Recovering Classic Evangelicalism

Applying the Wisdom and Vision of Carl F. H. Henry

Gregory Alan Thornbury

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781433530654
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Once upon a time, evangelicalism was a countercultural upstart movement. Positioned in between mainline denominational liberalism and reactionary fundamentalism, evangelicals saw themselves as evangelists to all of culture. Billy Graham was reaching the masses with his Crusades, Francis Schaeffer was reaching artists and university students at L'Abri, Larry Norman was recording Jesus music on secular record labels and touring with Janis Joplin and the Doors, and Carl F. H. Henry was reaching the intellectuals through Christianity Today. It was the dawn of "classic evangelicalism." Surveying the current evangelical landscape, however, one gets the feeling that we're backpedaling quickly. We are more theologically diffuse, culturally gun-shy, and fragmented than ever before. What has happened? And how do we find our way back? Using the life and work of Carl F. H. Henry as a key to evangelicalism's past and a cipher for its future, this book provides crucial insights for a renewed vision of the church's place in modern society and charts a refreshing course toward unity under the banner of "classic evangelicalism."

CHAPTER 1

The Lost World of Classic Evangelicalism

Everyone loves a good opening sequence in a film, and one of my favorites has to be the first fifteen minutes of Jurassic Park, the adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel. The story introduces the audience to Dr. Alan Grant, a paleontologist who spends his days on archeological digs looking for dinosaur bones, when he is sought out by John Hammond, an underwriter of Grant’s research and owner of a genetics lab. Hammond invites Grant and his graduate student Dr. Ellie Sattler to come with him to review his latest project, situated on Isla Nublar, about one hundred miles off Costa Rica. Upon arriving at the island via helicopter, Grant and his colleagues are taken on their first tour of Jurassic Park. As they make their way through the gates, Grant’s jeep pulls up the side of a hill, and what he sees leaves him speechless: a brontosaurus goes lumbering past them. When Hammond tells Grant that the park has a live T. rex, the paleontologist gets light-headed and has to sit down. For years he has been studying dry bones and fantasizing about a world in which these magnificent creatures actually lived and moved about in power on the earth. Now, he is confronted with the reality before him: “Dinosaurs aren’t just an object of study anymore—they are standing here right in front of me, confronting me with their strange and powerful ways.”

It may seem strange to begin a book on Carl F. H. Henry’s legacy by comparing him to a dinosaur. We live, however, in unstable days, and somehow the juxtaposition seems strangely apt, as I hope to show. For if we were going to press the Jurassic Park analogy further, we might note that the dinosaurs still have some fight left in them.

I grew up in the Northeast, where my father pastored a village church just outside of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Our congregation at the time was aligned with the American Baptist Churches (USA). Throughout his time serving as a minister, my father was actively involved in evangelical renewal projects, which proved to be a discouraging, if not impossible, task. But I remember his attending a denominational meeting in which Carl Henry spoke about recovering confidence in biblical authority. The presentation buoyed his spirits, so he wrote Henry to thank him. Several weeks later, he received a very gracious and thoughtful reply from the great theologian. My friend and colleague Owen Strachan, who worked in the extensive Henry archive at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, sent me a copy of the letter, which was on file. It reminded me of the debt that I personally, and I believe all of us corporately, owe to this great man.

My own sense of gratitude to Henry is reflected in my own biography. In my freshman year of college, I was exposed to a high dose of the historical-critical method of biblical study from a very kind, brilliant, and influential professor. Our freshman biblical survey textbook was Marcus J. Borg’s Jesus: A New Vision. My mind reeled as I read through its contents. I had been brought up with the conviction that the Bible was God’s very word, that it had a supernatural, objective origin, and that it was wholly trustworthy. And yet, in the classroom I was being confronted by a well-studied and persuasive scholar with an Oxford DPhil who was teaching us about form and redaction criticism, and the all-too-human manner in which the Scriptures came together. I came within a whisker of losing my evangelical confidence in the authority of Scripture. I called former mentors and consulted the authors I had read in high school, but none of these answered my doubts. Then, remembering my father’s high esteem for the theology of Carl F. H. Henry, I went to the library. Taking up nearly a whole shelf on its own was God, Revelation and Authority. As an undergraduate student engaged in both philosophy and biblical studies, I immediately identified with Henry’s approach and scholarship. Here was a philosopher-theologian of astonishing erudition and a titanic intellect. I remember thinking, “If this guy could believe in biblical inerrancy, then I can too.” It proved to be the turning point for me.

