Carl Fh Henry Quotes

We Americans are not God’s covenant people. America has, in any event, no biblical guarantee of perpetuity.

Evangelical theology is heretical if it is only creative and unworthy if it is only repetitious

If God truly exists, especially as a living personal being, are not revelational considerations more significant than our own inner feelings and outer perceptual probings? And if divine revelation—a possibility still to be considered—provides an authoritative basis for religious faith, does not an insistent reduction of all knowledge to empirical factors become a prideful—that is, worldly wise—justification of unbelief in a transcendent revelation? If there be a God, he could scarcely desire from human beings a commitment only to empirical tentativeness about his reality.

History’s most unusual and momentous news continues to be the message that the holy God provides sinful man a way of escape from the damning consequences of sin, and proffers him a new kind of life fit for both time and eternity. This ongoing global news is more important than the Allies’ rollback of Hitler and the Nazis, or modern technology’s putting a man on the moon, or scientific research’s latest medical breakthrough.

The modern loss of the God of the Bible has at the same time therefore involved a vanishing sense of human dependence on anything outside man himself; man sees himself as living on a planet devoid of any intrinsic plan and purpose, and supposedly born of a cosmic accident. He himself must originate and fashion whatever values there are. The current existential emphasis on man’s freedom and will to become himself, particularly on freedom and responsibility as the very essence of human life, regards external authority as a repressive threat. Man’s unlimited creative autonomy is exalted; this “authentic selfhood” consequently requires the rejection of all transcendently given absolute norms, for they are seen as life-draining encumbrances.

However marred, the world vessel of clay is not without some of the influence of the Master Molder. God has not left Himself entirely without witness in the global calamity; He discloses Himself in the tragedies as well as the triumphs of history. He works in history as well as above history. There is a universal confrontation of men and women by the divine Spirit, invading all cultures and all individual lives. There is a constructive work of God in history, even where the redemptive Gospel does not do a recreating work. The evangelical missionary message cannot be measured for success by the number of converts only. The Christian message has a salting effect upon the earth. It aims at a re-created society; where it is resisted, it often encourages the displacement of a low ideology by one relatively higher.

Common sense requires modern man’s recognition of the scientific method as a spectacularly useful instrumentality for transforming our environment. Respect and gratitude are indeed due the scientist for many comforts and conveniences furnished to modern living, often as the fruit of painstakingly sacrificial research and experimentation, although in recent times not often without financial reward. This practical success of science inclines many persons to a tacit acceptance of the scientific world-picture of external reality as a realm merely of impersonal processes and mathematically connectible sequences. Charles H. Malik observes rightly that all too often the highly merited prestige of scientists in their own fields of competence is transferred to areas of publicly expressed opinion in which they are novices.

The mystic must, of course, respect the canons of reason and the conventions of logic if he is to communicate anything whatever about ineffable reality. And yet, ultimate reality either is capable of intelligible representation, and in that case ineffability is a misnomer, or it is not, in which case the mystic has no ground whatever for speech about the Ineffable. It is one thing for a person to claim that he has seen a flying saucer, and on that basis to argue—contrary to those who have not— that such weird mechanisms exist, but it is more preposterous for someone to describe a reality which is said to be inherently inexpressible. It simply makes no sense for anyone publicly to claim that he has intuited the inexpressible. The mystic cannot formulate the experience which other men should have, if they would share his belief, since in the case of an “inexpressible intuition” nobody could know what anybody else’s experience was.

Rationalism has swerved between two radical extremes in its attitude toward revelation. There is the widespread present admission that reason is barren as a source of final truth, but that it would be a sell-out to madness to invoke revelational theology. But a very different tradition in the history of philosophy, not without recent representatives, holds that philosophy finds its ideal intellectual expression and summit in theology. For Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and even Spinoza, philosophy is at its apex an intellectual love of the Divine. It is this regard for theology as “the inner side of a philosophy,” to use Miss Emmet’s phrase (The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, p. 150), that turns some systems of metaphysics into a religious faith, albeit a false one. Such outlooks on the surface eliminate a direct clash between philosophy and theology. But, insofar as theology is viewed as the capstone of speculative philosophy, they do so only by denying the comprehensive intellectual implications of revealed theology, and in principle even deny to theology its own right of survival on the basis of special divine disclosure. Sooner or later—and usually sooner than its advocates think—this view works itself around to the other, in which rationalists suspect and disown all theology, only to discover at last that in doing so they have both idolatrized reason and emptied it into a vain thing.

