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God, Revelation and Authority

GOD, REVELATION AND AUTHORITY
Six volumes
By Carl F.H. Henry
Paternoster Press (paperback)
ISBN 0 85364 964 2

Of all living theologians and church leaders, my one really great hero is Carl F.H. Henry. Sadly, he is not as well known this side of the Atlantic as he deserves to be, but this re-publication of his greatest and most important work should help to rectify the situation.
My own intellectual love-affair with his work started when I took my fiancee (now my wife) to hear him speak at Gilcomston South Church of Scotland in 1989 on the theme of Christianity and neo-paganism. Romantically speaking, the date was something of a disaster - my fiancee complained that she had not understood a word he had said - but intellectually, it set my mind on fire to know more about this man who had such confidence in his evangelical convictions and yet who was able to comment so intelligently on cultural trends from a theological perspective.
Since then, I have read a lot of Henry's work, and my admiration has continued to grow apace: the man's learning, communication skills, evident commitment to the gospel, and refusal to compromise either Christian love or Christian doctrine for the sake of worldly success or acceptance, make him an example to us all. To my mind, his is a wise, humble and perceptive voice which needs to be heeded at this crucial time, particularly on the issue of the doctrine of Scripture where impressive-sounding rhetoric about 'Enlightenment premises' etc. is being used by many evangelicals to marginalise and undermine what has arguably been the mainstream understanding of Scripture in the church since the early church.

Bad press

Henry, of course, has had a certain amount of bad press in recent years. In some evangelical circles, 'Henry-bashing' has the status of a union card and is as crucial to credibility as praising Karl Barth - a sure sign of one's theological correctness - and, indeed, the less one has actually read of Henry, the more one's credibility appears to be enhanced. That is why it is such a pleasure to see the six volumes of Henry's greatest work, God, revelation and authority back in print. Now all those critical references in various trendy guides to evangelical theology can be checked with the original source and the validity or otherwise of the criticisms assessed.
Henry himself was born in 1913 in Manhattan. After working for a while as a journalist, he was converted to Christianity and then went on to enjoy a distinguished career both as an academic, being - among other things - a founding member of the then uniformly conservative Fuller Theological Seminary, as well as a Christian journalist (he was the founding editor of the influential American organ, Christianity Today). Indeed, his theological writings maintain a foot in both camps, with Henry's works being what one American professor described to me as 'very profound theological journalism' - a description meant, incidentally, as a compliment, not a put-down.

Revitalising struggle

Henry's career, and the theology which it embodies, must be understood against the backdrop of the rise and fall of American fundamentalism. With the collapse of conservative Princeton in 1929, and the series of public relations disasters in the 1920s which culminated in the Scopes Monkey Trial, American conservative Protestantism had sought refuge in a ghetto mentality and in intellectual obscurantism. After the war, a number of younger men (Henry, E.J. Carnell, Harold Lindsell, Bernard Ramm, G.E. Ladd, to name but five of the most important), attempted to revitalise the evangelical church by pursuing theological studies at the most impressive academic institutions and reformulating evangelical theology in an intellectually more rigorous manner. With hindsight, the results were mixed, even in the small sample named above: Ramm headed off into a terminally confused kind of conservative Barthianism; Carnell, crushed by overwork and the vitriol heaped on him by right-wing fundamentalists died of an overdose - whether deliberate or accidental, the coroner was unable to establish; Ladd found that even conceding large tracts of ground on the doctrine of Scripture was not enough to win academic credibility and died a somewhat disillusioned figure; Lindsell became increasingly bitter and reactionary about the compromises made by erstwhile colleagues; but Henry managed to keep his head as well as his theology and has, I believe, proved to be a real success story, maintaining both intellectual integrity and biblical fidelity.

