Lecture 12-1: The New Evangelical Mind — Carl F. H. Henry, J. I. Packer, and the Turn Toward Engagement

Two texts recur through new evangelicalism's own self-description, and it is worth reading them for what this movement specifically drew from them rather than treating them as generic proof texts any theology might cite.

2 Timothy 2:15 reads: "Give diligence to present yourself approved by God, a workman who doesn't need to be ashamed, properly handling the Word of Truth." (World English Bible) New evangelical writers, Henry chief among them, returned to this verse to state a specific complaint against the fundamentalism they had inherited: that a movement genuinely committed to Scripture's authority had, in practice, too often let its handling of that authority grow careless — thin engagement with the best available biblical scholarship, argument by assertion rather than argument by careful demonstration — and that taking 2:15 seriously meant doing the intellectual work "properly handling" the text actually requires, not simply defending the right conclusions about it.

1 Peter 3:15 reads: "But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts; and always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you a reason concerning the hope that is in you, with humility and fear:" (WEB) This verse supplied new evangelicalism's apologetic self-understanding directly: a community that has withdrawn from public conversation cannot be "always ready to give an answer" to anyone, because it has arranged its life so that no one outside the community is left asking. Henry and Packer both read 3:15 as placing a positive obligation on the church to remain in a position where its reasons can actually be examined by an outside questioner, which required precisely the re-entry into academic and public life fundamentalist separatism had made structurally difficult.

Fundamentalism's retreat and the shape of the complaint

The fundamentalist-modernist controversy chapter 2 traced from liberal theology's side reached its most publicly visible moment in 1925, when the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee — nominally a dispute over a Tennessee statute forbidding the teaching of evolution in public schools — became a national spectacle in which fundamentalism's most prominent public defender, William Jennings Bryan, was subjected to sharp cross-examination by Clarence Darrow and widely portrayed in the national press as intellectually outmatched. The trial did not, on its own, cause fundamentalism's subsequent retreat from mainstream cultural and intellectual life; that retreat had institutional causes as well, chiefly the loss of control over major mainline denominations and seminaries to more liberal leadership, which pushed conservative Protestants toward founding independent churches, Bible institutes, and denominations of their own. But Scopes did crystallize, in wide public perception, an image of fundamentalism as anti-intellectual and culturally embattled — an image that, fairly or not, shaped how the movement's own next generation experienced their inheritance.

By the 1940s, a rising group of theologically conservative Protestants, many trained at fundamentalist institutions themselves, had grown uneasy with what they judged fundamentalism had become in practice: doctrinally sound but culturally withdrawn, treating social ethics, the arts, and serious engagement with contemporary philosophy and science as distractions at best and compromises at worst. Carl Henry, then a young theologian teaching at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, gave this unease its sharpest early statement in a short 1947 book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Henry's argument was pointed: fundamentalism possessed, in its doctrinal commitments, real theological resources for addressing social problems — poverty, racial injustice, war — but had effectively surrendered the field of social ethics to the liberal Protestantism it otherwise rejected, treating any interest in social questions as itself a symptom of theological compromise. Henry insisted this was a mistake fundamentalism's own doctrine did not require: a robust doctrine of sin, a doctrine of the imago Dei, and a doctrine of God's coming kingdom all supplied grounds for social engagement that fundamentalism had doctrinal permission to use and had simply stopped using.

Building institutions for re-engagement

Henry's argument for social and intellectual re-engagement was matched, in the same years, by a deliberate program of institution-building among like-minded conservative Protestants. The National Association of Evangelicals, founded in 1942, gave theologically conservative churches and denominations outside the fundamentalist-controlled and mainline-controlled institutional structures a cooperative organization of their own. Fuller Theological Seminary, founded in Pasadena in 1947 with Henry among its first faculty, was explicitly conceived as a seminary that would combine full confidence in Scripture's authority with serious, first-rate scholarly engagement — a combination its founders judged fundamentalist institutions had increasingly failed to hold together. Christianity Today, launched in 1956 with Henry as its first editor and with funding help from the evangelist Billy Graham, was founded as a magazine explicitly meant to give theologically conservative Protestantism a public, intellectually serious voice to rival the long-established liberal Protestant journal The Christian Century — the choice of that specific rival is itself a small but telling piece of evidence for how self-consciously new evangelicalism understood its own project as re-entering a conversation, not avoiding one.

