Essential Evangelicalism E-Book

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 395

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Carl F. H. Henry was one of the most influential and formative evangelical voices of the twentieth century. His life and work continue to shape how evangelicals understand themselves, the gospel, and the world around them, offering wise guidance for remaining faithful to God's Word in the midst of a faithless world. In Essential Evangelicalism, some of today's prominent voices offer fresh and timely assessments of Henry's life and legacy, contending that his work is as relevant as ever for a new generation of evangelical Christians. These essays offer world-class scholarship and fresh perspectives on one of the most important Christian leaders of recent memory.

Leseprobe

ESSENTIAL EVANGELICALISM

The Enduring Influence of Carl F. H. Henry

MATTHEW J. HALL AND OWEN STRACHAN, EDITORS

Foreword by Timothy George

Essential Evangelicalism: The Enduring Influence of Carl F. H. Henry

Copyright © 2015 by Matthew J. Hall and Owen Strachan

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Josh Dennis

Cover image: Richard Solomon Artists, Gary Kelley

First printing 2015

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-4726-3 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4729-4 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4727-0 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4728-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Essential evangelicalism : the enduring influence of Carl F. H. Henry / Matthew J. Hall and Owen Strachan, editors ; foreword by Timothy George.

    1 online resource

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4335-4727-0 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4728-7 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4729-4 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4726-3 (tp)

1. Henry, Carl F. H. (Carl Ferdinand Howard), 1913–2003. 2. Theologians—United States. 3. Evangelicalism—United States—History—20th century. 4. Theology—United States—History—20th century. I. Hall, Matthew, 1980– editor.

BX4827.H38

230'.044092—dc23             2015014524

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Contents

Foreword by Timothy GeorgeEditors’ Preface1 The Indispensable Evangelical2 Toward a Full-Orbed Evangelical Ethic3 Carl F. H. Henry’s University Crusade4 Carl F. H. Henry5 The Compleat Christian6 Hope, Discipline, and the Incarnational Scholar7 Vain Philosophy?8 The Modern Mind and the Uneasy Conscience9 The Kingdom of God in the Social Ethics of Carl F. H. HenrySelected BibliographyContributorsGeneral IndexScripture Index

Foreword

American evangelicals and serious theology are terms that do not just naturally snuggle up to each other with easy equipoise. That, despite the fact that Jonathan Edwards, the greatest theologian America has produced, stands at the headwaters of the evangelical tradition. The diminution of the evangelical mind since Edwards—and not only in theology—has been often rehearsed. The lure of pragmatism, individualism, revivalism (not to be confused with revival, about which Edwards knew a thing or two), expressivism, and fissiparous fundamentalism have all taken their toll when it comes to the nurturing of a theological tradition that is wise and deep. But in recent history, there is one evangelical theologian who stands above others in depth of insight and clarity of vision: Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry.

Born in New York City in 1913, Henry came of age at a time when the modernist-fundamentalist battles were going strong. But he heard no talk of these struggles, or of anything else religious, at the family dinner table. His father, a master baker from Germany, was a nominal Lutheran; his mother, a nominal Catholic.

Skilled in typing, Henry landed a job as a sportswriter. He eventually became a reporter and then an editor of the small newspaper on Long Island while also writing stories as a stringer for the New York Times. By all accounts, he was a hard-nosed journalist given to pagan pleasures, with no knowledge or use for God, much less the church.

His conversion to Jesus Christ was dramatic, unexpected, and unforgettable. Sitting alone in his car in 1933, he was startled by a violent thunderstorm—shades of Luther. He later described this event in this way:

A fiery bolt of lightning, like a giant flaming arrow, seemed to pin me to the driver’s seat, and a mighty roll of thunder unnerved me. When the fire fell, I knew instinctively the Great Archer had nailed me to my own footsteps. Looking back, it was as if the transcendent Tetragrammaton wished me to know that I could not save myself and that heaven’s intervention was my only hope.1

Henry the convert became Henry the evangelist and Henry the student. He went on to earn two degrees from Wheaton College (where one of his classmates was the young Billy Graham) and eventually the PhD from Boston University under Edgar S. Brightman.

Soon after the National Association of Evangelicals was formed in 1942, the Christian Century announced in a headline, “Sectarianism Receives New Lease on Life.” But sectarian retrenchment was the last thing Boston pastor Harold John Ockenga, the ringleader of the so-called New Evangelicalism, or the far-thinking Carl Henry had in mind. In 1947, thirty-four-year-old Henry published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, a seventy-five-page booklet that sold for one dollar per copy. Henry called on his fellow evangelicals to leave behind the legalism, obscurantism, and judgmentalism that had left a blight on conservative Christianity in the twentieth century. Sectarian isolation, Henry said, must give way to evangelical engagement. The new movement had its manifesto.

