ENCORE: The Failure of the Church and the Success of Secularism: Carl Henry on the Crisis of Evangelical Engagement
As Christians look to upcoming elections and consider vital issues facing our public square, we must not be found silent nor unintelligible in our ethical convictions. Silence and underdeveloped theses for the verity of our moral vision are both an affront to our mandate and the duties of discipleship. At a bare minimum, Christians must express our biblical convictions in the voting booth, electing candidates that will uphold justice and promote the good. Christians must also articulate our convictions on abortion, marriage, and why the entire array of the LGBTQ rainbow revolution spells disaster for any nation that hopes to achieve flourishing. We also need Christians contending for the rights of children against the onslaught of “gender medicine.” In short, evangelicals must be more political, not less.
“If the church fails to apply the central truth of Christianity to social problems correctly, someone else will do so incorrectly.”[1] The twentieth-century theologian Carl F.H. Henry (1913-2003) made that argument in 1964. Regrettably, his thesis has held true over the past sixty years. But this doesn’t have to be. The moral decadence of American politics and culture can be reversed, but only through a God-given combination of spiritual graces. Theological conviction, moral clarity, and public courage on the part of American evangelicals are what is needed, and in this essay I hope to show how Carl Henry’s public theology is a good model for engaging our secular world.
The Disconnect Between Profession and Voting Practice
Consider, for example, the November 2023 elections. The various electoral contests in that year revealed a disturbing insight into the state of American society: our cultural consciousness has been discipled by a resurgent neo-paganism. Indeed, ever since the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement has endured significant setbacks and legislative defeats; and these failures occurred in what we thought to be deeply conservative states with high church attendance. In 2023, Kentucky reelected its Democratic governor who supports little to no restrictions on abortion. The residents of Ohio, where 73% of adults claim some manner of Christian faith (and 29% are evangelicals), passed a constitutional right to abortion in 2023.
These developments were captured in Ligonier’s 2022 “State of Theology” survey, which uncovered troubling realities not only about society, but amongst those who called themselves evangelicals. On the question of whether gender identity is a matter of choice, 42% of Americans agree that it is. Amongst evangelicals, that number is only slightly better at 37%. While 91% of evangelicals believe that abortion is a sin, exit polls from Ohio’s recent vote to enshrine abortion access as a constitutional right show that at least a quarter of white evangelicals support unfettered access to abortion. There is clearly a disconnect between what evangelicals believe to be unjust and their actual vote for unjust practices.
That same Ligonier survey also revealed the following about evangelicals: 43% believe that Jesus is not God; 26% say the Bible is not literally true; and 38% contend that religious belief is mere opinion rather than about objective truth. Is it any wonder that secularism triumphs when those who apparently bear witness to the truth of God’s revealed will have strayed from their obligations as disciples of Jesus Christ and have departed from the authority of God’s Word?
There is no Middle Ground
Our minds will either be conformed to this world or transformed by the Word (Rom. 12:2). In this scheme, no neutrality exists. The absence of obedience and the lack of abiding in Christ spells disaster for the Christian. We will find ourselves imaging this world, looking less and less like Christ with minds contorted by godlessness and worldliness.
This principle extrapolates into the broader culture. The Christian worldview rejects the myth of moral and ethical neutrality in the public square. Carl Henry stood upon that conviction, declaring that every contour of society—from its customs and culture to its legal structures—would either abide in the verity of God’s created order or conform to something else. Either the central truths of the Bible and its comprehensive moral framework would guide our civil and political communities, or a neo-paganism would nourish a national collective consciousness.
Indeed, Henry believed that “the fate of the Bible is the fate of Christianity and even of civilization itself.”[2] The eviction of the Bible and a biblical worldview as the ballast for society means the abandonment of the only stable source for societal flourishing. Dislodging the binding authority of God’s eternal law and his Word coincides with the embrace of ethical relativism and moral malleability. The result of this condition, Henry warned, was “society’s inevitable theological, spiritual, and moral suicide.”[3]
Failure to relate God’s revealed will to the broader society means surrendering our neighbors, communities, states, and nation to the ravages of a humanistic paganism. True human rights and human liberty, rightly understood, will disintegrate under the corrosive acids of moral relativism. Indeed, the democratization of ethics created the conditions for suffocating the vitality of families, the life of the unborn, and the recognition and respect of ontological reality in sex and gender. The stakes could not be higher.
Carl Henry’s Clarion Call
Carl Henry dedicated much of his career to the issue of public theology. The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, published in 1947, called for a renewed evangelical engagement in the public square. He cast a vision for an evangelical movement that avoided the isolationist tendencies of fundamentalism while also providing a theologically orthodox alternative to Protestant liberalism and the social gospel.
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Self-Creation Only Dehumanizes Us
Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender reassignment surgery are all used to relieve suffering—not physical suffering, but the psychological and emotional suffering caused by gender dysphoria. Most feel alleviating that suffering is a moral imperative; therefore, so is allowing these interventions. Few realize, however, that the psychological and emotional burden often remains even after transition.
Think about it,” my friend said, his voice tinged with aggression. “Why did you become a man? Because you didn’t have any other option socially. Wouldn’t it be better if kids didn’t have such constraints on who they could be?”
My friend (let’s call him Jim) had a preteen with no history of gender dysphoria who had recently come out as nonbinary. Jim was supportive, even enthusiastic. He shared his story with local news and invited questions and dialogue from our small church. So I asked him over to my home to hear more and, when the moment seemed right, express my fears for his family.
Which is undoubtedly why Jim preempted me by asking why I chose and continued to choose the male gender. To reply that, lacking power to swap my male gametes and DNA for female, I had no such choice would have cut too quickly to the heart of the matter. So I deflected the question.
