Third in a Series

8. The stark confusion in theology and philosophy has plummeted the prestige of these fields of knowledge to sad new lows. General public interest in serious religious and philosophical literature has been eroded. The list of 100 best books for 1971 carried by many Sunday newspapers at year-end did not even include theology or philosophy as a category.

9. As modern theologizers increasingly promoted their perspectives not as unchanging “gospel” but as merely “jump-off” points for contemporary inquiry, divinity students more and more forsook theology for social activism as the essence of Christian response. Thus for many clerics God’s Word and work gave way to political engagement as the focus of interest. In Germany, the appeal to socialism as informing the content of the theology of hope has so pervaded the ecumenical seminaries that Marxism now elicits notably wider loyalties among divinity students than among university students generally. A remarkable percentage of German seminarians today regard the churches not as centers for proclaiming an apostolic Gospel but as strategic springboards for promoting socio-political change.

10. The faddish cult of irrationality in the theology of the recent past is now fast running its course and a faith at once revelationally based and rationally compelling is reasserting its claims. The ablest Christian apologists have always contended that Christianity speaks the truth in view of intelligible divine revelation, and that what Christianity affirms about God is the case whether men choose to believe it or not. Augustine insisted that faith issues in understanding, and the Protestant Reformers stood with him against any reduction of divine revelation to camouflaged truth. J. Gresham Machen, Protestant modernism’s American archfoe, deplored the divorce of Christian faith from supernaturally revealed information about God and his purposes. C. S. Lewis correlated devotion to the Christian faith with the service of reason. Gordon H. Clark criticizes non-evangelical theories for their contrast of faith and reason.

Mediating views—such as process theology—that reaffirm the indispensability of rational coherence to a sound religious outlook, nonetheless needlessly constrict the rational activity of God and forfeit special cognitive revelation. Such speculative alternatives to philosophical and theological irrationalism promote supposedly coherent conceptualities that, as unstable half-way positions, compromise the Christian faith and make it necessary for others to formulate an acceptable counterview. Those who reject biblical theism cannot do so on the basis of coherent reasoning, for the Christian revelation of God is rationally consistent and compelling, and, moreover, rationality has its very basis in the nature of the Living God.

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11. Evangelical Christianity is unlikely to gain penetrating and persuasive significance in American life today unless it speaks a theological-ethical word to the nation and not simply to isolated individuals. The weakness of the evangelical thrust in both community and campus crusades is that it now aims almost solely at rescuing parched souls from the burning without energetically enlisting minds for intellectual perspicuity and bodies for public justice. Its witness to a Christian world-life view as a socio-cultural alternative to the empirical eccentricities of the West is meager.

Many Americans are given over to the vision of a scientific society in which cities are to be saved by technocratic planning and individuals by medical progress. Counter-cultural youth have disowned the technocratic world-view in the name of human values, but, disillusioned by the Vietnamese war abroad and social injustices at home, they tend to embrace private mysticism and to lack consistent dedication to national purpose. Not long ago the danger of revolutionary rebellion was widespread; social critics were asking whether the disenchanted young might rally to a tyrant mounting a Red charger, much as restless German youth became Hitler’s Nazi storm troopers. Now the question is whether the alienated young, many of whom are dropping out of the public arena into private communes, have resigned themselves to the ambiguity of their experience and given up hope for a new direction—whether they will even bother to vote.

American society is increasingly adrift on matters of destiny and morality. The American people are sinking into a socio-political and religious-moral crisis that demands the leadership of a modern Lincoln. No society can long take a rain check on final commitments. The relevance of religious truth to public politics must not be muddled into generalities. Nor ought concern over religion in public education to leap over the question of truth in the classroom in order to debate simply whether prayer and meditation are permissible—while non-theistic teachers proceed with impugnity to capture the minds of young America.

Evangelical “think tanks” intended primarily to formulate an evangelistic strategy without wrestling with the larger concerns of truth and right cannot adequately cope with these concerns. No theological outlook is now likely to exert a shaping influence on the American scene unless it moves the masses toward both a new vision of truth and justice and a new way of life in a socio-cultural context. If revealed religion is to become formatively significant on the present American scene, the Christian vanguard must address man as man as well as man as sinner; it must speak to the destiny of nations and the meaning and worth of life, while it speaks to man in his private needs and as an evangelistic target.

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12. American evangelical Christianity is by no means in an enviable position. No academically great university reflects its views, and no voice like President Timothy Dwight’s at Yale almost two centuries ago calls academia to contemplate the logic of biblical theism. Many large state and private universities crowd historical Christian perspectives out of their philosophy and religion departments. Many evangelical colleges are running large deficits; few are concerned with solid literary production, and rarely are these colleges’ administrative spokesmen and scholars quoted in the public arena. In denominational circles, evangelical seminaries are continually merged out of their historic commitments or tend to become theologically imprecise through ecumenical dilution. Leading evangelical magazines have not escaped substantial circulation losses; long-range gains in readership are now usually achieved through magazine mergers. Most evangelical journalistic efforts remain too pontifical and propagandistic to interest disenchanted liberals, and too theologically unexciting and journalistically unimaginative even to pace evangelical frontiersmen. In evangelism, only exceptional churches across America have recaptured the energies that crusade evangelism hoped to stimulate; many congregations still pray that a crusade will rescue their declining cause, and usually that does not happen.

[To be continued.]

CARL F. H. HENRY

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