CONFESSIONS OF A THEOLOGIAN: An Autobiography, by Carl F.H. Henry, published by Word Books, Waco Texas, 1986, hardcover $14.95.
Dr. Henry has been called “the leading theologian” among evangelicals of our time. The skillfully-told story of his life which took him into the heart of many of the major religious developments of our century can help us to better understand them.
Beginnings
Born in New York City in 1913 as the oldest of 8 children of a hard-working German immigrant family, he early began working for a newspaper and was a reporter and editor by the time he was 19. His father was a nominal Lutheran and his mother a Roman Catholic, but the family was not religious, although he went to an Episcopal Sunday school. After his conversion he attended Wheaton College at about the time some of us were at Calvin. ln those depression years his journalistic experience helped him to work his way as a reporter and even got him a faculty job at teaching typing. In that capacity, he met the daughter of a baptist pioneer missionary family in the African Cameroons, Helga Bender, who in due time became his wife. After college graduation he took graduate work at both Wheaton and Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. He frankly evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of his training and teachers and at one point calls attention to the influence of Gordon Clark, W. H. Jellema and Cornelius Van Til in shaping his thinking (p. 111).
A Versatile Career
When Fuller Seminary began in 1947 he became dean, and he provides an account of the early opposition to and problems of that venture.
In 1955 he was invited to become editor of a new evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, designed to give the liberal Christian Century “a run for its biases” (p. 144). In the next twelve years he saw that project through its early struggles far outstrip its rival in distribution and influence. The central part of the book traces these developments. Christianity Today, like the earlier Southern Presbyterian Journal (now Presbyterian Journal), was an outgrowth of the dream of the famous Presbyterian China missionary, Dr. L. Nelson Bell. (He had headed a large hospital just north of our China field, and had been stirred to action by the liberal betrayal of the Christian mission and by Dr. J. Gresham Machen’s exposure of it.) The paper got off to a running start, especially with the support of Bell’s famous son-in-law, Billy Graham, and of the Presbyterian industrialist head of Sun Oil Company, J. Howard Pew. “Contending that the venture was needed only if it ‘gets preachers back to preaching the Bible’, Pew volunteered $150,000 a year for two years” (p. 145). With that kind of beginning subsidy the paper was able to quickly gain many readers by free offers to all ministers and ministerial students while soliciting paid subscriptions.
The remarkably frank reporting of the interplay of personalities and diverse opinions in the development of the paper makes interesting and illuminating reading (especially to anyone who has any experience in such a venture). Bell once said that “not even one of the Board has the remotest idea of the complexity of our problems,” as they thought only of printing some good articles, editorials and news reports, with little awareness of the needed “analysis, balance and judgment” (p. 150). During these years the differences of perspective in the board and editorial staff gave trouble. Henry felt that the paper, aimed at winning the clergy, should more forthrightly deal with our Christian responsibility to face political, social and economic problems and not leave these matters (as some evangelicals had tended to do) to the exclusive attention of the liberals. Others, increasingly disgusted with liberal churchmen’s and churches’ preoccupation with political, social and economic matters to the neglect of the gospel , felt that this should be vigorously opposed and that the paper should aim at arousing and enlisting laymen in the opposing evangelical movement. “Only by awakening the laity can this trend be stopped. How to do it is the problem” (p. 268). Such differences about policy finally led to the rather awkward end of Henry’s 12–year editorship in 1968 and his replacement by Dr. Harold Lindsell, a long-time friend who had been best man at his wedding and later a fellow teacher at Fuller Seminary.
Henry‘s prominence as editor of Christianity Today , as well as his books and teaching, had involved him in a wide variety of evangelical movements and speaking assignments around the world. He taught at Eastern Baptist Seminary, figured in Key-73 and the Lausanne 1974 Congress on World Evangelization, and authored a massive series of books on God, Revelation and Authority (which in their encyclopedic coverage remind one of the books of Berkouwer). Since 1974 he has been lecturer-at-large for World Vision, in demand for speaking and teaching engagements in many parts of the world.
Conclusions
The last chapter of his biography on “The Evangelical Prospect in America” highlights his “two main convictions,” (1) “that American evangelicals presently face their biggest opportunity since the Protestant Reformation, if not since the apostolic age” and (2) that they “are forfeiting that opportunity” as “many evangelical leaders bask promotionally in the movement’s towering success instead of point it to repentance, rededication, reformation and renewal.” He recalls the coming of the NAE in ‘42, Fuller Theological Seminary in ‘47, Billy Graham’s crusades in ‘49, Christianity Today in ‘56, and the rise of new evangelical student groups, but ruefully observes, “Yet none of the major contributory evangelical movements fully achieved its original goal” as evangelicals “failed to walk through open doors that might spectacularly have set their cause ahead with important consequences for the nation’s religious fortunes.” His survey, from the unusual point of view of his own deep and wide involvement in these movements, highlights their internal weakness and tendency to fragment because of their lack of a common biblical, doctrinal foundation. One senses in his analysis a certain ambiguity as he shrewdly exposes this problem, but in his own ecumenical efforts to promote broad evangelical cooperation does not really escape from it. Thus we find him seeming to deplore the disagreements about the Bible’s inerrancy (pp. 365, 384), although he had maintained before even taking the job as editor of Christianity Today that “an authoritative scripture is the watershed of theological controversy,” and evidently continued to champion this principle throughout his career (pp. 142, 366, 367). The early history of the Reformed churches highlights the way in which they, facing comparable confusion, by painstaking study of God’s Word achieved their carefully constructed “forms of unity” or creeds, and on that basis were able, despite some large differences, to work together for centuries in a common Christian cause. Henry’s survey of some of today’s grandiose but disappointing ecumenical efforts really highlights their weaknesses because of lack of such a common foundation.