Biding my time did nothing to assuage Jim’s anger. For him, expressing or even implying concern with his parenting choices or his child’s decisions was out of bounds. By voicing that concern, which I eventually did more explicitly, I made him and his child “unsafe.” He seems, in fact, to have experienced my fear for his child as tantamount to assault. Our friendship was over.
I have no doubt that Jim’s motivation was to protect his family. But he had been seduced by a culture-wide mass movement bent on “the quest for freedom from natural limits,” as the English theologian Oliver O’Donovan described it in a series of indispensable lectures when Jim and I were still in diapers. That movement wishes to dispense with human nature especially with regard to sexual difference and sexuality. Nature, after all, implies limitation. “To hate one’s own flesh is the limit of self-contradiction to which our freedom tends,” O’Donovan said. “It is the point at which our assertion of ourselves against nature becomes an attack upon ourselves.”
Happily, these forty-year-old lectures have been reissued in a slim volume that includes a new introduction by Matthew Lee Anderson and a retrospective by O’Donovan. Begotten or Made? remains relevant for its clarifying theological analyses of abortion, in vitro fertilization (and the concomitant disposal of embryos), surrogacy, contraception, marriage, and more. O’Donovan begins, however, by addressing what in 1983 was called “transsexual surgery,” a topic his original audience might have thought a waste of time but will strike no one that way today.
“The great intellectual challenge that faces our age in view of these innovations is not to understand that this or that may or may not be done,” writes O’Donovan, “but to understand what it is that would be done, if it were to be done.” A careful look at what was considered best practice for treating gender dysphoria stood to clarify for O’Donovan’s Thatcher-era audience where our culture’s quest to shed our natural limits was taking us. Likewise, O’Donovan’s little enchiridion will help today’s reader begin to grasp just what it is we do when we begin IVF treatments, use contraception, undertake surrogacy, or undergo so-called “gender affirming care.”
First, it reveals “our cultural conception of freedom as the freedom not to suffer,” a conception that implies a moral imperative to continually push back humanity’s natural limits in order to overcome suffering. Second, it brings to the fore the accompanying “exclusive importance of compassion among the virtues.” Compassion moves to relieve suffering, he writes, and so “circumvents thought, since it prompts us immediately to action.” All of which means that we have little idea what we are doing in continually pushing back the boundaries of human nature.
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Bishop Barron in “Frank Disagreement” with Synod on Synodality’s report on “Development of Moral Teaching”
“To say that this multilayered, philosophically informed, theologically dense system is incapable of handling the subtleties of human sexuality is just absurd,” Barron said.
“But the deeper problem I have is that this manner of argumentation is based upon a category error— namely, that advances in the sciences, as such, require an evolution in moral teaching,” he added.
“Let us take the example of homosexuality. Evolutionary biology, anthropology, and chemistry might give us fresh insight into the etiology and physical dimension of same-sex attraction, but they will not tell us a thing about whether homosexual behavior is right or wrong. The entertaining of that question belongs to another mode of discourse.”
A misperceived “tension between love and truth”
The bishop also noted that during discussions at the October synod assembly, there was a “perceived tension between love and truth,” particularly around the issue of outreach to the LGBT community.
“Practically everyone at the synod held that those whose sexual lives are outside of the norm should be treated with love and respect, and, again, bravo to the synod for making this pastoral point so emphatically. But many synod participants also felt that the truth of the Church’s moral teaching in regard to sexuality ought never to be set aside,” Barron said. -
3 Things to Know about Malachi
Not everyone in Malachi’s day shared this cynical attitude toward the Lord. Some still feared the Lord, and the Lord saw that attitude and kept them as His “treasured possession,” (segullah; Mal. 3:17), the same word used to describe Israel in Exodus 19:6. The Lord would soon appear in His temple to bring the justice for which people were supposedly longing (Mal. 3:1–2). He would separate the righteous from the wicked once for all, and those who feared the Lord would be vindicated as His true people, while the wicked would be judged and destroyed (Mal. 4:1–3).
The Lord says many challenging things to His post-exilic people through the prophet Malachi. The book of Malachi is arranged as a series of seven prophetic disputations that each begin with a bitter saying of the people to which the Lord responds. Most of these oracles are searching rebukes of the attitudes and actions of Malachi’s contemporaries. However, before the Lord rebukes the people, He begins by affirming His electing love for them, which is the reason they continue to exist after the judgment of the exile. Before He says, “This is what I have against you,” the Lord first declares, “I love you” (Mal. 1:2).
1. Malachi reveals that God’s electing love is always the starting point.
The people, meanwhile, respond with a rebuff, “How have you loved us?” (Mal. 1:2). This is a question to which the Lord gives a surprising answer. We might have expected the Lord to point to the exodus and conquest of the land of Canaan, where He performed mighty miracles to protect His people and grant them their inheritance. Instead, the Lord points Israel even further back, to the election of their forefather, Jacob, and the contrasting rejection of his brother, Esau (Mal. 1:3). This utterly undeserved love is the reason there is still an Israel after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the exile. Israel had suffered for her sins, to be sure, but she had nonetheless been restored because of the Lord’s great love. Edom, the descendants of Esau, survived the Babylonian period relatively unscathed by aiding the Babylonians (see Obad. 1:10–14). But Edom’s present comfort would soon be destroyed, and her fall would be full and final (Mal. 1:4–5). God’s chosen people might stumble through their sins, but they will not fully fall, for the Lord holds them up out of love (see Ps. 37:23–24).
2. Malachi demonstrates that people are tempted to cynicism when life is hard.
In the book of Malachi, the people’s response to the Lord is deeply cynical from beginning to end. At the beginning, they brush off the Lord’s declaration love for them (Mal. 1:2).
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