It is worth being precise about what these institutions did and did not represent. New evangelicalism was not a doctrinal revision of fundamentalism's core commitments — inerrancy, the substitutionary atonement, and the other "fundamentals" remained fully in place. What changed was the posture toward the wider culture and the wider academy: engagement rather than separation, argument rather than assertion, willingness to be examined by outsiders rather than a retreat into a closed subculture answerable only to itself.

Carl Henry's God, Revelation and Authority: propositional revelation defended on two fronts

Henry's most substantial theological achievement is God, Revelation and Authority, a six-volume work published between 1976 and 1983 that stands as new evangelicalism's fullest systematic statement. Its central and most philosophically load-bearing claim is that divine revelation is essentially propositional: God communicates truths that can be stated, in principle, as true propositions, and Scripture's words are the divinely given, trustworthy linguistic vehicle for those propositions, not merely a fallible human witness pointing toward a revelation that remains, strictly speaking, non-verbal.

This claim is aimed, deliberately and explicitly, at two targets this course has already met. Against liberal theology's tradition from chapter 2 — Schleiermacher's grounding of religion in a pre-doctrinal feeling of absolute dependence, and Ritschl and Harnack's ethical "essence of Christianity" stripped of what they judged later metaphysical accretion — Henry argued that revelation without stable propositional content collapses into a report of human religious experience, however elevated, rather than genuine communication from God. Against neo-orthodoxy's account from chapter 3, and Barth's theology of the Word specifically, Henry pressed a related but distinct objection: Barth's insistence that Scripture becomes the Word of God only in the event of address, rather than simply being identical with God's propositional communication at every point, struck Henry as leaving biblical authority dependent on an unrepeatable, unverifiable event rather than resting on a stable, examinable text. Henry did not deny that revelation involves God's personal self-disclosure, and he was careful to state Barth's position in terms a sympathetic reader of Barth would recognize before objecting to it; his disagreement was narrower and more precise than a caricature would suggest — that an exclusively event-centered account of Scripture's authority, whatever else it secures, does not by itself secure the stable, propositional continuity Henry judged Christian doctrine and Christian apologetics both require.

J. I. Packer and the case for keeping the label

J. I. Packer's 1958 Fundamentalism and the Word of God, written from within British evangelicalism rather than the American context Henry addressed, took a related but distinct tack. Where much of American new evangelicalism moved to distance itself from the "fundamentalist" label because of its embattled public associations, Packer argued for retaining the substance the label had originally named — full confidence in Scripture's authority and trustworthiness — while directly answering the caricature that such confidence was necessarily anti-intellectual, historically naive, or hostile to careful biblical scholarship. Packer's approach shared Henry's underlying conviction that Scripture's authority and serious scholarly engagement were not in tension, but argued the case primarily through close, patient engagement with specific objections (concerning biblical criticism, the nature of biblical inspiration, and the relationship between Scripture and church tradition) rather than through Henry's larger systematic-theological architecture. Packer's later and more widely read Knowing God (1973) is a different kind of book — devotional and pastoral rather than polemical — but reflects the same underlying conviction that serious doctrinal precision and a genuinely warm, personal knowledge of God are not competitors.

A criticism stated fairly

The new evangelical project drew, and continues to draw, a specific and recurring criticism worth stating in the terms a critic would use. Some later readers — including, as later lectures in this chapter will note, theologians working within the evangelical tradition itself — have argued that Henry's strongly propositional model of revelation, whatever it gains in doctrinal precision and apologetic clarity, risks underselling Scripture's own literary variety: its extensive use of narrative, poetry, prophecy, and wisdom literature whose meaning is not obviously reducible, without remainder, to a set of propositions extracted from the text. This is not a claim that Henry denied Scripture contains narrative and poetry; it is a narrower methodological worry that his account of revelation's essential nature privileges the propositional mode even where a given biblical text's own primary mode of meaning-making is something else. This concern will return, considerably sharpened, in lecture 12-3's discussion of Kevin Vanhoozer's proposal that doctrine functions less like an extracted set of propositions and more like a script for the church's performance.

6. Further Reading

• Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Eerdmans, 1947) — the short book that gave new evangelicalism its founding complaint.
• Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 6 vols. (Word Books, 1976–1983) — Henry's full systematic defense of propositional revelation.
• J. I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God (Inter-Varsity Press, 1958) — Packer's case for retaining confidence in Scripture's authority against the caricature of anti-intellectualism.
• George M. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1987) — the standard scholarly institutional history of Fuller and the movement around it.
• Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013) — a wider historical account of the intellectual pressures new evangelicalism was responding to.