Auf Wiedersehen

Way back in the day when the original Reformed Journal was still in print via Eerdmans Publishing Company in the 1980s, I had the thrill as a seminary student to get a letter to the editor published to which a prominent thinker had the courtesy to honor me with a response.  After that RJ ended and there was an attempt to merge with the RCA journal Perspectives, my professor, mentor, and friend Neal Plantinga was gracious enough to invite me to join him on a back page column about preaching and that was a honor as well.  Neal helped me publish several or so columns when I was then yet a young preacher.  While I was on sabbatical in Princeton in the Fall of 2000, I was invited by Jim Bratt to join the editorial board for Perspectives in 2001 and that led to a multi-year collaboration and my serving for several years as one of three co-editors for the magazine.

Not long after my gig on the board and as editor ended, Perspectives launched a blog called “The Twelve” and of that original dozen writers I was a member from the get-go.  Now we’ve come full circle and have become once more the Reformed Journal and its attendant blog of now more than twelve of us.   I have been glad to write what I am guessing is 200+ blogs since that time when this blog began in 2011.

I have tried to write about what I thought was important, interesting, funny, ironic, deeply Reformed, and relevant.  As the rise of Donald Trump was happening, I tried to raise issues and even sound what I regarded to be alarms.  Within my own denomination of the CRCNA I have addressed ideas, synods, overtures, and some of the best parts of our amazing Reformed theological tradition of which I am so humbly proud to be a member.

But our socio-political, cultural, and ecclesiastical atmosphere has gotten more fraught not less over time and with some major changes in my need to care for my parents and other considerations, I have found it increasingly difficult to know what could be considered acceptable or prudent about which to blog here every other week.  And so perhaps it’s time to make way for other voices and thus with this blog, I am stepping away from my regular blog postings. 

When Johnny Carson retired in 1992, he said at his farewell show that if he had another idea for something to do on TV, he hoped America would welcome him back.  He never did have anything else, but I might have the occasional blog I will offer to the RJ editors and will also hope they will welcome me back as a guest blogger.

It’s curious to me that any number of other languages have a way to say farewell that also contains within it the seed of hoped-for reconnection.  Auf Wiedersehen.  Au revoir.  Hasta la vista.  They all say, “Bye, but see you soon!”  English just basically cuts things off and does not hold out a lot of hope for another encounter.  Maybe in this age, that linguistic fact is telling.  Predictive.  Maybe.

But as Frederick Buechner noted, the English word “goodbye” seems to be an heir of what was once perhaps a longer term of parting as “God Be With Ye” and if so, then perhaps that contains the seed of “God Be With Ye Till We Meet Again” or some such.   In that sense then, Goodbye. 

In any event, as a German major at Calvin, I say Auf Wiedersehen.  God be with you until we meet again.