In 1956 Henry was invited to become the first editor of a new publication, Christianity Today.CT was to be “a magazine of evangelical conviction,” a thoughtful conservative alternative to the more liberal Christian Century. In his first editorial, Henry told his readers that he could see the lawn of the White House from his office. He was saying, in effect, that evangelicals would no longer be confined to the gospel ghettos of the culture. The mission of the evangelical church was both personal and public. The aim was to capture minds as well as to save souls, to struggle for a just social structure, and to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth.

To accomplish these goals, Henry not only wrote editorials, but he also published serious theology. He wrote more than forty books in his lifetime, dealing with a range of issues from theological ethics to higher education and human rights. One of his most interesting essays was called “Christian Fund-raising Heresies.” But his magnum opus was a massive six-volume study, God, Revelation, and Authority, published from 1976 to 1983. It contains more than three thousand pages, and none of them is meant for light bedtime reading. God, Revelation, and Authority is not a systematic theology proper but rather a sustained theological epistemology offering a comprehensive overview of revelation in biblical terms—the living God who speaks and shows, who stands and stays, who stoops and saves.

God, Revelation, and Authority is an extended discourse built on fifteen principal theses. Luther had ninety-five; Henry had fifteen. The first of Henry’s fifteen theses is the most important, the basis for all the others: “Revelation is a divinely initiated activity, God’s free communication by which he alone turns his personal privacy into a deliberate disclosure of his reality.”2 He argues that all merely human affirmations about God that are based on something other than his divinely initiated, freely communicated, and deliberately disclosed reality will inevitably curl into a question mark.

The awesome disclosure of God precipitates human surprise. Perhaps thinking about his own encounter in the thunderstorm, Henry declares that divine revelation is “like a fiery bolt of lightning that unexpectedly zooms towards us and scores a direct hit.” Or, it is like an earthquake that suddenly shakes and engulfs us. Or, it is like “some piercing air-raid siren” which sends us “scurrying from life’s preoccupations and warns us that no escape remains if we neglect the only sure sanctuary.”3

During the latter years of his life, Henry became theologus non gratus within large sectors of the evangelical academy. In far less nuanced fashion than the postliberal criticism he had received from Yale theologians Hans Frei and Brevard Childs, postconservative, postevangelical, and semi-post-Christian critics blasted Henry for what they called his pure propositionalism and conformity to the canons of Enlightenment rationalism. But Kevin J. Vanhoozer, an evangelical theologian whose own work is marked by acuity and insight, has been much more balanced. Using speech-act theory as an aid to understanding biblical discourse, Vanhoozer criticizes Henry for his lack of interest in genre along with some of his hermeneutical presuppositions. But Vanhoozer is a friendly critic and openly admits, “Carl Henry said the right thing at the right time.”4

In a tribute I wrote on Henry at the time of his death in 2003, I predicted that despite his eclipse at the time, a new generation of evangelicals would arise to rediscover “Uncle Carl” and once again find his work vibrant, provocative, and relevant to the issues of the day. Now, more than twelve years after his death, my prediction is coming true. The essays in this volume are among the firstfruits of a harvest of renewed engagement with the most significant American evangelical theologian since World War II.

There is a sense that postmodernism with its stops, gaps, and radical breaks with all traditions of received wisdom is suffocating in its own exhaust fumes. This is a good time to affirm something truly awesome: that the God of eternity, the creator and Lord of time, has come among us as one of us in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ, and that this God still speaks to troubled and confused human beings using “comprehensible ideas and meaningful words.”

I applaud and welcome the Henrician renaissance now under way, with this one caveat: what we need is not a repristination of Henry, nor a new defense of his methods and views in every respect, but rather a renewed commitment to doing theology in the service of the church, and to doing it with a Henry-like passion for truth and with love for the God who is both the source and object of truth.

In the closing paragraph of God, Revelation, and Authority, Henry describes the wonder and joy that is the true calling of every theologian and of theology itself. He points us to the contemplation of the living God of creation and redemption, the God who stands and stoops and speaks and stays:

He it is who preserves and governs and consummates his cosmic purpose. But the awesome wonder of the biblical revelation is not his creation and preservation of our vastly immense and complex universe. Its wonder, rather, is that he came as God-man to planet Earth in the form of the Babe of Bethlehem; he thus reminds us that no point in the universe is too remote for his presence and no speck too small for his care and love. He came as God-man to announce to a rebellious race the offer of a costly mercy grounded in the death and resurrection of his only Son and to assure his people that he who stays will remain with him forever and they with him. He is come in Christ incarnate to exhibit ideal human nature and will return in Christ glorified to fully implement the Omega-realities of the dawning future.5

Beyond all of his accomplishments, two things about Carl Henry stand out in my mind. On his last visit to Beeson Divinity School, he spoke in chapel about his conversion to Christ. He never got over the sheer wonder and joy of having been chosen and rescued by God’s surprising grace. He knew what it meant to be born again. The other thing that stands out was his extraordinary humility and kindness toward others. His commitment to the orthodox Christian faith was solid as a rock, but I never heard him speak in a bitter or disparaging way about anybody, not even those with whom he disagreed.

