Firebrand: One Year Later
Photo by David Traña on Unsplash
A little over a year ago, I called my friend Steve Beard, Editor of Good News. I told him that I was working with several people to start a new online magazine dedicated to high-level public discourse in the Wesleyan tradition. As he reacted to this news, I could tell he was trying to be encouraging. After thirty years of editing a church-related conservative publication, he knew much better than I did what we were getting into. He knew that we didn’t even know what we didn’t know. True to his character, Steve was encouraging, but there was also a cautious subtext, something along the lines of, May God have mercy on your soul.
Firebrand officially launched one year ago, on June 1, 2020, and it’s been a wild ride. When it started, we didn’t know if there would be much interest in what we were doing. As it has happened, the interest has been substantial. Thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of page views later, we can look back and see that we’ve done some things really well. At other times, we’ve done some things… not as well. C’est la vie. I’m grateful for what we’ve been able to accomplish, and I’m confident that even better days are ahead.
I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank those who have contributed articles to Firebrand. Thank you for the time, thought, and care you put into your writing. Thank you to those who have supported us financially and those who have come on board as sponsors. Thank you to those who serve on our Editorial Board. We could not maintain the quality of offerings we’ve seen over the last year without your contributions and input. I also wish to express my deep gratitude to our lead team: Suzanne Nicholson, Maggie Ulmer, Ryan Danker, and Matt Reynolds. They carry the lion’s share of the work at Firebrand. We’ve held many a cage match over what to publish, the tone and content of our offerings, how to respond to criticism, and how to navigate choppy waters as we move ahead. So far there have been no serious injuries.
From its outset, Firebrand has drawn both praise and criticism. There are those who were on board from day one. They had been waiting for something like this, a venue for thinking in public about our Wesleyan faith. Others have seen Firebrand more negatively, and many have let us know about it. Fair enough. To offer public arguments is to invite critique. The quality of critique has ranged from the serious to the sophomoric. Leaving aside the accusations that we are Nazis, satanic minions, and bedwetters, our critics have at times given us reason to think more deeply about the arguments we advance. I am personally grateful to those who care enough about public discourse to engage these arguments seriously, whether in agreement or disagreement.
There have been less serious critiques, such as that Firebrand simply represents “propaganda.” Particularly early on we were said to have been launched by the Wesleyan Covenant Association, a misattribution that even the most cursory bit of investigation could have avoided. Had Firebrand been launched by the WCA, I certainly wouldn’t take that as a strike against us. Many of our United Methodist board members (including me) are involved with the WCA. But the simple and obvious truth is that the WCA did not start Firebrand. Had it done so, Firebrand would have been a different kind of publication, one more directly tied to the United Methodist Church and focused on internecine debate and advocacy.
The fact of the matter is, we have published authors not simply from the UMC, but from the Church of the Nazarene, the Free Methodist Church, Pentecostalism, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and Anglicanism. Heck, we even interviewed a Baptist. What binds these articles together is a commitment to Firebrand’s core values: (1) the authority of Scripture, (2) the Nicene-Chalcedonian faith, (3) the Wesleyan tradition, and (4), the cultivation of intellectual virtue. We don’t have to agree on everything, but in this publication we do have to agree on these.
Firebrand was in fact launched by another ministry, Spirit and Truth, founded by Dr. Matt Reynolds. Spirit and Truth has no denominational affiliation, though its theological roots are Wesleyan and charismatic. As stated on its website, “Spirit & Truth is a movement of Wesleyan-minded Christians seeking to awaken and equip the 21st century church, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to share the Gospel and make disciples of Jesus Christ. We long to see a new movement of Christians who are empowered by the Spirit, rooted in the truth, and mobilized for the mission.” Firebrand is a part of that mission, and particularly the goal of helping people to become rooted in truth.
Truth…. The very mention of the word can make people break out in hives. In the philosophical climate of our day, truth claims are often perceived in terms of power relations. “Truth,” so the argument goes, is simply a means of coercion, a way to force people into certain norms of belief and behavior. Christians, however, cannot properly think this way about truth. We claim that we have not developed truth, but perceived it. Truth is not a matter of invention but revelation. Truth precedes us. It is built into the very fabric of creation. God brought all things into being through the divine logos--reason, word, thought, order--and that very logos became one of us in the person of Jesus Christ. Truth is not just an idea. Truth is a person. Pilate stands in for the human condition when, in the very presence of Christ, he asks, “What is truth?” As Christians, our role is to point people to Christ, who is himself truth. And from this one source of truth come all other truths. The logos of God is the organizing principle according to which everything else makes sense.
The problem is, what is true is not always apparent. Our minds are finite and our reasoning imperfect. Truth, moreover, is often occluded by the power of sin. In other words, sin has epistemic consequences. I hammer this point home in my teaching. In fact, it’s become something of an inside joke in the DMin group I lead with Justus Hunter. Here he goes again…. Well, laugh it up, students. It’s not my idea. It’s hard to read through the Pauline corpus and avoid it. Sanctification walks hand-in-hand with the discernment of truth. As Paul teaches us in Romans, to discern the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect--requires the renewing of our minds (12:2). Truth, then, is not simply about the acquisition of knowledge. It is also about holiness. We perceive it through the sanctification of our individual reason and the sanctified reason of the church. I can think of no better tradition than Wesleyanism to draw out the implications of the relationship between sanctification and truth.
The church’s sanctified reason is a topic that bears more exploration. It relates to such diverse topics as the canonization of the Bible, the creeds of the Great Tradition, and the church as a particular moral community. It certainly comes to bear on the discernment of the church today. The sanctification of our collective reason in the Wesleyan tradition requires what Charles Taylor calls the “public sphere.” Put differently, it requires a space where we can engage ideas in conversation with one another with the assumption that our goal is the common good. In the secular world the public sphere is all but gone. We have lost any collective vision of the common good, much less a commitment to its advancement in our public engagement. In the church, however, we must not succumb to the cynicism that so characterizes the ambient culture. We believe that truth matters, that it is good, and that we discern it not simply by ourselves, but in community with others. John Henry Newman argued that ideas do not reach their full expression until they have been brought out before the public, pondered, dissected, debated, and ultimately refined. This process takes time. In fact, it may take centuries. We need vigorous public discussion in order to draw out the full implications of the claims we make as Christians.
For Christians, the truth claims we make are not a means by which we exert coercive power. On the contrary, truth leads to freedom. “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). God’s truth frees us from sin and death. As we come to know God through Jesus Christ more fully, we are less and less beholden to the lies we soak in by cultural osmosis. We come to know the true God and to see the ever-expanding pantheon of idols for what it is. We come to know ourselves, to see ourselves as God sees us. Thus we can come to appreciate the great sacrifice--the costly grace--by which we have been saved. We repent and avail ourselves of the means of grace so that we might live ever more fully in the truth revealed to us through Christ. So when we say we want to equip believers to be rooted in the truth, this is what we mean. Our hope is that Firebrand can in some ways contribute to this end.
Yes, folks, it’s our one-year anniversary here at Firebrand, so pop the champagne corks, open up a package of smelly cheese, and crank up the Charles Wesley hymns. It’s been a wild ride, and a good one. Bring on year number two, and may God have mercy on our souls.
David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.