Theological meat

Henry's massive work, God, revelation and authority is perhaps the most extensive defence of the classic, orthodox understanding of Scripture to date, and its re-publication, financed in part by Albert Mohler and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is an important event. While it is, in parts, somewhat dated (for example, Henry's excursus on the Jesus People in volume one is now of little more than antiquarian interest), and elsewhere rather dense (Henry's own training was as a philosopher, so there is much informed discussion of philosophical issues in the work), there is still plenty of theological meat for any moderately well-read Christian to chew over.
His criticisms of neo-orthodoxy, with its actualisation of revelation, of the hard-evidentialism of J.W. Montgomery, and of the existentialism of Bultmann and others, are all well-placed and seldom miss the mark. Exegesis is not his strongest point, and in 3,000 pages of text, all will find some point of interpretation with which to quibble; but the overall thrust of the volumes, focusing on the sovereign personal God who speaks to his people and who shows his power in history, is fundamentally sound.

God and Scripture

The most important aspect of the work, however, is the intimate connection which Henry sees between the doctrine of God and the doctrine of Scripture. As any competent theologian will tell you, the two stand together: Scripture is what it is because God is who he is; tinker with the one and one must also, if one is consistent, tinker with the other. This is the background to his defence of propositional revelation. Much derided today for reducing revelation to the level of 'Euclidean geometry' (I often wonder how many of those who use this phrase have ever read any Euclid) or for tying God's revelation to 'the Enlightenment project', the best advocates of propositionalism have never done either - and one should, after all, judge the soundness of a position by the arguments of its best advocates, not its worst!
Like the dictation theory of inspiration which its exponents always stressed did not mean that the Bible was dictated but merely indicated that the results were as reliable as if it had been, so the concept of propositional revelation is intended merely to do justice to the fact that God speaks to humanity, and does so through human language. As I said to a group of theological students recently, my wife and I have not reduced our relationship to the level of Euclidean geometry or tied it to Enlightenment premises because we talk to each other using human language and expect that language to convey meaning. Not at all. The inter-personal nature of our relationship depends in large part precisely upon our use of language as establishing, defining, expressing, and maintaining our relationship. When I tell my wife that 'I love her', I use a proposition, a set of words, in order to express and maintain our relationship.

Propositional revelation

The choice of words is itself very important, and not simply an accidental vehicle for some formally unrelated and verbally inexpressible existential encounter. The same is true when I tell her: 'It took me 20 minutes to get home tonight'. Who I am, who my wife is, what the relationship between myself and my wife is, and what I am trying to express determine the words used and the meaning expressed. Regarding the examples given above, the statements: 'I do not love you', 'Three pints today, please' or 'Despite the pundits, Cassius Clay still beat Sonny Liston' would simply not do the job at all. This simple point, that there is an intimate connection between who God is and the words of Scripture, is where Henry is so solid: following in the footsteps of theologians such as Augustine and Calvin, Henry sees God, the personal God, accommodating himself to human capacity in order to communicate himself and establish a relationship with us.
Talk of 'propositional revelation' is simply a term coined to do justice to this. It does not flatten Scripture - Henry is not an idiot and sees clearly that the Bible contains commands, promises, poetry, history, doctrine - nor does it put God in a box - Henry is emphatic that God is the one who speaks, who maintains the initiative, who reveals himself adequately but not exhaustively in the words of Scripture. What Henry refuses to do is to reduce biblical authority simply to the level of its impact upon the individual, what one might call 'functional inerrancy'; nor does he take the superficially plausible but theologically lethal option offered by some post-modernists - that because language cannot convey perfect knowledge of God, it cannot convey any knowledge of God at all.
It is not possible to do justice to Henry's vast discussion of God and Scripture in a review such as this. All I can really do is commend him to the evangelical public and encourage individuals not to be put off reading him either by the sheer size of the undertaking or the misplaced criticisms of others. If you want an antidote to much of the superficial tosh and pretentious obfuscatory bunkum that passes for discussion of Scripture and revelation today, buy these volumes and read them. We do have a great God who speaks - and something of that greatness is captured in the pages of this work, waiting to be discovered and enjoyed by those who will spare the time and energy to look.

Carl Trueman,
Aberdeen

N.B. Carl Trueman has written a full-length article on Henry's God, revelation and authority which will appear in Issue 25.2 of Themelios, a theological journal which he edits for UCCF. Subscription information is available from the Leicester offices (0116 255 1700).