I shall never forget my last visit with Carl. Dr. Greg Waybright, then president of Trinity International University, and I made a pilgrimage to his bedside at the little Moravian nursing home where Henry and his dear wife, Helga, lived. He could not walk and could barely talk, but his mind was abuzz with ideas and plans and new ventures for the advance of God’s kingdom. We prayed and read the Scriptures together. Even though he was in pain, his eyes still sparkled with the joy of Christ. Carl loved to quote Vance Havner’s prayer: “Lord, get me safely home before dark.” Although Carl Henry has been home for some years now, his legacy lives on and still illumines the path we tread toward that Light, which can never be extinguished.

Timothy George

1 Carl F. H. Henry, Confessions of a Theologian (Waco, TX: Word, 1986), 45–46.

2 Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 2, God, Who Speaks and Shows: Fifteen Theses, Part 1 (Waco, TX: Word, 1976), 8.

3 Ibid., 17.

4http://www.biblicalfoundations.org/vanhoozer-responds-to-my-review/ (May 8, 2007).

5 Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 6, God Who Stands and Stays (Waco, TX: Word, 1983), 513.

Editors’ Preface

We begin a book about a Long Island–born theologian with a quote from a Swiss scholar reflecting on a French churchman. In 1922, writing to his friend Eduard Thurneysen, Karl Barth said the following about John Calvin:

Calvin is a cataract, a primeval forest, a demonic power, something directly down from Himalaya, absolutely Chinese, strange, mythological; I lack completely the means, the suction cups, even to assimilate this phenomenon, not to speak of presenting it adequately.

What I receive is only a thin little stream and what I can then give out again is only a yet thinner extract of this little stream.

I could gladly and profitably set myself down and spend all the rest of my life just with Calvin.1

Barth’s words are memorable on their own terms. It is not every day that a magisterial theologian is described by another master scholar as “something directly down from Himalaya,” after all.

Descriptive gymnastics aside, our real interest in Barth’s description is his effort to take the measure of a man whose varied life and voluminous work defy easy summation. So it is with Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry, a man so eminent he bore two middle names. Carl Henry is a distant reality for many modern Christians. Perhaps we should amend that: to a good many folks, he is unknown. He is recognized primarily among scholars, seminarians, and some pastors. Those who are aware of Henry know him to be a formidable theologian, a sometimes impenetrable writer, and an evangelical-at-large of the postwar twentieth century.

These senses are correct. Henry was all these things. But he was more: a tireless evangelist, an incurable optimist, a gifted administrator, a loving father, a devoted husband, a fierce opponent, an eternal journalist, an unstoppable-hatcher-of-grand-schemes, a Sunday school teacher, and a primeval forest. The last of these does not in truth apply; it is true, though, that one could profitably set down with Henry and spend a very long time following his trail of thought.

As two young evangelical scholars, we ourselves are committed to some form of this program. Like many of our peers, we have found ourselves drawn, even mythologically, to Henry. Our lives overlapped to a relatively significant degree with his; he died on December 7, 2003, when both of us were recent college graduates. While we shared an understanding of the massive loss his death represented to evangelicalism, neither of us had a full appreciation of the extent of this man’s singular contribution to the shaping of much of the world we inhabited. We had seminary professors, pastors, and mentors who spoke of their own firsthand dependence on Dr. Henry’s influence and guidance. We heard the stories and legends of his influence in the genesis of Fuller Theological Seminary and in the launch of Christianity Today and of his place in the galvanization of postwar neo-evangelicalism.

Owen was a church member at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, while Henry was a “watchcare member” of the same congregation, living in Watertown, Wisconsin. That secondhand connection aside, we never actually knew the man. We never met him, much as we wish we had. But we are convinced that there are few better or more urgently vital models for young evangelicals interested in theological engagement of an unsteady church and a secular age. As historians, we believe that we are best positioned to thrive when we face the future with the wisdom and training of the past, not when we engage in create-your-own-evangelical-polity-and-theology. We are young, but we actually like the past. We like, furthermore, faithful leaders who would train us in thinking and living unto God. We’re eager to learn from their successes and failures, their strengths and weaknesses.

This book represents our best effort to collect reflections and essays from some of those who knew Henry or who have dedicated significant time and effort to assessing his influence and place in the story of American evangelicalism. To be even more pointed, we count ourselves among the tribe of evangelicals who routinely survey the landscape of American religion and lament the absence of Henry in our own day. Yes, in case you’re wondering, we’d love to hear the answer to, “Dr. Henry, what do you make of Joel Osteen?” though we would have his heart medication close at hand in posing the query.

