With this issue, Modern Reformation begins celebrating twenty-five years of continuous publication. While other periodicals have come and gone, while other parachurch ministries have flamed out because of scandal or loss of focus, while other forms and mediums of communication have destabilized the publication sphere, we have remained constant. It is all by the grace of God, particularly as he has brought donors alongside our team with all sorts of gifts, large and small, to enable us to fulfill our calling. We are also grateful that for twenty-five years our team has embraced our simple mission of bringing together representatives of the major Protestant confessional traditions to speak about God, this world, and our lives in it.
In this, our anniversary year, we are asking questions weightier than we have recently considered. We begin this issue by returning to basic categories of doctrine: the who, what, where, when, and how of God’s activity in the world. To do so, we’re borrowing a construct from our editor-in-chief, Michael Horton, that he explores in his new book Core Christianity: the four “D’s” of “Drama,” “Doctrine,” “Discipleship,” and “Doxology. We believe this construct goes far in connecting deep theological truths to the real lives of God’s creatures.
With articles from Reformed theologians Michael Horton and Whitney Gamble, Lutheran pastor John Bombaro, and Baptist pastor Brian Croft, we continue to reflect the unique offering of Modern Reformation and our sister radio broadcast, White Horse Inn: men and women representing reformational traditions speaking into areas of common concern (although not always common agreement), in service to the church. We believe this kind of conversation, sorely lacking in many areas of civil society, is a key ingredient of Christian health and the advancement of the cause of Reformation here in the United States and around the world.
Along with a history of these conversations that our subscribers can access in our online archives, we are pleased to feature a selection of some of our best content from the past twenty-five years in a new book just published by Hendrickson Publishers, The Reformation Then and Now: 25 Years of Modern Reformation Articles Celebrating 500 Years of the Reformation. Edited by our editor-in-chief and me, our hope with this new volume is that the rich resources of the Reformation will be rediscovered by the modern church. While we don’t believe this will lead to a return to some fabled “golden age” of the church, we are convinced that the same joy, hope, and confidence that took hold of Christians as they rediscovered the gospel in the sixteenth century can be experienced today in our churches and around the world as we, like the Reformers, return to the central message of the Bible.
Eric Landry executive editor
