In my last piece, “The Evangelical Coalition,” I outlined the formation of the new evangelical movement (or, as Roger Olson calls it, postfundamentalist evangelicalism). As that piece closed, I noted that Olson surveys five theologians as representatives of evangelical theology.
- Carl F. H. Henry: Dean of Evangelical Theology
- E. J. Carnell: Apologist for Evangelical Theology
- Bernard Ramm: Moderate Evangelical Theologian
- Donald Bloesch: Progressive Evangelical Theologian
- Clark Pinnock: Postconservative Evangelical Theology
In this piece I summarize Olson’s remarks on Carl F. H. Henry. ((I intended to make this brief, but alas! I decided to go ahead and post since I want to keep something newish up on oxgoad.))
Carl Henry became a major force in the developing new evangelical movement. A student of Gordon Clark at Wheaton, he emphasized (with Clark) a rational approach to Christianity. He didn’t completely break with revivalism (he was an ally of Billy Graham, after all), but “his theological thinking was the antithesis of emotionalism, subjectivism, fideism, and obscurantism. To Henry, these are the bane of evangelical existence and need correction, if not rejection, by modern evangelical theologians. Henry’s pattern of evangelical thinking escapes simple labeling, but one appropriate term for it may be ‘rational, evangelical, theistic presuppositionalism.’” (pp. 96-97). Henry taught that every system of belief rests on “unprovable axioms” but that those axioms, subjected to the tests of “logical consistency and explanatory power” (p. 104), are capable of evaluation. Only Christianity survives these tests.
Henry’s position on the founding faculty of Fuller Seminary, as the first editor of Christianity Today, and as one of the founders of the Evangelical Theological Society, put him in a prominent position in the evangelical world. The publication of his book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) proved a watershed event in the post-war theological world. It “fell like a bombshell on conservative Protestantism” (p. 101). Fundamentalists rejected the book; “moderates” embraced it. “The Uneasy Conscience … came to be viewed as a neo-evangelical manifesto decisively breaking the neo-evangelical movement away from its older fundamentalist roots.” (p. 101). ((Interested observers should make a point of reading The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. It is an important book in the development of both fundamentalism and evangelicalism.))
Before moving on to the next theologian, I want to note these comments about Henry from Olson’s book:
“In 1949 Henry helped found the Evangelical Theological Society, whose only confessional requirement for membership was biblical inerrancy. The stated purpose of the society was to combat liberal theology without embracing fundamentalism.” (p. 100)
“The upshot is that Henry surveyed the theological scene in the 1950s through the 1990s and thought he noticed one, single, main disease infecting and corrupting Christian theology: anti-intellectualism — a ‘flight from reason.’ Fundamentalism’s brand of anti-intellectualism was obvious to Henry…” (p. 102)
“Some critics believe that Henry has overreacted to neo-orthodoxy and failed to move far enough from fundamentalism. However, Henry’s impact on postfundamentalist, conservative evangelical theology has been both deep and broad. His theological approach … is the ‘gold standard’ by which other evangelical approaches to theology tend to be judged.” (p. 107)
I’ll come back to these quotes later. I’ll point out similar statements in the discussion of the other theologians. I think they are significant.
Next time, E. J. Carnell
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