I must make one other confession at the outset before proceeding any further. During my PhD work at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, several friends and I gathered in the office of the newly engaged Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, where it soon became apparent that each and every one of us had the legacy of Carl Henry running through our veins. Paul R. House wrote Carl to ask him whether he had the rights to his masterwork God, Revelation and Authority (GRA), and whether he had any interest in seeing it republished. Henry wrote back, answering in the affirmative, and four of us—Paul House, C. Ben Mitchell, Richard Bailey, and I—journeyed to meet Carl, who seemed exiled in Watertown, Wisconsin. During that visit, we were all transformed into official Henry protégés of a sort, and I had the good fortune of beginning a correspondence with Carl and his wife, Helga, over a period of time. In fact, one of the greatest privileges of my academic career was to travel to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School to present on Hans Frei and postliberalism at one of Henry’s last graduate seminars. In time, and with the enthusiastic support of R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Seminary, and Lane Dennis from Crossway, GRA was reissued as a complete set in 1999. So, in the interest of full disclosure, I confess up front that I am no unbiased bystander or scholar of the Henry corpus. I feel like Dr. Grant in Jurassic Park. I have seen a time in which giants roamed the land, and like all travelers who sojourn in magical places, I long for myself and my fellow evangelicals to return to the world of Henry—where the promise and power of evangelicalism seemed to be just within reach.

Evangelicalism: A Suicide Death Cult

Throughout its relatively brief and checkered history, evangelicalism has been given many definitions. The question, who are we? bedevils any family, culture, or religious group. Likewise, the question, who am I? is the fundamental query of human existence. It was, after all, the thorny matter at hand when Descartes began searching for his Archimedean point in epistemology. During this quest to discover the indubitable foundations for thought, Descartes realized that such issues are inextricably bound up with personhood. His program of methodological doubt—supposing that everything he saw or experienced was a chimera and illusory—plunged him into a deep melancholy—if his Meditations on First Philosophy are taken as memoir as much as description of his approach to achieving truth. Descartes supposed that some malicious demon might be controlling his senses, causing him to believe that which was spurious. But it was precisely this moment of despair, the French philosopher believed, that occasioned his greatest discovery: that if he was being deceived, then he most certainly existed.

And let this [deceiver of supreme power and cunning] deceive as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.1

Descartes’s cogito stands as an archetype of the “who am I?” interrogative. For him, it was crucial to know who we are in order to get to the question of what we can be, or what can be known. One need not be a Cartesian to appreciate his contribution to the history of self-definition. Discovering one’s identity—both as an individual and as part of culture—is important to a person’s internal sense of purpose and prerogatives. For their part, evangelicals have in the past almost fetishized the business of self-examination. In the 1980s and 1990s it was the subject of seemingly endless discussion, with more conferences, essays, monographs, confessions, and salvos than any other comparable movement. This is not to gainsay such discussions by any means, for the book you are reading is a kind of alternative memoir of evangelicalism: its past, present, and future.

While lecturing in Norway recently, I was asked to define evangelicalism. “It is,” said I, “a suicide death cult.” I got the quizzical look I was anticipating, so I went on to explain. Evangelicals are a people who are constantly second-guessing themselves and constantly reimagining their project(s) along those lines. Stated differently, we are an editorial people, or, put more precisely, a self-editorializing people. Like most core traits of a collective, this attribute of evangelicalism expresses itself in a bipolar manner. First, the penchant for editing has made evangelicals a dynamic, forward-thinking movement. As Joel Carpenter has demonstrated in his helpful history Revive Us Again, this impulse to change sometimes served in positive ways, with revivalism helping the movement break free of the shackles of fundamentalism.2 Timothy George built on this point in his work on William Carey3 and D. L. Moody,4 arguing that fresh gospel resources are always available to each successive generation. Similarly, A God-Sized Vision, by John Woodbridge and Collin Hansen, has detailed the sort of esprit de corps that inspired great movements of missional advance for the evangelical cause in America, from the First Great Awakening through the 1950s and the reinvigoration that the ministry of Billy Graham brought to believers around the globe.5 In addition to this willingness to leave behind certain practices and traditions in order to make room for renewal and growth, evangelicals have inherited the virtue of self-critique from their Protestant forebears and their insistence on semper ecclesia reformanda. To admit error, to declare mea culpa and attempt to square with even the hardest truths, is a Christian virtue setting us apart from other religious traditions, say, cults that must lay claim to the infallibility of their leaders, or even other world religions like Islam that are wary of admitting shortcomings in the reception of their tradition.

There is, however, another side to this penchant for internal critique. Left to themselves, evangelicals will criticize themselves to death, or at the very least, to the point of exhaustion. We have a self-image problem, and there is a veritable cottage industry for this analysis. Much of the navel gazing is welcome, entertaining, and precisely on target. Stephanie Drury’s blog, “Stuff Christian Culture Likes,” hits close to home. Her tagline—“Christian culture is funny because it doesn’t have much (if anything) to do with Christ himself”—rings true.6 Then there is the string of volumes assessing our condition, from Os Guinness’s Fit Bodies, Fat Minds7 to Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity,8 to virtually anything Randall Balmer has written in the past ten years.

Several years ago, while I was reading Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy, I found myself wondering how much of this could have been avoided if Brian as a little boy had not been made to wear clip-on ties and shoes with slick soles to church.9 And just to show that I am being evenhanded with my analysis, consider David Wells’s series of apocalyptic books about evangelical decline: No Place for Truth,10 God in the Wasteland,11 Losing Our Virtue,12 and Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World.13 What really strikes you about those volumes is that they are a systematic theology via negativa but read through a quasi-sociological lens. The primary mode of discourse is lament.

What is ironic about all of these ...