We’ll assume for a moment that you’re not that different from us. You know you’re supposed to respect, admire, and appreciate the legacy of someone like Carl Henry. But, if pressed, you’d have a hard time explaining why. And you might not even have a clear sense of where to begin if you did want to learn more about this titan of American evangelicalism. Before you launch into this book and are introduced to Henry from several individuals who did have the privilege of knowing him and working alongside him, allow us to lay out a few reasons we find Henry to be as urgently relevant for evangelicals in the twenty-first century.

FIVE REASONS TO ENGAGE CARL HENRY TODAY

First, Henry provides a model of orthodox theological engagement with an unorthodox world. Henry grounded his entire program in divine authority mediated through divine revelation. If you know nothing about Carl Henry, mark this. Henry’s six-volume trilogy, God, Revelation, and Authority (or GRA), is a masterwork, the most serious contribution to a synthesis of evangelical hermeneutics and first theology of the twentieth century. No other work by one of Henry’s fellow evangelicals even tried for this title. In GRA, and in numerous other works less well known, Henry set out to define, delimit, and defend divine truth. In the 1970s and 1980s, at the end of his career, he saw that humanity had entered into a “crisis of word and truth,” as he put it.2 He believed that it was his call to address the crisis and to do so by reattaching that which modernity had sundered. The Word was the Truth; the Truth derived from the Word.

GRA sets out this vision in six volumes that total nearly three thousand pages. Let us be clear: GRA is to the Christian academy what Tolstoy is to the literary guild. His books may in past days have served more as doorstops in the office than as doorways into another realm. It has become somewhat fashionable to drop into conversation at an evangelical seminary that one has acquired GRA, but to read him is another matter altogether. We are happy to commend GRA to those whose interest in Henry is whetted by this volume. It is true that the prose can at times grow thick. It is correct that he never lost his quick-fire journalistic instincts and that this can lead to digressive sections. Yet it is also the case that Henry was a brilliant mind. He was, as all the best theologians are, in regular conversation with the guild. He argued with the living and the dead and engaged them, sometimes multiple scholars in one paragraph, in his masterwork. What is more, he accomplished something in GRA: he showed that the Christian faith is rationally defensible yet spiritually vital. In Henry, one sees that word and truth, heart and mind, authority and piety are one, joined as they must ultimately be not in an abstract concept but in a flesh-and-blood person: Jesus Christ.

Second, Henry’s philosophical engagement can provide young evangelicals with the framework for navigating the perils of encroaching secularism. Somehow, we suspect Henry would be neither surprised nor intimidated by the so-called new atheism, deconstructionist theories, or challenges to ideas of revealed truth. In fact, his own work seemed to have a nearly prophetic ability to foresee some of the most vexing intellectual challenges to the Christian worldview. Are you wrestling with understanding the Christian tradition of moral ethics? Henry wrote on that. Troubled with understanding ideas of epistemology and philosophy? He wrote on that too. And if you cannot quite seem to wrap your mind around concepts of biblical revelation, truth, and inspiration—well, as mentioned, we have a six-volume magnum opus just waiting for you.

This is a promise that has real weight and depth. One of our colleagues and contributors to this book was helped enormously by Henry’s work. Gregory Thornbury was a budding intellectual at a Northeastern college whose Christian piety crashed into the wall of higher criticism in one survey class. Thornbury, now the president of a resurgent The King’s College in Manhattan, read Marcus Borg’s Jesus: A New Vision and “reeled” at the materials.3 He was trained in faithful Christian living, but Greg was knocked off his game by a “well-studied and persuasive scholar with an Oxford DPhil.” who brought him “within a whisker” of losing trust in the Bible.4 In God’s kind providence, Thornbury remembered the name of Carl F. H. Henry, a scholar his father, a pastor, greatly respected. He began devouring Henry’s writings and recovering his trust in God’s Word. It was, he later reflected, “a turning point for me.”5

We suspect that there are a good number of bright young thinkers out there much like the collegiate Thornbury. Their evangelical upbringing was warm and even rich, but in their educational years, they have encountered influential voices that threaten to overwhelm their own understanding of the faith. Where this is the case, we want to freshly commend Henry’s work. It is not perfect; it will not answer every question; it is, like every body of texts ever crafted, a product of its time. But its depth of thought, its level of scholarly interaction, and its abiding zeal for Christ lift it out of the half-priced bookstore consignment bin and beckon us to take and read once more.

Third, Henry provides young evangelicals with a vision for gospel-centered social justice. Of the making of arguments about the connections of the evangelion and the call to peace and justice, there shall be no end. But we believe that Henry provided more light than heat, offering evangelicals a vision and ethic of the kingdom of Christ that managed to affirm the centrality of the atonement and resurrection for sinners, but to also understand that the church must play a part in calling for peace, justice, righteousness, and virtue. What Henry rightly knew, and what evangelicals in our time so easily miss, is that social justice and the gospel must be tethered together closely if there will be true justice and if there will be much of a gospel that really is “good news.”