The “Watershed” Issue
Despite some such confusion in his ecumenical involvements, Henry’s unqualified commitment to the Lord and His Word comes through his writings and biography loud and clear. And it has important bearing on the predicament of our churches today. While he taught some recent courses at Calvin Theological Seminary, for which he commuted from his home in Arlington, Virginia, I, in a brief interview, referred to his having been a subject of Dr. Allen Verhey’s doctoral dissertation. Of this he was apparently unaware, but when I remarked that this dissertation on “The Use of the Scripture in Moral Discourse” virtually repeated both the views and the structure of the book of Verhey’s Yale University Professor David H. Kelsey, The Uses of the Scripture in Recent Theology, this provoked Dr. Henry’s immediate interest. He referred me to some 50 pages in the 4th volume of his God, Revelation and Authority which contained a devastating analysis of Kelsey’s treatment of the authority of the Bible as being an example of “the newest phase in a continuing anti-scriptural revolt against divine authority. It repudiates the Holy Spirit’s inspiration of the scriptural writings, repudiates the contingent divine authority of the apostles in their doctrinal witness to such inspiration and repudiates the objective truth of the inspired teaching of Scripture” (p. 97). “It . . . reduces theology to an intricate exercise in futility and nonsense” (p. 91).
Kelsey’s book purported to be a historical study of some 7 theologians ranging from Warfield to Paul Tillich, to determine from their use of the Bible what it means that the Bible is the authority in moral matters. Finding little, if any, agreement among them, he concluded that it is one’s own “inspired imagination” that determines how the Bible functions as authority. Dr. Verhey followed a similar procedure, comparing Walter Rauschenbusch, the father of the social gospel, with Carl Henry, on point after point agreeing with Rauschenbusch rather than Henry. Thus, for Verhey too, although the Bible is “authoritative,” it may be applied to current matters only when sanctioned by “warrants” such as its acceptability in present society, and the most important “warrant” of one’s own “experience!”
When, a few years ago we had to object to the synod against Dr. Verhey’s critical denial of scripture texts, the objections were dismissed as dealing with mere isolated texts, despite Verhey’s statement that his method covered also our Lord’s resurrection. When we pointed out that his 318-page dissertation showed the same subjectivist denial of the Bible’s authority in morals, this was brushed aside as irrelevant. Who would have thought at that time that the denomination’s Board of Publications would, on its own initiative now publish Verhey’s, what a Christian Renewal review characterized as “socialistic” treatment of the Heidelberg Catechism as a denominationally sponsored guide to the churches’ creed?
Henry has well said that the Bible’s authority is a “watershed” which decides in what direction one’s course will go. Even confronted by enormous pressures to work for “common fronts,” he has really been unable to allow for straddling that dividing line, and has labored long and well to persuade people to acknowledge the authority of God’s Word. Dr. Berkouwer, with whom he in his writing has been compared, after early labors on the right side of that divide, has gone over to the other side to further mislead churches that are getting ever further away from confessing the Bible’s authority. Our synod studies and decisions, one after another, testimony of students in our seminary and the denomination’s official publications, especially the almost invariable conclusion that “the Bible doesn’t speak clearly” about the points in question, clearly show to which side of the “watershed” our denomination is currently moving.
Don’t overlook the fact that even the effort to pull the divided churches together by allowing for differences of opinion on this point, has itself already gone over to the wrong side of the divide, because it is conceding that the Bible no longer decides our course!
Our problem is not new, produced by the sweeping changes in our society, as some learned guides would have us believe. What we are encountering is exactly the same thing as our Lord did when he exposed and ridiculed the fraudulent labors of the scribes of that day to “nullify” the word of God, whenever it crossed their wishes (Matt. 15:6; Mark 7:13). The Lord encountered the same tactics when the devil in his temptations “cited scripture to his purpose,” and was silenced by the Lord’s own appeal to His Word. Recall how the Lord concluded His written Word with a kind of “footnote:” “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book” (Rev. 22:18, 19). Although one may try (as a recent writer did) to restrict the application of this text, no one can stop the Lord‘ s own on-going execution of his threat in the churches of our time. May we, accordingly work and pray to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” (James 1:22).
The reader can keenly appreciate Dr. and Mrs. Henry’s expressed recognition and dependence on the Lord’s gracious direction through their extraordinary career. At the same time, the large, promising and disappointing evangelical projects in which he was involved, not consistently and solidly based on God’s Word—as we have seen—expected far too much from big “rallies” and spectacular demonstrations. (Recall Elijah’s disappointed expectations at Mt. Carmel). The humanistic (Arminian) calculations and methods often used in these modern projects seem very different from the apostles’ reports of “all that God had done with them” (Acts 14:27; 15:4), and from Paul’s explanation, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase” (I Cor. 3:6, 7). We must pray and work for reformation and revival in the Lord’s way and time.