The Painful Truth has reached out to Dixon Cartwright and inquired as to why he is shuttering the doors of the Journal after 21 years of providing all the churches a forum in which to express themselves. The following is the reply back I received.
Well, James. You asked why are we (Dixon and Linda Cartwright) shutting down The Journal. Our last planned issue will be dated January 2018 and mailed out in early February.
We’re getting along in years. The same month The Journal turns 21 I will turn 71. I had a heart attack in 2011 and haven’t had the same level of energy since then that I used to have. I no longer have exactly the same reasons for publishing The Journal that I used to have. I started The Journal because my friend John Robinson shut down his paper called In Transition. I tried to get John to keep it going by giving or selling it to me. Our negotiations in that regard fell apart and we could come to no agreement. So when he stopped publishing his paper in January 1997 I started The Journal in February 1997.
My original intent for my newspaper was to help people maintain contact with other COG Christians across the boundaries of the various COG groups and also to provide a forum. We were kind of like a blog before there were blogs. We were different from In Transition in that John’s aim was to have two of his trusted friends check out articles before they were published in In Transition for correctness of doctrine. The friends were Ron Dart and Leon Walker. I did not share the view with John that that was an appropriate consideration for my newspaper. Rather, I welcomed creative essays, even those advocating unorthodox versions of doctrines, and did not feel the need to make sure they were correct or for me to agree with them. As a result, we printed many such opinion pieces — editorials, letters, essays — with many of them disagreeing with each other, frequently in the same issue of The Journal. My main consideration was that writers deal politely with each other in their doctrinal and political discussions, especially since people with different interpretations of Scripture can reasonably prove their varying doctrines from the Bible.
In the beginning I believed my publication, at least my reason for publishing, was almost a necessity: if not a necessity then something that I thought would be a worthy service to the brethren. I still think that it is a worthy service, but not a necessity. Thinking The Journal was almost a necessity was presumptuous and naive. I can further make this point by mentioning my opinion about salvation. I no longer believe salvation is fragile, so to speak. I don’t think Christians or other religious people must get their religion exactly right for them to enjoy eternal life and blissful consciousness in the Kingdom or heaven or whatever the goal happens to be. I do not think God, whatever is the exact nature and definition of God, would set things up that way. Some of my opinion about this is implied in the series I started in 2011 about the Bible canon. I’m still active in a COG (actually, more than one COG) and consider myself a COG member, but I’m not the same kind of a Christian I was in 1997.
I do get some flak from some of the anti-Armstrongism bloggers for supposedly being an “enabler,” as one of my critics likes to say. (He also likes to say I’m insane.) However, I’m not trying to enable anybody. I’m trying to provide a forum and an avenue for fellowship. I’m not concerned about supporting or refuting, for example, Herbert Armstrong or other preachers. If I enable people to communicate and fellowship and voice their opinions, then I guess by definition I am some kind of enabler. Bye.
–Dixon Cartwright