Henry made this case in his best-selling The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, the most widely read of all his books. Clocking in at eighty-eight pages, the text is almost shockingly ahead of its time, anticipating both a secularizing society and the desperate need for Christians to love their neighbor in tangible ways in such a society. Henry came up in a time when to be a conservative Christian meant accepting cultural marginalization, and perhaps even taking cold comfort in it. He walked a fine line in sociological terms, for the fundamentalists of his day were ready to brand him as a gospel-softening deed-doer, while the liberals of his day were ready to denounce him as a backwater brimstone evangelist whose charitable work was only a means to an end.

Henry was far closer to the fundamentalists in his theological commitments, but he could not tolerate cultural retreat. His sense of idealism and his love for his fellow man impelled him to do everything he could to stir up the church to love and good deeds. So it is that he popped up in surprising places, including the organizing meeting of the 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, a project championed by Ron Sider and others. Henry’s interest in gospel-shaped social justice led him outside his normal circles. It is for this and other reasons that it is thoroughly unfair to label Henry. He was an unabashedly conservative theologian who offered the most forthright defense of biblical authority of any thinker of the twentieth century—and yet he was also powerfully motivated by the need to love justice and pursue righteousness. He is as inspiring as he is iconoclastic.

Fourth, Henry models a broad evangelical ecumenism that is framed by confessional identity. While seemingly paradoxical, Henry managed to reconcile a vision for a broad evangelical coalition with a commitment to necessary theological first principles of orthodoxy. We suspect Dr. Henry would be delighted by some of the broadening coalitions within some corridors of confessional evangelicalism. As cultural Christianity evaporates before our eyes in Western Europe and the United States, the necessity of cooperative efforts among evangelicals of diverse traditions and denominations becomes increasingly imperative. But, as Henry would have warned, these coalitions must be framed by and held in check by the truth of Scripture and the message of the gospel of Christ.

We recognize that some may push against this vision of Henry as a “confessional” thinker. Wasn’t he the man, with Harold John Ockenga and Billy Graham, who was most responsible for minimizing traditional ecclesiological boundaries in the mid-twentieth century? There is some truth to this characterization, we admit. But we must also think carefully about Henry’s identity and his role. With his peers, he made a major contribution to the Christian church in his day. He helped it to see that unity in the gospel was a more powerful unifying force than separating from one’s foes. This, in truth, is what the neo-evangelical project was. It was a referendum on gospel unity, not an attack on meaningful confessionalism.

With many young friends, we are grateful for the example of Henry and his friends. We believe that their recovery of an evangel-driven identity was a contribution for the ages, akin to the pioneering work of Edwards and Whitefield in the First Great Awakening and of Luther and Calvin in the Reformation. We ourselves are happily evangelical. But none of this should distract us from the reality that Henry was a Baptist. Perhaps we see this most clearly in his churchmanship, which is, after all, vitally important to laying hold of a person’s truest, deepest commitments. Henry was a faithful member at Capitol Hill Baptist Church and a longtime Sunday school teacher there. Years after his passing, he was warmly remembered by congregants. He did not carry himself like a world-class scholar but like a fellow worshiper at the feet of Jesus.

Henry would very likely have struck much deeper roots in Baptist theological territory than he did, save for one thing: not all Baptists of his era liked him. He was an outspoken evangelical. In sectors of the Southern Baptist Convention, this was not the pathway to making friends and influencing people. It was the opposite. When R. Albert Mohler Jr. first encountered Henry in the 1980s, he was shocked to find that the best-known evangelical Baptist theologian of his day was not permitted to speak in his graduate seminar at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Henry, we should reiterate, was very much a Baptist. He worked out of his tradition in ways obvious and obscure. But he came unto his own, and his own received him not. It is our delight to, in a very small way, redress past wrongs in a volume of this kind. It is a particular point of pleasure that, alongside other similarly denominated academic centers, the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement is alive and flourishing on the campus of Southern.

Fifth, Henry understood that theology and evangelism are inseparable. It is now the stuff of legend, but Henry famously once told a group of seminarians that the most important theological question of our time is, Do you know the risen Christ? Henry understood that the gospel was only good news if it got there on time. And this conviction and commitment to the truth claims of the gospel undergirded and animated his urgent commitment to global evangelization. As evangelicals become a shrinking minority in the West—and a surging group in the southern hemisphere—we could learn much from Henry’s vision and hope. If the gospel really is true and the promises of God are reliable, then the church universal has good reason to be hopeful and confident in its task.

