Elusive Unity
Eric Miller on Carl F. H. Henry’s Vision for Evangelicalism
From his years as a Wheaton College student in the 1930s, to his long tenure as a leading Evangelical theologian and spokesman, to his death in 2003 at the age of ninety, Carl F. H. Henry proclaimed a single bold conviction that might be summarized thus: Human history and hope center on the gospel of Jesus Christ, and Evangelical Protestantism is its most faithful expression in our troubled, momentous times.
For Christians, the first part remains unproblematic, of course. It is the second part that even self-identifying Evangelicals—let alone other Christians—may find audacious. What, in twenty-first-century America, does it mean to be an “Evangelical”? And how could anyone claim that Evangelical Protestantism, whatever it is, fares so favorably when placed alongside older, more sturdy incarnations of Christian faith? These days, many Protestants to the left and to the right of Henry have their doubts about the meaning and usefulness of the term Evangelical.
Henry didn’t. He wore it with a sense of honor. Why?
Uneasy Evangelicals
What Henry in his 1986 autobiography called a mere “tract” is, as it turns out, the book he is today best remembered for: The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, published in 1947 . “Fundamentalism” was the label then attached to those early-twentieth-century English-speaking Protestants who, in the face of the powerful arguments of modernist intellectuals, resolutely affirmed the central doctrines of the historic Christian faith and fought for their theological veracity and ecclesiastical necessity within their denominations.
Henry, born in 1913, was their admirer and heir. As a new convert, he had witnessed in the 1930s and 1940s the Fundamentalists’ declining academic, ecclesiastical, and cultural fortunes, and in The Uneasy Conscience he tried to call them back and push them forward. His book aggressively called conservatives, in the face of fragmentation within Protestantism and geopolitical catastrophe without, to embrace both each other and the radical social implications of the gospel they confessed.
“The time has come now for Fundamentalism to speak with an ecumenical outlook and voice,” he insisted. “If it speaks in terms of the historic Biblical tradition, rather than in the name of secondary accretions or of eschatological biases on which Evangelicals divide, it can refashion the modern mind.”
It was a great hope, this vision of triumphal unity, and as he came into his own as an Evangelical intellectual in the 1950s, he continued to press for it, with the steady conviction that to fail to achieve this unity was to fail the gospel itself. Moving reluctantly in 1956 from his teaching post at Fuller Seminary to become the founding editor of Christianity Today (CT), he effectively guided, at huge personal and scholarly cost, an effort to bring conservative Protestants—now called Evangelicals—together once more.
The Dutch Calvinist theologian G. C. Berkouwer registered the mood of these men in the lead article of the inaugural issue of CT, where he declared that “the struggle around orthodoxy, which took such fierce form in the nineteenth century, is not a thing that belongs only to the past.” It was this “struggle around orthodoxy” that they self-consciously joined, writing and thinking against the backdrop of a social crisis they believed to be rooted in the West’s collective turning away from the Christian faith. They joined hands, Protestants of many varieties, to face together a civilization whose most brilliant thinkers dismissed their way of seeing and thinking with little more than a scoff.
And so, crucially, for Henry and those near him, the term “Evangelical” had an extroverted, outward thrust: the Evangelical endeavor was not centered on preaching to conservatives, but rather on winning those beyond their borders. Being Evangelical, in Henry’s mind, was not about internal renewal so much as external thrust. He and his editorial cohort fashioned CT accordingly.
Eric Miller is an Associate Professor of History at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania (www.geneva.edu). He is writing a biography of Christopher Lasch.
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