For more than a generation, conservative Christians had been on the defensive, "contending for the faith" against a phalanx of liberals. The world was just emerging from a devastating war, but the fundamentalists had been waging a war all their own. They had developed a bunker mentality and were increasingly closed in among themselves.
In several areas the liberals had preempted the issues. For instance, conservatives had lost interest in social issues because liberals were espousing the "social gospel." Soon any attempt to redeem society was met with suspicion by fundamentalists and rejected for being too close to that liberal "social gospel." In general, fundamentalists talked about separation far more than they talked about involvement. Besides that, the fundamentalists had lost the ability to be self-critical. Indeed, they were afraid to analyze themselves lest the enemy discover their weaknesses.
But in those postwar years a new breeze began to blow in fundamentalism and a new breed of conservative thinkers was starting to speak up. In the forefront was thirty-!our-year-old Carl F. H. Henry. A former newspaperman, he knew the social issues as well as the theological issues. Though he was risking his future among fundamentalists, he was not afraid to speak out and criticize conservatives.
Henry merits recognition for many reasons. Time magazine later recognized him as "the leading theologian of the nation's growing evangelical flank.״ And so he was. He was also the first editor (1956-1908) of Christianity Today, a leading voice of American evangelicalism, as well as the author of many theological tomes, such as his six-volume magnum opus, God, Revelation,
and Authority (1976-1983), Frontiers in Modem Theology (1966), and Christian Personal Ethics (1957). But we feel his earlier work The Uneasy Conscience of Modem Fundamentalism had the greatest impact on America's evangelicals.
His case was made carefully: "It is an application of, not a revolt against, fundamentals of the faith, for which I plead." Yet no matter how carefully it was worded, it was still a scathing attack on his brethren. "Fundamentalism is the modern priest and Levite, bypassing suffering humanity."
Henry told how he had asked a hundred evangelical pastors if any of them had preached a sermon on warfare, racial hatred and intolerance, labor-management relations, or even the liquor traffic in the past six months. Not one had raised a hand.
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Yes, fundamentalism had revolted against the social gospel of the liberals, and rightly so, Henry said, but in the process they had also revolted against the Christian social imperative. "If the evangelical answer is in terms of religious escapism, then the salt has lost its savor."
In the previous century evangelicals had led the way in their work for social reform, but now the issue was complicated by the fact that most reform movements were in the hands of modernists or secularists. In this climate Henry dared to suggest that evangelicals "must unite with non-evangelicals for social betterment if it is to be achieved at all." He recognized that this wouldn't be easy, but it was necessary. "The battle against evil in all its forms must be pressed unsparingly."
A few years after Henry's book was published, World Vision was launched, and then came the World Relief Commission of the National Association of Evangelicals. Evangelicals were starting to grasp the message of The Uneasy Conscience of Modem Fundamentalism.
Carl Henry was always a thoroughgoing conservative in politics as well as in religion. Yet at the same time throughout his life, he maintained his concern to apply his faith to modern social dilemmas.