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Cultural Engagment From the Cross
Following the exposition and applicaton of the import of a kingdom message, Henry then spends the next chapter entitled “The Fundamentalist Thief on the Cross” challenging the fundamentalist camp to re-engage culture with supernatural verities contained in the Scriptures. The reality is that man must come to terms with Jesus Christ. Henry gives a clarion call “to bring men everywhere to a knowledge of Jesus Christ.”51 After bringing a challenge that would resonate with fundamentalists, Henry then enumerates fundamentalist tenets that show how distorted it is to view fundamentalism in terms of eschatology only. Those tenets are:
(1) purposive and moral as over and against a purely mathematical uinverse
(2) a personal God as against an impersonal god
(3) divine creation as over against a naturalistic evolution
(4) man’s uniqueness as a divine endowment rather than human achievement
(5) man’s predicament is not an animal inheritance nor a necessity of his nature but rather a consequence of his voluntary revolt against God
(6) salvation can only be provided by God as against the view that man is comptent to save himself
(7) the Scriptures are a revelation lighting the way to the divine incarnation in Jesus Christ as the Redeemer of mankind, as against the view that they stand among many records of religious experience without a difference in kind
(8) history is bound up with man’s acceptance or rejection of the God-man, rather than that history is primarily what happens among nations
(9) the future is not an open question, but that world events move toward an ultimate consummation in a future judgment of the race. Having these foundational beliefs safe guarded and grounded in the Holy Writ, the fundamentalist is without excuse in not engaging culture with these transformational truths. In advancing themes found in Remaking the Modern Mind, in the chapter entitled, “The Struggle for a New World Mind,” Henry champions intellectual engagement with the secular world. This chapter would be played over and over in the ensuing years as Henry lays out a blueprint of intellectual engagment in theory and what he hoped would be practice. The first step is the development of competent literature in every field of study, on every level from grade school through the university that adequately presents each subject with its implications written from the perspective of the Christian and non-Chirstian view. Second, evangelicalism must prioritze the development of higher institutions of learning in order to counteract the endoctrination that occurs at state sponsored educational institutions. In order for this to become a reality, evangelical churches will have to redistribute on a massive scale the resources that God has entrusted to the church in the United States. The effect of this shift in educational paradigms will be that Christian expansion will find a more hospitable environment due to the impact of the spread of Christian convictions.
The Uneasy Conscience Revisited
When Henry finished writing The Uneasy Conscience in 1947, he had big dreams for what evangelicalism could become. The time was ripe. The message was exactly what was needed for the social and individual needs that were being faced. The message and challenge were bold. But what was the effect? For a more detailed look at part of the answer to the question the following chapter will address, but in 1988 Henry would take a look back in a chapter entitled “The Uneasy Conscience Revisted” in his book Twilight of a Great Civilization. In Twilight of a Great Civilization, Henry warns of coming barbarian invasion, in rejecting fixed truth based upon the God of creation as revealed in the Bible, that threatens the very foundation of Western Civilization:
Modernity deliberately experiences this new [pagan] morality as an option superior to the inherited Judeo-Christian alternative. What underlies the atheistic commitment to novel sexual and marital and political patterns is a stultification of Biblical conscience, an irreligious redefinition of the good, a profane will set. . . . A half-generation ago the pagans were still largely threatening at the gates of Western culture; now the barbarians are plunging into the . . . mainstream. As they seek to reverse the inherited intellectual and moral heritage of the Bible, the Christian world-life view and the secular world-life view engage as never before in rival conflict for the mind, the conscience, the will, the spirit, the very selfhood of contemporary man. Not since the apostolic age has the Christian vanguard faced so formidable a foe in its claims for the created rationality and morality of mankind.61 It was in this setting of warning that Henry revisit The Uneasy Conscience.
His concern at the time was still a prevailing concern, and in light of the events of the ensuing decades, one that was more pessimistic than when he first wrote in 1947. Ray S. Anderson provides an outline of The Uneasy Conscience: “Here he called for a renewed conern for social issues, serious interactions with sciene and culture, and above all, a renewed commitment to biblical theism as the the basis of an apologetic which focused on the theological essentials on which evangelicals coud unite, not on secondary issues on which they tended to divide.”