With these developments the modern mind is no longer clearly a mind, but a temperament, a mood subject to frequent changes. Some interpreters think that Western culture may yet have a future of sorts on the basis of pragmatism, that is, a secular pluralistic mind. Pragmatism is the last stand for a culture that has lost a true center; in the welter of speculative disagreement and moral confusion it seeks a cultural pattern by dignifying every kind of divergence as a form of creativity. At the moment it enjoys undeserved reinforcement as a theory of life because of the spectacular practical successes of experimental science. But one scientific experiment with morality such as the Nazi barbarisms is too much, and one misadventure of atomic warfare may be too late. Pragmatism in any event contains the seeds of its own undoing. It professes to be tolerant of all views, but its concealed intolerance becomes clear when, confronted and seriously challenged by the Christian absolute, it dogmatically refuses to reconsider any return to universally valid truth and objective principle.

The human mind, just because man is by nature a spiritual-rational-moral agent, will not and cannot forever shun the larger issues of truth and reality; the nonmeta-physical and antimetaphysical eras always turn out to be transition interludes.

The task of Christian leadership is to confront modern man with the Christian world-life view as the revealed conceptuality for understanding reality and experience, and to recall reason once again from the vagabondage of irrationalism and the arrogance of autonomy to the service of true faith.

The basic issues reduce really to two alternatives: either man himself projects upon the world and its history a supernatural reality and activity that disallows objectively valid cognitive statements on the basis of divine disclosure, or a transcendent divine reality through intelligible revelation establishes the fact that God is actually at work in the sphere of nature and human affairs.

More is sacrificed by defecting from the truth of revelation than simply the truth about God and man and the world; loss of the truth and Word of God plunges into darkness the very truth of truth, the meaning of meaning, and even the significance of language. To sever the concerns of reason and life from the revelation of God as the final ground and source of truth and the good accommodates and accelerates the contemporary drift to nihilism. It is not merely Christianity that stands or falls with the reality of revelation. To avert a nihilistic loss of enduring truth and good, only the recovery of revelation will suffice.

On the other hand, while we insist that what is other than theology cannot determine the content of theology, or its nature as a science, do we imply that all the various academic disciplines may and must freely go their own way, independently and competitively, without any obligation to coordinate and adjust their claims about the real world or in the name of truth? Should not theology in the name of revelation and reason, and in view of the logical norms of noncontradiction and coherence, call the secular sciences to account? Ought it not, for example, challenge both the arbitrary positivist limitation of truth to the sensory world and technocratic scientific reduction of the real world to impersonal processes and relationships? To go yet a step farther, should not theology in the name of the truth of revelation elaborate a comprehensive framework wherein theology and all other sciences are together and equally answerable to criteria that apply to each and every claimant to knowledge of external reality?

Man’s only hopeful option in a universe of God’s making and governance lay in the acceptance and appropriation of this divinely inspired teaching. The Bible, the incomparably unique and authoritative source of spiritual and ethical truth, proffered all that is needful for human salvation and felicity; Scripture was a treasured divine provision that equips sinful rebels with valid information about the transcendent realm, and discloses the otherwise hidden possibility of enduring personal reconciliation with God.

The Fundamentalist does not think that the ends can be reached by various means, and that his method is better; if he did, the hostility would not be as serious.

Lewis seems to have seen his move to Cambridge in January 1955 as marking a fresh start. It is striking how few of his writings of this later period of his life deal specifically with apologetic themes, if understood in terms of the explicit rational defence of the Christian faith. In a letter of September 1955, declining the invitation of the American evangelical leader Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003) to write some apologetic pieces, Lewis explained that while he had done what he could “in the way of frontal attacks,” he now felt “quite sure” those days were over. He now preferred more indirect approaches to apologetics, such as those which appealed to “fiction and symbol.”[556] These remarks to Carl Henry—one of the most significant figures in the history of postwar American evangelicalism—are clearly relevant to the creation of Narnia. Many would see this comment about “fiction and symbol” as a reference to his Chronicles of Narnia, which can easily be categorised as works of narrative or imaginative apologetics, representing a move away from the more deductive or inductive argumentative approaches of his wartime broadcast talks.

The problem is not one of fundamental intellectual incompetence, or men could know nothing at all. Nor is it that the canons of reason and forms of logic are irrelevant to ultimate reality. Were that the case, we would be doomed from the outset to ontological skepticism. Rather, man the thinker, for whatever reason (Judeo-Christian theology would point to the fall and sinfulness of man) employs his intelligence to formulate comprehensive explanations of reality and life that not only rival each other, but together stand exposed as inadequate, inordinate world-wisdom when evaluated by the transcendent cognitive revelation which Judeo-Christian truth affirms. The human spirit slants its perspectives in a manner that does violence to the truth of revelation, while its very formulations are at the same time made possible because reason is a divine gift whose legitimate and proper use man has compromised.

