frameworks to adopt.
The mainline is dying and now has an even more indifferent relationship to orthodoxy than it did in Niebuhr’s day. The evangelical world in certain places is far healthier–certainly the Christian study center movement is immensely encouraging, there are many exemplary scholars working in Christian colleges, and there is also a lot of great work happening in the book publishing world. The flourishing of an organization like the Veritas Forum or the Trinity Forum is also encouraging.
But none of these are magazines. So if you frame the challenge before us in Bucer’s terms—how do we cultivate a Christian ecosystem of communities and institutions that seek to advance distinctly Christian wisdom and ends in their respective spaces, thereby advancing a broadly Christian view of society that honors God and advances the common good?—you will find that we still have an enormous amount of work to do. This is not because the work being done by book publishers, colleges, study centers, or groups like Veritas is bad, but because it takes a plurality of like-minded institutions working in a plurality of unique spaces to advance that singular project.
What particular value does a magazine offer to such a project? Four things come to mind.
First, magazines require a readership of at least some size to survive. Reader-supported magazines need enough readers to support them financially. But even magazines largely dependent on donors still require a broad enough readership to appear worthy of support to a donor. This means that magazines inherently have a larger audience than what can be found in academic publishing, let alone what you can have in a single classroom or lecture hall in any kind of geographically bound institution, such as a college, church, or study center. A magazine, then, by virtue of its broad reach can be a unifying thread that links together a variety of different groups and people who might not otherwise find each other, even if they actually are broadly aligned and unified in what they care about and value.
Second, magazines and other online media projects can create a plausible structure on the internet in which certain ideas come to appear more plausible or worthy.
Put another way, a YouTube channel or a podcast or an online magazine can, through its work, define a certain sensibility about the world and commend that approach to its audience. Such endeavors become a tool for their readers or viewers, such that when they have a question or want to think more deeply about an issue, they find themselves turning to that media outlet for help. Once again: Magazines are world-makers and at their best they help their audiences locate themselves within a certain kind of world.
Third, because magazines need a large audience (relatively speaking) to survive, magazines also must necessarily have a certain generalist sensibility.
There is peril in that, of course. Knowing a little bit about a lot of things can easily become knowing enough to be dangerous but not enough to be wise. Being a good steward of a magazine is, in many ways, about learning how much you do not know and being willing to ask others for help in your ignorance. A figure like Christopher Hitchens is a cautionary tale for magazine writers and editors everywhere: It was Hitchens’s broad reading and remarkable command of language that made him a joy to read on so many topics. But it was his arrogance and unacknowledged ignorance of theology that made him such an appalling writer on religion.
And yet there is much to say in praise of generalism as well: Many writers regard a certain inaccessibility and privileged knowledge as a marker of their giftedness. The fact that their work is difficult is seen as a sign of its goodness. There are cases where that instinct is not entirely wrong, I think. For example, I can recognize both that Oliver O’Donovan is immensely difficult to read and also that if I stretch myself and challenge myself as a reader, I will be rewarded by the time spent with him.
Yet there is also a certain decadence and vanity that can slip in for writers who dismiss concerns about accessibility and readability. Pope Benedict XVI did not take this attitude. I recall once reading an anecdote about how he thought about his own writing that captures what made him such a marvelous communicator. When he finished writing a homily or lecture he had to give, he would read it aloud to his sister–she was college educated, but had no training in theology. If he read it to her and she found it difficult to follow, he concluded that he had failed and needed to try again. It was not that he needed to dumb his work down–a phrase that in some ways exemplifies the writerly vanity I am condemning. Rather, if his work was not accessible to an intelligent and educated woman like his sister, then the work would not accomplish what he hoped it would do, which is to direct others to Christ. C. S. Lewis had a similar rule, of course: He believed that if he could not express an idea in a way that was sensible to a typical British working man then he was not yet ready to write about that idea. (The preeminent contemporary example of this virtue would be Timothy Keller.)
The generalist magazine, then, helps pastors, academics, and other writers to communicate their ideas in ways that will make them more fruitful and effective in serving their readers and enlivening their readers to the delights of the world, the goodness of God, and the needs of their neighbor.
Fourth and finally, because magazines have a broader audience and because they write on a variety of topics in a way that is both learned and accessible, they are best positioned to fruitfully do the thing I already mentioned as their purpose: to imagine a world that we might endeavor to build.
Reality itself is always messy and uneven and even chaotic. The golden days are never quite so golden as they are later made out to be, but neither are the bleak times quite as bleak. When we are reckoning with actual churches and businesses and governments, good stewardship always require a certain measure of compromise and accommodation to what is possible. But over time this necessary and good accommodation to the plausible can lead us astray. Setting aside what is ideal in the name of what is possible can become setting aside the good itself because goodness comes to seem impractical.
Magazines, as a common endeavor devoted to ideas and conversation, are a bulwark against that spirit of accommodation. At their best they equip people with a vision of the good that guides and directs them in their day to day work, which inherently involves compromise and accommodation. But by keeping a vision of the good at the center, by imagining a world that just might be possible magazines help their readers to take small incremental steps toward the good, balancing the need to compromise with the weightiness of truth, righteousness, and justice.
Martin Bucer lived in both of these worlds. He lived in the world where compromise with Lutheran Christians and even some Roman Christians seemed plausible to him as a condition for cultivating Christian society, where friends fell into error, catastrophe struck and destroyed his best laid plans, and where he was constantly navigating complicated situations that forced him to compromise. But he also lived in a world where he knew that Christian love was genuinely possible, where the poor did not need to remain forever poor, where kings did not need to be corrupt, and where church authorities did not need to be greedy and vain. And by remembering that that world was possible he was able to labor faithfully in the world that was. Enabling others to follow in that way is the work of Christian media.