Carl F.H. Henry on Social Justice and an Over-Individualized Gospel
These words from Henry, penned in the late ‘70s, critique not only the failures of liberalism but also the over-individualized understanding of the gospel that has marked conservatives
Re-reading volume 4 of Carl F.H. Henry’s magisterial God, Revelation, and Authority, I have been struck again by his holistic presentation of the implications of the gospel for the pursuit of justice and equality in the social order.
If Henry wrote these same words today, there are those who would immediately accuse him of being a “social-justice warrior”—which suggests to me that some of those who make such accusations are the ones whose perspectives have changed as they have left behind the venerable evangelicalism of previous generations and chosen the path of fundamentalism instead.
Here are a few selections from Henry’s work:
“Because many churches try to solve the social plight of the masses with individual evangelism as the only alternative, and avoid discussion of the duty and dangers of social involvement, younger evangelicals are unprepared to confront the socioeconomic crisis except through socialist ideology. Socially concerned evangelicals want a gospel directed to nothing less than the whole man—especially a gospel addressed not exclusively to the soul in this life and to the body only as awaiting the prospect of future resurrection, so that remission of sins becomes man’s only present possession. … These younger missioners recognize the importance of the body not simply in the hereafter, when present physical needs will no longer be an anguished concern, but right now in this present life, when food and health and shelter are daily inescapable imperatives; for lack of an articulate alternative to meet their needs they turn to social revolution or political liberation. …
“The gospel resounds with good news for the needy and oppressed. It conveys assurance that injustice, repression, exploitation, discrimination and poverty are dated and doomed, that no one is forced to accept the crush of evil powers as finally determinative for his or her existence. … Even if Christians should and must deplore pseudotheologies that deal inadequately and objectionably with human oppression, they nonetheless must recognize the positive concerns of theologies of liberation and of revolution with their indictment of political, economic, and other injustice against the human spirit. … Concern for a theological orthodoxy devoid of justice and compassion is not orthodoxy but heterodoxy. … To drain God’s verbally revealed truth of its vitality by allowing social imperatives to be swallowed up in excuses for inaction is to suppress God’s mandate.
“The church … is already called, now, to challenge and contain the powers of evil. … Social justice is not, moreover, simply an appendage to the evangelical message; it is an intrinsic part of the whole, without which the preaching of the gospel itself is truncated. Theology devoid of social justice is a deforming weakness of much present-day evangelical witness. … Marxists make a hurried leap from the economic needs of the poor to the forced redistribution of the property of the rich. However indefensible this revolutionary alternative may be, it can hardly be challenged and stayed if evangelicals are indifferent to the necessities of the poor as well as the neglected responsibilities of the rich. … The evangelical community has a mandate to challenge social injustice wherever it is found, and to call and strive for social justice—as part of what it means to love God with one’s whole being and one’s neighbor as one’s self. … Not every loaf of bread given to the starving prepares the way for evangelistic commitment—nor need it, for feeding the hungry is a duty whether they respond to Christ in this life or not.
“Many evangelicals polarize the individual and social aspects of salvation, and overlook the fact that structural interrelationships are critically important for meeting the problem of social justice.”
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Selections from Carl F.H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority: Volume IV: God Who Speaks and Shows: Fifteen Theses, Part Three (Crossway, 1999) 711–754.
Thanks for sharing these words, which are critically important for all to hear today. As Jesus taught, “on EARTH as it is in heaven”.