Therefore, the path of evangelical action seems to be an eagerness to condemn all social evils, no less vigorously than any other group, and a determination (1) when evangelicals are in the majority, to couple such condemnation with the redemptive Christian message as the only true solution; (2) when evangelicals are in the minority, to express their opposition to evils in a "formula of protest," concurring heartily in the assault on social wrongs, but insisting upon the regenerative context as alone able to secure a permanent rectification of such wrongs.

On the other hand, the secularizing speech of audio-visual technology more and more sets the tone for human thought and conduct. Deliberately and universally the mass media encroach upon modern man. Enhanced by color and cunning, television or radio or the printed page makes every last human soul a target of its propaganda. So astonishingly clever and successful have been these media in captivating the contemporary spirit—haunted as it is by moral vacillation and spiritual doubt—that Yahweh’s ancient exhortation to beware of visual idols would seem doubly pertinent today.

The crisis of word and truth is not, however, in all respects peculiar to contemporary technocratic civilization. Its backdrop is not to be found in the mass media per se, as if these sophisticated mechanical instruments of modern communication were uniquely and inherently evil. Not even the French Rèvolution, which some historians now isolate as the development that placed human history under the shadow of continual revolution, can adequately explain the ongoing plunge of man’s existence into endless crisis. Why is it that the magnificent civilizations fashioned by human endeavor throughout history have tumbled and collapsed one after another with apocalyptic suddenness? Is it not because, ever since man’s original fall and onward to the present, sin has plummeted human existence into an unbroken crisis of word and truth? A cosmic struggle between truth and falsehood, between good and evil, shadows the whole history of mankind. The Bible depicts it as a conflict between the authority of God and the claims of the Evil One. Measured by the yardstick of God’s holy purposes, all that man proudly designates as human culture is little but idolatry. God’s Word proffers no compliments whatever to man’s so-called historical progress; rather, it indicts man’s pseudoparadises as veritable towers of Babel that obscure and falsify God’s truth and Word.

The God who reveals himself is still addressing murmuring nomadic hearts that refuse to enter his promised land; he still calls vagabonds out of a modern wasteland to redemptive fellowship. As the Spirit of eschatological revelation presupposes the Old and New Testaments, and God ongoingly convicts men of sin and imparts new life to all who believe, his self-disclosure in the world takes its free course daily and hourly, even moment by moment, in a galaxy of revelational witness that renders mutinous man an inexcusable rebel.

Yet even in this public extension of its insistence on personal sensitivities, the New Left champions something less than an identifiable ideology of fixed principles and less than an articulate political platform and program. The personalism of the New Left easily channels into sentimental humanism, and just as easily, through frustration over a failure to achieve desired social changes by political activism, into inhumane violence in the guise of righteous indignation. Its confrontational politics lacks objective norms to control revolutionary propensities, even as it lacks objective criteria for escalating or deescalating a reliance on force to promote the preciousness of personality.

The biblical revelation proclaims from start to finish that the old self is a lost cause, and that man faces the future with hope only as a new creature, as a reborn self, spiritually enlivened to the supernatural world;

The New Testament vision of the kingdom of God is no plunge into existential subjectivity, no phantasmagoric anti-intellectual experience, nor is it like being “turned on” by LSD even though ventured, as Timothy Leary would have it, as a sacred rite.

You may recall that we raised the question, Whose idea was it that it would not rain: God’s or Elijah’s? The answer? The buck stops with God. Further evidence of this is the verse we study in this chapter. Elijah did not go to Ahab to say it would rain; he waited to hear from God. He waited a long time—three and a half years. Then one day the word of the Lord came to Elijah to present himself to Ahab. And from that moment things started happening. You and I cannot make things happen. Elijah could not make things happen. We are fools if we try to make things happen in our own strength. I once asked the late Carl F. H. Henry, called “the dean of American theologians,” what he would do differently if he had his life to live over. After a moment he replied, “I would remember that only God can turn the water into wine.” The greatest folly

While the Bible assuredly insists that man still bears the divine image, although impaired by his fall into sin, it nonetheless stresses God’s ontological as well as moral and noetic otherness; divine revelation is not manipulatable through man’s initiative and mystical techniques, but is mediated everywhere at God’s initiative through the Logos of God. The Bible, moreover, represents this mediated divine disclosure as rational and objective, and not as transcending logical distinctions and the sphere of truth-and-error. That the Logos of God is central to the Godhead is an unyielding scriptural emphasis. While there is a mystery side to God, revelation is mystery dispelled and conveys information about God and his purposes.