Here we see how important it is to understand Henry’s theology as a body of thought. Too often we approach theologians in discrete terms, dividing up their work into nicely spliced seminars and reading groups. In reality, there is a straight line between Henry the GRA writer and Henry the evangelist. Biblical authority mattered for the man. He knew what it was to walk through life a lost soul, to have no foundation for hope, to possess no direction for the soul, no light for the mind. He was himself saved by a traveling evangelist when a young man. He never lost his sense of the serendipity of conversion. It could strike at a moment’s notice, giving no warning to a lifetime of unbelief and sin. It is no accident that some of Henry’s closest associates, including the prison reformer Chuck Colson, came from similarly non-Christian backgrounds. Like Colson, Henry understood the convulsive power of the gospel, a gospel that rushes over the most formidable of personal barriers to redeem the depraved in heart.

Any theologian or philosopher who lived by his or her convictions is to be granted special consideration. Henry falls in this category. Not everyone who reads this volume will come away agreeing with him. They cannot fail, however, to find in the stories and reminisces and theological reflections that he was a man who lived what he believed. To be most specific, he believed what divine revelation teaches as a unified message: that the God who speaks does so to save a people for himself. For his teaching, writing, and living, he deserves commendation. Not only this, though—he deserves emulation, the ultimate honor.

THE BROADER CONVERSATION

We publish this book recognizing that it is part of a broader conversation. The discussion of Henry is not waning; it is growing apace. There was an earlier period of Henry-related publishing some twenty-five to thirty years ago. One thinks of works such as the following: Henry’s own Confessions of a Theologian: An Autobiography (Waco, TX: Word, 1986); Bob Patterson’s Carl F. H. Henry, Makers of the Modern Theological Mind (Waco, TX: Word, 1983); R. Albert Mohler Jr.’s chapter “Carl F. H. Henry,” in Baptist Theologians, edited by Timothy George and David S. Dockery (Nashville: Broadman, 1990), 518–38; and a number of the more personal essays in Henry’s Gods of This Age or God of the Ages?, edited by R. Albert Mohler Jr. (Nashville: Broadman, 1994).

The second wave of books interacting with Henry appeared about fifteen years ago. These included Kevin Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster, 2005); Stanley Grenz and John Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville, KY: Westminster, 2001); and most sympathetically and extensively, Russell D. Moore’s The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004). In 2004 the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology devoted its entire Winter 2004 edition to evaluating and honoring Henry.6 We may group two more recent volumes in this later school: Gregory Alan Thornbury’s Recovering Classic Evangelicalism: Applying the Wisdom and Vision of Carl F. H. Henry (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), and G. Wright Doyle’s Carl Henry—A Theologian for All Seasons: An Introduction and Guide to Carl Henry’s God, Revelation and Authority (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010).

In terms of institutional commitment, Henry’s name has graced the nameplates of no less than three scholarly centers: the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Intellectual Discipleship at Union University; and the aforementioned Henry Institute at Southern Seminary. Capitol Hill Baptist Church of Washington, DC, has for over a decade sponsored “Henry Forums” on theology and culture in honor of its former member, Sunday school teacher, and mentor to pastor Mark Dever.

CONCLUSION

We began this preface by reference to the words of Karl Barth on John Calvin. Barth was one of Henry’s most frequently referenced sparring partners. The two men labored in the same task from different theological poles. Both wished to vindicate Christianity as a system of revelation in a century that viewed the Word as outmoded. Barth, though a churchman, championed the neoorthodox position, claiming that the Bible-in-itself was not the Word of God, but contained the Word of God; Henry, though recognizing Barth’s prodigious gifts—he called his writings an “epochal contribution to theology”7—sided with the evangelical tradition in identifying the Scripture as the revealed mind of God itself.

The two men did not cross paths on many occasions. In 1962, Barth came to America from Switzerland for a lecture tour. Henry attended his lectures at the McCormick Divinity School in Chicago and engaged him in the question-and-answer session. The exchange that followed, recounted by Henry in his Confessions, captured perfectly the differences between the two theologians.

“The question, Dr. Barth, concerns the historical factuality of the resurrection of Jesus.” I pointed to the press table and noted the presence of leading religion editors or reporters representing United Press, Religious News Service, Washington Post, Washington Star and other media. If these journalists had their present duties in the time of Jesus, I asked, was the resurrection of such a nature that covering some aspect of it would have fallen into their area of responsibility? “Was it news,” I asked, “in the sense that the man in the street understands news?”

Barth became angry. Pointing at me, and recalling my identification, he asked: “Did you say Christianity Today or Christianity Yesterday?” The audience—largely nonevangelical professors and clergy—roared with delight. When countered unexpectedly in this way, one often reaches for a Scripture verse. So I replied, assuredly out of biblical context, “Yesterday, today and forever.”8

Wherever one lands, this is one of the all-time great trading of wits of the Christian church. Henry’s last response—which Barth followed up with a question about whether photographers would take pictures of the virgin birth—crystallized his optimism about the future God directs. The church would suffer violence, and violent men would seek to destroy it. But they would fail. The kingdom of God might suffer violence but never defeat.