The Uneasy Conscience was not an angry diatribe on fundamentalism. Rather it was a call to action and re-dedication. In Henry’s words it “was a conscience troubled by the failure of American Christianity to relate Biblical verities to crucial contemporary events.” Even forty years after the call to action in The Uneasy Conscience, evangelicalism seemed not have heard the call to action, much less did it proactively seize the moment:
Unless evangelical Christians break out of their cultural isolation, unless we find new momentum in the modern world, we may just find ourselves so much on the margin of the mainstream movements of modern history that soon ours will be virtually a Dead Sea Caves community. Our supposed spiritual vitalities will be known only to ourselves, and publicly we will be laughed at as a quaint but obsolescent remnant from the past.
Here was the startling situation that “Biblical Christianity, which had been historically the taproot of legitimate public concerns, was now often seen to be undevoted to human well-being. Christianity ought to be in the front of social reform by challenging social injustice, political humanism, and evils such as racial intolerance and the liquor traffic. We must oppose all more evils, societal and personal, and point a better way.”65 It had to be disappointing to Henry, for he had labored faithfully and vigorously calling evangelicals to social engagement. And yet for all his labor, by any standard, by the time he died, the evangelical engagement with societal ills was paltry by comparison to the cultural engagement of the nineteenth century.66 Another aspect of this call that was misinterpreted by many in the fundamentalist camp was that Henry was in no way endorsing the modernist agenda. In point of fact, Henry was calling for a rejection of the obscurantist position of the fundamentalist and return in cultural engagement that is based on the revealed word of God:
I had no inclination whatever to commend the modernist agenda, for its soft and sentimental theology could not sustain its “millennial fanaticism.” Discarding historic doctrinal convictions and moving in the direction of liberalism would not revitalize evangelicalism. Fundamentalism had a realistic view of man and an awareness of the dread of the cancer of sin. Only supernatural regeneration, I insisted, was adequate to cope with human wickedness.
CHAPTER 1 Introduction
1.1 Purpose of Study
1.2 Reason for Study
1.3 Issue at Hand
1.4 Hypothesis
1.5 Study Goals
1.6 Methodology
1.7 Chapter Outline
CHAPTER 2 The Stage is Set
2.1 The Shaping of a Theologian
2.2 Long Island Beginnings
2.3 A Theological Quest
2.4 Henry’s Objection to Strong’s Compromise
2.5 Theological Foundations
2.6 Theological Maturation
2.7 A Theological Via Media
2.8 Institutional Development
2.9 Conclusion
CHAPTER 3 The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism: An Exposition
3.1 Evangelical Renascence
3.2 Fundamentalist Flaws
3.3 Agents of Change
3.4 Dispensational Pessimism
3.5 Cultural Engagment From the Cross
3.6 The Uneasy Conscience Revisited
3.7 The Failure of Fundamentalism—Revisited
3.8 Fundamentalism—Movement and Mentality
3.9 Conclusion
CHAPTER 4 Evangelical Definition
4.1 Evangelical: What does it Mean?
4.2 Henry and the Problem of Evangelical Definition
4.3 Evangelical Institutional Development
4.4 Evangelical Success
4.5 Henry and The Reformed Approach to Christianity and Culture
4.6 Conclusion
CHAPTER 5 Revelational Epistemology
5.1 GRA—A Landmark Project
5.2 Knowing that You Know: Revelation– The Basic Epistemological Axiom
5.3 The Starting Point: Revelation
5.4 The Method for Recognizing Truth: Reason
5.5 The Principle of Verification: Scripture
5.4 Logical Consistency and Coherence: The Test for Truth
5.5 Theology’s Task: Exposition and Elucidation
5.6 Apologetic Confrontation
5.7 Upon An A Priori
5.8 The God Who Speaks and Shows
5.9 The Intelligibility of the Logos of God
5.10 Propositional Revelation
5.11 What Role Does Inerrancy Play?
5.12 Biblical Authority
5.13 Inspiration
5.14 Inerrancy of the Scriptures
5.15 Infallibility
5.16 The History of Inerrancy in the Church
5.17 Conclusion
CHAPTER 6 Henry’s Critique of Karl Barth
6.1 A Theological Critique
6.2 Rational or Irrational—Barth’s view of Reason
6.3 Man’s Mind and God’s Mind
6.4 Propositional or Personal—Barth’s Doctrine of Revelation
6.5 Conclusion
CHAPTER 7 Henry, His Critics and His Legacy
7.1 Henry and His Critics
7.2 Critique of the Criticism
7.3 Henry and His Legacy
7.4 Conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY
