This article first appeared in National Review.
In the years after the Second World War, an American theologian delivered a dire forecast about the future of Protestant Christianity. Unless the Evangelical church in America grappled with the great social questions of its time, warned Carl F. H. Henry, it “will be reduced either to a tolerated cult status” or become “a despised and oppressed sect” within two generations. That was in 1947.
Henry’s book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, published 75 years ago, challenged the Evangelical church to tackle problems such as racism, materialism, economic injustice, and international aggression. Although himself a thoroughgoing Evangelical, Henry had worked as a reporter for the New York Times and got his Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University. He was attuned to the issues that were shaping America’s future — and that demanded, in his view, a Christian response. “There is no room here for a gospel that is indifferent to the needs of the total man nor of the global man.”
For Henry, the post-war years brought those needs into focus. The 1940s saw the start of the civil-rights movement, as African Americans returned home from war to confront racial segregation; massive labor strikes, including a rail strike that triggered the intervention of federal troops; the formation of the United Nations to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”; and, at the international trials at Nuremberg, the startling revelations of Nazi atrocities.
Yet, as Henry observed, American fundamentalism had adopted habits of thought that isolated the Christian message from the central debates of the modern world. The broader Evangelical movement, he warned, was in danger of making the same mistake. He recalled a meeting with more than 100 Evangelical pastors and asking how many of them, in the previous six months, had preached a sermon addressing problems such as “aggressive warfare,” “racial hatred and intolerance,” or “exploitation of labor.” The result: “Not a single hand was raised in response.”
The church of the apostolic age, Henry explained, transformed the culture of pagan Rome because it offered a compelling and aspirational vision of human life. By contrast, he said, modern fundamentalism had reduced the gospel message to one of condemnation: “Whereas once the redemptive gospel was a world-changing message, now it has narrowed to a world-resisting message.”
You can read the rest of the article here. If you are interested in viewing the Carl Henry Conference which inspired this work (and which IRD was proud to host), you can do so here, here, and here.
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