We need many things in our day, but this kind of God-centered hope is paramount. As future chapters will show, Carl Henry did not only quip about his confidence in God’s promises. He made good on it. He fashioned a life by it. He produced a body of thought according to it. We young evangelicals may never have had the privilege of knowing Henry in the flesh. We can, however, encounter both his piety and his theology, profiting from the meeting, discovering in it a godly man who lived what he believed and a Christian theologian who wrote what he had seen: Jesus high and lifted up, the Word once and for all delivered to the saints.

Books like this one are by necessity collaborative efforts. We therefore owe a debt of gratitude to many who have contributed to its completion. We are especially grateful to the various institutions and organizations that collaborated in one form or another to mark the occasion of the centennial of Carl Henry’s birth in 2013. Two conferences in particular, hosted at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, provided venues for many of this book’s chapters to be delivered first in address form.9

We also note our appreciation to the administration at Southern Seminary, including President Albert Mohler and Provost Randy Stinson. Both have provided keen institutional leadership and influence, fostering an environment that reflects the best virtues of Carl Henry’s vision for theological education and scholarship. We are thankful to call that place home.

Deep thanks are especially due to the wonderful team at Crossway. We found it to be a particularly sweet providence that Lane Dennis and Justin Taylor would support this project, especially in light of the long history and partnership between Crossway and Dr. Henry. Jill Carter and Lydia Brownback provided outstanding editorial assistance along the way, and Lauren Harvey led the effort to produce the book’s extraordinary cover.

We are particularly grateful to our wives, Jeannie Hall and Bethany Strachan, who always lovingly and patiently endure our academic enterprises and broadly eccentric scholarly pursuits.

American evangelicalism now faces, as it has at various points in its complex history, something of a crisis moment. In the face of stiffening cultural opposition and the evaporation of cultural Christianity, the movement is once again required to return to its first principles, those convictions and beliefs that anchor our faith and direct our mission. We remain optimistic and hopeful. The faith once for all delivered to the saints remains as true and steadfast as ever, because the God “who speaks and shows” remains unchanging, and his promises are sure. We pray you sense that hopefulness even as you read this book and are strengthened afresh for the task at hand.

Matthew J. Hall and Owen Strachan

1 Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd­mans, 1994), 57.

2 Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1, God Who Speaks and Shows, Preliminary Considerations (Waco, TX: Word, 1976), 21.

3 Marcus Borg, Jesus: A New Vision: Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship (New York: HarperOne, 1991).

4 Gregory Alan Thornbury, Recovering Classic Evangelicalism: Applying the Wisdom and Vision of Carl F. H. Henry (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 14.

5 Ibid., 15.

6http://www.sbts.edu/resources/category/journal-of-theology/sbjt-84-winter-2004.

7 Carl F. H. Henry, “The Dilemma of Facing Karl Barth,” Christianity Today, January 4, 1963, 27–28.

8 Carl F. H. Henry, Confessions of a Theologian (Waco, TX: Word, 1986), 210–11.

9 We were especially delighted to see the broad constellation of evangelical sponsors behind the event in Louisville, including Beeson Divinity School, Christianity Today, Fuller Evangelical Theological Seminary, Prison Fellowship Ministries, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Union University.

1

The Indispensable Evangelical

Carl F. H. Henry and Evangelical Ambition in the Twentieth Century

R. Albert Mohler Jr.

Historians often overplay the term indispensable. Charles De Gaulle once quipped that cemeteries are filled with “indispensable” men. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that some men are indeed indispensable in the stories of nations, movements, and institutions. Historians of the founding era of the United States, for example, increasingly understand the indispensability of certain men whose lives proved consequential in the founding of the American nation. James Thomas Flexner, for example, wrote a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography entitled Washington: The Indispensable Man, a monograph that describes Washington’s indispensable role in the birth of America.1

Carl Henry had a similar stature within the evangelical movement in the United States during the twentieth century. His role in the neo-evangelical movement was, without overstatement, indispensable. Just as the story of America’s founding is impossible to tell without the indispensable George Washington and his network of colaborers, so also it is impossible to tell the story of the evangelical movement in the twentieth century without the indispensable Carl Henry and his fellow laborers Harold John Ockenga and Billy Graham.

In 1983 Word Publishing released a monograph on Carl Henry in their series Makers of the Modern Theological Mind. Bob Patterson, the general editor of the series, chose to write the volume on Carl Henry. He explained in the book’s foreword, “As the editor of this series . . . I had to select an (or the) outstanding American evangelical theologian about whom to write a book. That choice was simplicity itself—Carl F. H. Henry, of course. Carl Henry is the prime interpreter of evangelical theology—one of its leading theoreticians and now in his seventies, the unofficial spokesman for the entire tradition.”2 Later he wrote, “Carl Henry has been the prime mover in helping evangelical theology in America re-assert its self-respect.”3 In 1978, Time magazine named Carl Henry evangelicalism’s leading theologian. In his obituary in the New York Times, published on December 13, 2003, Laurie Goodstein described Carl Henry as the “brain of the evangelical movement”—a line that served as the headline of the obituary.4

