James Bratt - The Best of The Reformed Journal

The Best of

THE
REFORMED
JOURNAL

The Best of

THE
REFORMED
JOURNAL

Edited by

James D. Bratt & Ronald A. Wells

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY
GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN / CAMBRIDGE, U.K.

2012 William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

All rights reserved

Published 2012 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The best of The Reformed Journal /

edited by James D. Bratt & Ronald A. Wells.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8028-6702-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4674-3547-5 (epub)

1. Reformed Church Doctrines. I. Bratt, James D., 1949- II. Wells, Ronald, 1941- III. Reformed journal (Grand Rapids, Mich.)

BX9422.5.B47 2011

285.705 dc23

2011039465

www.eerdmans.com

Contents

If my ministerial father was not a charter subscriber to The Reformed Journal, he was at least an early one, owing in part, I think, to James Daane, a Journal founding editor and an old friend from their student days together at Princeton Seminary. It was Jim who likely got my father going on Christianity Today as well, Jim having joined Carl Henry and others on that evangelical masthead. These personal connections interest me because together they embody in a small way the intellectual and cultural ethos that was central to the Journal and, beyond, to the Eerdmans Publishing Company, which produced the magazine. Here in the late 50s or early 60s were two ministers firmly rooted in their Dutch-Calvinist tradition but having one eye on the broader mainline Protestant world, as represented by Princeton, and the other eye, however warily, on the evangelical world of Billy Graham, who had founded Christianity Today. They were, in fact, undoubtedly wary in both directions, concerned about theological slippage on the one side (my father, while revering Princeton, had sympathies for Machen) and on the other side concerned that, however fervently held the evangelical truths and whatever the clarion intellectual summons of Carl Henry and others, there hadnt been a great deal of theology in the first place from which to slip.

Those wanting a general account of Eerdmans attempt as a publisher to navigate among these worlds can refer to An Eerdmans Century, the company history written by Larry ten Harmsel and Reinder Van Til for this centennial year. The Reformed Journal, over the course of its forty years of publication, played an important role in the Eerdmans program, both in its own right as a magazine, and as a supportive adjunct to the book program. The company is pleased now to offer here, as part of its anniversary celebration, a volume of pieces from the magazines own particular history. We are grateful to Ronald Wells and James Bratt, erstwhile colleagues together in the history department at Calvin College, for making so judicious and well-introduced a compilation. Those wanting a deeply informed and beautifully rendered account of where the Journal came from and where it went hardly need look farther than this volume. Wells came to the task as a frequent writer for the magazine and as a former member of the Journal editorial board, and Bratt came to it as one of the most astute historians of Dutch Calvinism in its American context.

The Journal, over its forty years, had a wonderfully symbiotic relationship with the book program, benefiting from the intellectual and ecumenical expansion of the Eerdmans list and contributing to it through its own growing network of authors and readers. A book idea might first try its wings as a Journal article. From the other direction, an article might be drawn from an already published Eerdmans book or from one still in progress. Usually, however, the relationship was indirect and diffuse, simply a matter of books and magazine stirring the same pot. The magazine also, of course, especially through its reviews but also through excerpting, helped to keep the book program alert to what was being produced by other publishers.