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Crossway Books has republished this monumental six-volume
work by a leading evangelical scholar of the 20th century. I commend
Crossway for their vision to keep available this outstanding testimony to
evangelical theology as we enter the 21st century. Carl F. H. Henry,
well-known editor of Christianity Today in the 50s and 60s, is one of
those outstanding Christian leaders and teachers who believes the Gospel of
truth is a credible faith that can aptly challenge modern thought, whether it be
in the form of liberalism, neo-orthodoxy, or atheism. Fundamentalism had
basically withdrawn its intellectual challenge in the first part of this
century, but the Christian witness to the truth was maintained under the
leadership of men like J. Gresham Machen, Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, and
Carl Henry. Clark was Henry’s primary mentor and his philosophy professor at
Wheaton College.
In 1947 Henry wrote and published The Uneasy Conscience
of Modern Evangelicalism which sounded a clarion call to evangelicals not to
continue to withdraw Christian influence from the world’s arena. He believed
that Christians must maintain a strong commitment to biblical truth in a way
that would construct a biblical world and life view which would provide the only
solid hope for impacting our world and social activity. Henry focused his life
and ministry on the premise “that we must exhibit the logical power of truth and
the permanent relevance of the scriptural alternative.”
One thing that I have always appreciated in Henry’s
writings, something that permeates these six volumes, is his understanding of
the need to communicate the truth to our present day audience. But to do that,
Henry maintains, we must know the language of this present age. If we try to
communicate truth today in the same manner as we did to those of past
generations we will be speaking a strange language that the present generation
does not understand. While we must preserve and defend the historic faith,
Henry’s emphasis was to do that in a way that reflected an understanding of
present day language and ideologies. But far from dumbing down the Gospel or
changing it in any way, our allegiance is to God’s revelation set forth in
Scripture. Also, Henry frequently underscored Peter’s instruction in 1 Peter
3:15, that we must be able to give a reason for our hope.
These six volumes have been rightly referred to as a “long
overdue exposition of evangelical theology and its cognitive defensibility.”
Definitely a true statement, but, as Henry acknowledges in the preface, since
the first printing, especially since the early 1980s, others have been spurred
on to produce systematic theologies. Henry originally wrote four volumes, titled
God Who Speaks and Shows, which set forth the nature of religious
knowledge. Volumes five and six, God Who Stands and Stays, were added to
deal with the nature of God. They proclaim that we can truly know not only the
God who stands above his creation, but also the love of this One who is
continuously at work within His creation. Using Henry’s own words, I suggest the
theme of this six volume series is that “Theology sets out not to simply deal
with God as a speculative presupposition but with God known in His revelation.
The fundamental issue remains the issue of truth, the truth of theological
assertions.”
I wish every pastor and teacher could have and read these
six volumes. They would sharpen our abilities to communicate God’s truth in a
non-compromising and faithful way.
- Charles Dunahoo, CEP Coordinator
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