The description of Henry as the “brain” of the evangelical movement was not original to Goodstein. She adopted the phrase from none other than David Neff, the then-editor of Christianity Today. Neff told the New York Times, “If we see Billy Graham as the great public face and general spirit of the evangelical movement, Carl Henry was the brains.” Goodstein also said, “In more than 40 books he wrote or edited, Dr. Henry laid out an intellectual defense both for a literal understanding of Scripture and for the imperative of spreading the faith.” She went on to conclude, “Dr. Henry helped start several of the institutional pillars of the evangelical movement: Fuller Theological Seminary, where he was the first acting dean, and the National Association of Evangelicals, in addition to Christianity Today.” Greg Thornbury later added a similar assessment of Henry’s role in the neo-evangelical movement: “It would be fair to say that if Billy Graham was the heart of evangelicalism, Carl F. H. Henry was its head. The man with a massive brain, a journalist’s pen, and an Athanasian fortitude.”5 Paul House also noted, “It is historically untenable to ignore or dismiss Carl Henry’s role in the shaping of twentieth century American evangelicalism. His involvement in evangelical life is well known, and has been well documented by himself and others.”6 My own assessment of Henry already published in Baptist Theologians is in accord with the statements above: “In an age of declining theological vigor and few theological giants, Carl F. H. Henry has emerged as one of the theological luminaries of the twentieth century. His experience as journalist, teacher, theologian, editor, and world spokesman for evangelical Christianity ranks him among the few individuals who can claim to have shaped a major movement.”7 I continue to stand by those words and the assessment made in that essay.

A PERSONAL ACCOUNT

HENRY AT SOUTHERN SEMINARY

I first encountered Dr. Henry in his theological literature. Remaking the Modern Mind was the first of his books I read. This work and others on the modern mind were written a generation before I read them. These books, however, described exactly what I was seeing and experiencing both in the modern world and in classrooms at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary during the 1980s.

I met Dr. Henry personally when he visited Southern Seminary at the invitation of the Student Evangelical Fellowship (SEF) in the 1984–1985 academic year. This was a critical time for both the seminary and the Southern Baptist Convention. Just one year prior (1983), Glenn Hinson, one of the most influential professors on the campus of Southern Seminary, and James Leo Garrett of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary participated in a literary project that asked the question, Are Southern Baptists evangelicals? Garrett was more open to the notion that Southern Baptists were evangelical of a sort. Hinson, however, was adamant that Southern Baptists were not evangelicals. Evangelicals were not only a different theological tribe but of a different species! As both he and other SBC moderates saw it, evangelical was an undesirable adjective and a noun they did not intend to be.

Furthermore, in 1984 Jimmy Draper, then president of the Southern Baptist Convention, published Authority: The Critical Issue for Southern Baptists. That the president of the SBC was writing about serious theological issues within the church was an important achievement for the convention. Draper’s book is also notable because it was largely dependent on the work of Carl Henry. Further, Draper, as president of the convention, included Henry and other prominent evangelicals in many important conversations taking place in Southern Baptist circles.

When Dr. Henry arrived on campus at Southern Seminary, I was serving as the assistant to my predecessor, President Roy Honeycutt. Dr. Honeycutt called me and indicated that we were facing an institutional challenge due to Henry’s presence on campus. Henry, the most distinguished evangelical theologian of our time, had come to Southern Seminary, and yet no faculty member would host him.8 In light of this crisis, I was asked to host Henry. This was an experience that, for me, was a bit like discovering one had been asked to have breakfast with a visiting head of state!

Dr. Henry’s arrival proved an intimidating experience—a massive, titanic theological presence had been delivered unto me for hosting. Having admired Henry’s work and having listened to so many audio recordings of his lectures, I wondered what he was going to do with this twenty-something who had been appointed as his official host simply because the members of the faculty did not want to host him.

Dr. Henry accompanied me to my PhD theological colloquium, where I introduced him to Dr. Frank Tupper, the chairman of that colloquium and a senior faculty member at Southern. The faculty, having met prior to my arrival with Henry, had decided that Henry was certainly welcome to participate as an observer but was not allowed to speak. As usual, Henry was incredibly gracious. He folded himself into a chair among the students, took out a tattered, leather briefcase with “C. H.” in gold on the clasp, retrieved some notes, and listened quietly.

The student presenting in colloquium that day was Charles Scalise, who now serves as professor of church history at Fuller Theological Seminary. Scalise had written a very incisive paper on Brevard Childs’s pioneering work on canonical theology. After roughly thirty minutes of cross-examination from the students, the faculty entered the conversation with a very lively debate about Hans Frei, James Barr, and Brevard Childs. Though I could almost feel the energy coming out of Dr. Henry, he exercised restraint and said nothing. At the end of the colloquium he privately made some very kind comments to Scalise about the paper.