Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the evangelical great, Carl F. H. Henry. Justin Taylor has a roundup of links over at his blog.
I’d like to point to an essay from a couple years back by Richard Mouw in Christianity Today, in which Mouw describes how Carl Henry changed his mind about the church and social justice. The story takes place within the context of Henry’s role as editor of CT, and Mouw’s attempt to contribute. There is an editorial back and forth that Mouw describes, and here’s a key takeaway:
Here is what I need to say now about my youthful negotiations with Carl Henry: Henry was right and I was wrong. At the time I agreed to Henry’s revision of my draft, I only grudgingly accepted what I considered a less-than-fully satisfactory compromise arrangement. What I really wanted to say is that the church—in the form of both preaching and ecclesial pronouncements—could do more than merely utter a “no” to some social evils. There were times, I was convinced, that the church could rightly say a bold “yes” to specific policy-like solutions. I now see that youthful conviction as misguided. Henry was right, and I was wrong.
Mouw goes on to note the coherence between Henry’s position and that articulated by Paul Ramsey in his book, Who Speaks for the Church? As Mouw writes, “the issue for Ramsey was not just the sheer number of pronouncements, but also a methodology that flowed from a defective theology. Henry quotes Ramsey’s harsh verdict: ‘Identification of Christian social ethics with specific partisan proposals that clearly are not the only ones that may be characterized as Christian and as morally acceptable comes close to the original New Testament meaning of heresy.'” These same concerns about the specificity and ideology of ecclesial pronouncements, inspired in large part by Ramsey, were a driving factor behind my engagement of ecumenical ethics and economics, Ecumenical Babel: Confusing Economic Ideology and the Church’s Social Witness.
Mouw goes on to make some important points about the role individual Christians and extra-ecclesial institutions have in working out the social implications of the gospel in concrete terms. As Mouw concludes, “I am not alone in owing a debt of gratitude to Henry for his pioneering—and courageous—efforts to encourage a more mature evangelical discipleship in the broad reaches of culture. I hope others will join me in continuing to learn from him how best to search out remedies for an evangelicalism that still suffers from an ‘uneasy conscience.'”
I have been reading Metaxas’ book on Bonhoeffer and found his movement towards more radical action quite compelling. Bonhoeffer realized that it might not be possible to not sin while pursuing justice and resisting evil, but to remain quiescent was the greater danger. Does Christian maturity bring a greater clarity concerning the stratagems of the enemy of souls, even in areas where there may be policy differences among professing Christians? Is there sometimes a choice to be made between not offending the immature and destroying the works of the devil?
Bob, those are good questions. I think from Bonhoeffer’s perspective there is a certain maturity of faith that implores you to act according to your convictions, even when the circumstances are complex and the way forward is morally dubious. The point that Henry, Ramsey, and Mouw are discussing is slightly different, in that it deals with the actions of the institutional church. The stakes are rather higher when the church as a formal institution makes public pronouncements than when an individual Christian, or even a group or organization of Christians does so. Individual Christians are called to work faithfully from their conscientious convictions in public on a variety of issues, and to band together to form groups to promote various purposes. This kind of action remains qualitatively different, I would argue, from official confessional, creedal, or positional statements from church denominations. It should also be noted that before getting involved more deeply and intentionally in the conspiracy that Bonhoeffer resigned his ordination in the church precisely so that his moral stand could not be used to indict the institutional church, so that his actions could not be construed as official acts of the church. This distinction between the church as institution and as organism (to use the neo-Calvinist terminology) is absolutely critical, in my view, to sorting out the questions of who ought to do and say what and when.
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While I’m definitely sympathetic to view of Henry, Ramsey, & (more recently) Mouw on this issue (I read Mouw’s article in CT), it seems to me there are degrees to which the institutional church can (& ought to) affirm SOME broad guidelines, if not specific prescriptions, on policy issues—e.g., affirming a “pro-life” bias on a wide-range of policies (abortion generally, the death penalty) while refraining from endorsing specific policies (specific types of or cases for abortion).
I think you are probably right, Paul, and the way Henry frames it (the church can only speak *negatively*) isn’t quite what Ramsey thinks. Ramsey’s view is rather that the church can (and must!) speak at the level of moral and spiritual principle, but not arrogate unto itself any special expertise in terms of prudential policy. That is actually much closer to my own view than splitting things up positive/negatively.