October 31st is a public holiday in Slovenia, a beautiful and cosmopolitan little country which has been at the intersection of the Germanic, Slavic, and Italian spheres since its beginning. Claudio Magris writes, in his Microcosms, that it is a place where “…even the woods are penetrated by History, with its continuous scene-changes and relocations.” The majority of Slovenians declare themselves Roman Catholic, though, like much of modern Europe, the number of declared atheists and agnostics is fairly high; a fact even less surprising, given that Slovenia had been part of officially Communist Yugoslavia for much of the 20th century. There are very few Protestants in Slovenia today.

But what is celebrated on the 31st of October in Slovenia isn’t, as one might expect, the Eve of the Feast of All Saints- our Halloween- it is, rather, Reformation Day.

Although Slovenia was one of those regions where the initial success of the Reformation was forcibly suppressed, the country hasn’t forgotten the great cultural blessings it derived from the evangelical faith. One of the chief examples of these is the work of the evangelical scholar and preacher Primus Trubar, who gave Slovenia the beginnings of its vernacular literature (as Luther gave Germany its language, and Cranmer and the Jacobean translators helped shape modern English). And the nation remembers those blessings with gratitude, by celebrating Reformation Day.

Many evangelicals have lost any real sense of what the Reformation meant or taught, confusing it at best with the sort of theologically unprincipled sentimentalism common now, and thus it goes uncelebrated in that quarter; and many doubting evangelicals of a more restless sort, unhappy for whatever reason with their mother tradition and idealizing, from a safe distance, the unreformed communions, wonder whether the Reformation was much of a good thing- and so they refuse to really celebrate it too.

Slovenia has a better sense of history.

A friend of mine, an Anglican minister, recently invited me to the eucharist which will be celebrated in his chapel on the Eve of All Saints- I asked him whether he didn’t actually mean Reformation Day, a feast which he is decidedly not inclined to celebrate. We are close enough friends, and close enough as fellow Christians, that the joke was taken in the same spirit in which it had been made. But I do think there is something remarkable in that close juxtaposition of the two feasts: on the one hand, Reformation Day, celebrated by evangelicals as the feast of God’s great rectification of religion, a feast of a decisive proof of His steadfast faithfulness and love of His bride; but seen by the unreformed as a celebration of revolt, fracture, opposition. On the other, the Eve of All Saints: seen by the unreformed as a feast of the mystic unity of those are conformed to Christ, but perhaps a little too redolent, at least to many evangelicals, of veneration of mediators other than Christ, the cult of perfection by works, and worship of images.

But one of the great catholic doctrines which the Reformers declared as loudly and clearly as they could was that of the communion of saints: that all who receive Christ by faith, simply by simple faith, are holy in Him in the eyes of God, and members of Him: saints. They are one holy, catholic church; mystical as a whole, but visible wherever people are gathered in charity around the Word.

The Reformers drew out the full implications of the doctrine of the communion of saints for all of Christian life; it has as much to do with their thought on politics as it has to do with their thought on spiritual matters. So in a way, the Reformation, which preached the truth of what it means to be a saint in that communion of saints, can be regarded as the “eve”, the gate, of the truth of All Saints Day.

For evangelicals, the Reformation was the moment in which the church came to the clearest self-understanding of any time in its history; but its self-understanding includes all that history: Reformation is not a dividing line, it is a clarity and scope of vision, and part of what seen clearly from that vantage point, is “all saints”; the true form of the church of Jesus Christ throughout all times, and in all places. In other words, the catholic Church.

It seems appropriate, then, that an online journal devoted to conversation informed by evangelical catholic principles, should be inaugurated on Reformation Day.