What Carl F.H. Henry’s Sunday School Notes Teach Us

The following lunchtime address on The Need and the Opportunity for Evangelical Public Theology by Caleb Morrell was offered at IRD’s Conference on the 75th Anniversary of Carl F. H. Henry’s “Uneasy Conscience” of American Evangelicalism on November 10, 2022 in Washington, D.C.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I bring you greetings on behalf of Carl Henry’s home church here in DC—the Capitol Hill Baptist Church. You may know Carl Henry the theologian, but today I want to introduce you to Carl Henry the church member. 

For the last two years I’ve been conducting research for a book on the history of Capitol Hill Baptist Church—formerly known as Metropolitan—and in the process of digging through our archives made the most astonishing discovery. In a manilla folder entitled ‘Hilltoppers,’ handwritten in pencil on yellow-legal pad, forgotten for decades in the basement of our church, are hundreds of pages of Carl F.H. Henry’s notes from a little-known Sunday School class he taught at the church from 1962 to 1964. The notes reveal a more personal glimpse into one of evangelicalism’s greatest twentieth-century theologians than his editorials at Christianity Today afford. Specifically, they show that Henry practiced what he preached, and illustrate the need and the opportunity for evangelical public theology.  

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As you know Henry moved to Washington in 1956 to launch Christianity Today’s inaugural issue in October, but he also immediately joined what was then known as Metropolitan Baptist Church. The story—potentially apocryphal—goes that Billy Graham, at first, encouraged Henry to join Calvary Baptist Church. He told him that was where Henry would make all the connections. But Henry was won over by the doctrinally rich, expositional preaching of Metropolitan’s new pastor—Walter A. Pegg—who had recently arrived in Washington, like Henry, from Southern California. 

Henry arrived in Washington on a mission. The very day after joining, he wrote to the church’s pastor, Walter Pegg, about assembling a group of influential evangelicals in Congress. “We have tried to get a list of the religious preferences of the 85^th Congress,” Henry explained, “but have been told that the National Council has the only list which has been compiled, and it has refused to release it as yet.” Henry speculated that the National Council might only release the list to “preferential circles,” before getting to his point: 

“The point of my letter is that some organization ought to be set up, it seems to me, by a church the stature of Metropolitan, on the edge of Capital Hill [sic], which would know the identification of the Baptist members of Congress.”

In other words, Henry had a vision for reaching elites in Washington, DC. What he advocated for in the Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism in 1947, he embodied in personal life. Namely, articulating Christianity as a “world-life view” which recognizes and responds to real world problems, while insisting on “divine redemption… as the best solution of our problems, individual and social.” This was not an easy balance to maintain. It’s still not an easy balance to maintain. But this was the mission of Christianity Today that brought Henry to Washington, and this was the mission Henry embodied personally as a church member of Capitol Hill Baptist Church.

By 1962, he finally had his responsibilities at Christianity Today sufficiently under control to make his dream a reality. He called the class—‘Hilltoppers’ [and when I told his son-in-law, Paul, about the class, Paul just laughed and told me that Henry always had a penchant for marketing. You know, he wrote his first book on church publicity?]. 

Anyway, the class—launched on January 28, 1962, and hosted by Henry each Sunday from 9:30-10:30 a.m. in the pastor’s study of Metropolitan Baptist Church—attracted an exclusive invite-only group of evangelical elites. Regular participants included Senators A.T. Robertson and Strom Thurmond, military generals Charles R. Landon and Paul C. Watson, lobbyists like National Right to Work president Reed Larson, and public intellectuals like Dr. Clyde W. Taylor, secretary for public affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals. If Henry wanted to reshape evangelical political engagement in Washington, he had picked the right people. 

Each class followed the same hour-long format. The moderator—usually Carl himself—assigned passages of Scripture to be read, followed by fifteen minutes of discussion of the text and its implications by a previously selected panel. The dialogue then opened to the larger group, after which the moderator provided concluding comments on the most significant points. 

This group met between 1962 and 1964 and covered many topics—but the subject that garnered the most attention by far was that of Communism. Now, you’ll have to remember that 1962 was the high-water mark of the Cold War. That was the year of the Cuban Missile crisis—perhaps the closest the world has ever been to nuclear war. The United States was still very much in the thick of the Vietnam War and Communism was widely recognized as the single-greatest threat to America and to democracy. 

So you have an existential threat—you have a crisis in American history—you have a gathering of evangelical leaders—what does Carl Henry do? 

He does two things. And this is what I’m going to spend the rest of my time unpacking. First, he used the threat of Communism as an opportunity to illustrate the impotency of liberal Protestantism. Second, he used the threat of Communism to demonstrate the need for biblically grounded Protestantism in public life. So he’s cutting two ways at the same time—he’s undermining liberal Protestantism, and he’s making his case for a vigorous and public evangelicalism. If you’re looking for vintage Henry, this is it! 

How does he illustrate the impotency of liberal Protestantism? Henry offered four reasons why liberal Protestantism is unable to meet the challenge of Communism: in its view of creation, history, revelation, and ethics. [He writes,

(1) [creation] Its concessions to evolutionary theory are such that it has no consistent or convincing view of the primal ‘givenness’ of things, that is, of the original structure of creation, over against the communist view. 

