Issue 5

In this issue...

When this edition of Ink was commissioned, the world was a different place. Nobody had heard of Covid-19, and reports of lockdown across Britain would have sounded like science fiction. Since then we have been plunged into a crisis unlike anything most of us in the West have ever experienced.

In 1939, CS Lewis preached to a group of students in Oxford about the value of scholarship for a nation being tested: “The war creates no absolutely new situation,” he said, “it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice... If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun.”

This has a particular poignancy for Tyndale House, which was founded during WWII. In 2020, as we celebrate 75 years since our official opening, we remember a group of Christians who looked up from the “precipice” and saw the unchanged importance of the search for truth — and truth about the Bible above all things.

We remain enormously inspired by our founders, who went before us into uncertainty with hope. We are thankful that scholarship is so adaptable to isolation, and that while we miss face-to-face community, our academic work can continue unabated. Thanks to 2020’s technology we can also carry on sharing it in more ways and with more people than ever before.

We pray this issue will be an encouragement to you, and that in a small way the search for understanding in these pages will help us lift our heads above our present troubles for a moment.