One should feel guilty about letting these journals set the agenda for theological discourse, or for any discourse, for that matter. It cannot be better for one's theology. As a student in New York back then, I was fascinated by the way a glossy magazine could send such a chill down the vestigial spines of so many theologians. A spokesman for the Jesus Seminar, who rejects the entire Fourth Gospel but says his own testimony is true, claims that he left the priesthood and took a wife as the result of inconsistencies in the Synoptics. By a similar reasoning, any Shakespeare scholar should drop all his incongruent folios and take a whole harem.
Nothing is new about remarking the lack of science in pseudo-science about the Scriptures.
The Catholic modernists, Loisy and Tyrrell, blind to their own flaws, saw the cracks in German historical criticism in the nineteenth century. But that was just another variation of the Kantian mood that, along with Hegelianism and Romanticism, became the mental ether of the age. At least Kahler challenged the inculturated presumption of subjective historical critics. No similar statement can be made of the Slavs. We are not superior for seeing through the sentimental unwinding of the nineteenth century that gave us the Teutonic Christ.