(2) [history] Its concessions to secular theories of history are such that it compromises or loses the historical manifestation of God in Christ (by tending to view the historical Jesus as non-supernatural, or by distinguishing the Christ of faith from Jesus of Nazareth, so that the reality of the Kingdom of God is left with no more historical vindication than the Communist vision of a classless society. 

(3) [revelation] Its concessions to anti-intellectual philosophies are such that divine revelation is deprived of rational propositional form and of universal validity, so that Communist theory cannot be confronted by transcendent principles and fixed values on the basis of divine disclosure.

(4) [ethics] Its rejection of intellectual revelation strips liberal Protestantism of an authoritative exposition of the nature and will of God so that it must rely mainly upon conceptions of social ethics (which liberalism also fails to ground in an assured basis of revelation) in confronting Communist theory.

What Henry is saying is that if America is going to resist the spread of Marxist ideology, it will not happen through liberal Christianity. As Henry surveyed the spread of Marxist ideology at home and the advance of Communist armies abroad, he laid the blame, in part, on liberal Protestantism’s view of creation, history, revelation, and ethics.] Let me just walk through those briefly. 

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First, by mythologizing the Book of Genesis in order to accommodate evolutionary theory, Henry argued that liberals had the undermined the “original structure of creation.” This played into the hands of Marxism, which denied God’s existence, and consequently, his all-encompassing authority as Creator. So when Communism demanded an absolute concentration of power in the State for achieving its utopian ends, liberal Protestantism had little theological capital to resist. Evangelicals, on the other hand, insisted that, as creator, all power belonged to God, and were therefore skeptical of any attempt at concentrating absolute power in the hands of anyone. Why? Because it constituted a direct attack on God’s authority as Creator.

Second, in their view of history, Henry argued that liberal Protestantism’s denial of God’s miraculous interventions in history made them susceptible to mechanistic notions of historical inevitability—which is a key presupposition of Marxism. For Henry, however, there was no such thing as ‘historical inevitability’ other than that revealed in Scripture. As Henry writes, “the Lord of history has preordained world judgment, vindication of his righteousness, and the eternal blessedness of the redeemed.” Unlike liberals, Henry was not worried about being “on the wrong side of history”—at least the version of history propagated by the Communists. He worried only about being on God’s side in history. 

Finally in their views of revelation and ethics, by denying God’s inerrant revelation in Scripture, liberal Protestantism removed the absolute standard by which history and ethics are to be judged. As Henry explained, “[the] rejection of intellectual revelation strips liberal Protestantism of an authoritative exposition of the nature and will of God so that it must rely mainly upon conceptions of social ethics (which liberalism also fails to ground in an assured basis of revelation) in confronting Communist theory.” In other words, in the absence of an absolute standard, liberal Protestants were forced to resort to assessing morality on the basis of the harm principle, which made them especially susceptible to equating justice with equality, and love with license. As Henry summarizes the matter succinctly, “Liberal Christianity confused the Marxian classless society with the Biblical kingdom of God as a penalty of the loss of supernaturalism and acceptance of evolution.”

So in all this, by approaching Communism, not only as a military or political threat, but as an anti-Christian worldview, Henry is able to compare its doctrinal claims to Scripture. That’s because worldviews can only be fought on the level of worldview. And liberal Christianity could not cut it—since it was already dangerously infected with the underlying assumptions animating Communism. Only the ontological foundations of evangelical Protestantism could counter the threat of Communism. And that constituted the need and the opportunity for a vigorous, public, evangelical theology. 

See Henry refused to accept that Christianity could be true for us personally as evangelicals and have nothing to say in addressing world issues. If God does exist—if he has created us—if there is a moral law by which mankind will be judged—and if history is going somewhere—we cannot be silent about it and let competing theologies dominate the public square. 

That was Henry’s message to political leaders in Washington DC in the 1960s, and it has several implications for us today. 

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First, threats to Christianity must be analyzed theologically. Henry correctly identified the correct doctrinal heads through which to expose the errors of Communism. Specifically, the doctrines of creation, revelation, history, and ethics. 

If seeking to counter the various critical theories of our day, I would expect Henry to double-down on the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of man. As evangelical Christians today, seeking to articulate the truths of Scripture to a world that is increasingly confused about what it means to be a man and a woman—and what it means to be human—we must dig deep into the Christian doctrines of creation and of man, and grow skilled in articulating those doctrines over and against secular creeds, and liberal Protestant compromises. 

Second, as evangelicals, we need to remember that we have the truth that our world desperately needs. Our world is confused about everything from gender and sex to marriage and family. And there is enough light of general revelation still shining in the consciences of non-believing men and women today that creates an opportunity for public evangelical theology. See liberal Protestantism has nothing to offer disillusioned refugees of the sexual revolution. But we do. We have the truth our world desperately needs—that there is a God who has created us to submit joyfully to his good designs, that all of us—individually and corporately—have rebelled against those good laws, and that consequences of living against the grain of God’s design is evident in every part of our world. But God sent his son to bear the penalty for our sins and rise victoriously over death, that Christ is reigning now over all things and through his Spirit in the church, and will soon come again to submit all things to his perfect rule and reign. 

That’s the message that Henry joyfully and confidently proclaimed, because he knew the world needed it. Thank you. 

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