Henry first emerged as an evangelical public intellectual with the publication of his landmark 1947 book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. This short manifesto is rightly famous for the role it played in helping to define postwar, evangelical identity. Uneasy Conscience has been republished twice and it remains one of the founding texts of modern American evangelicalism. Henry argued that fundamentalists had disengaged from significant cultural engagement, especially in the spheres of education and politics, while modernists had abandoned Protestant orthodoxy for the Social Gospel.
Over the decades, Henry continued to address the relationship between faith and culture, including political engagement. Henry’s magnum opus is the six-volume God, Revelation, and Authority, which was published in three stages between 1976 and 1983, a generation after Uneasy Conscience. God, Revelation, and Authority is best known for its discussions of such matters as religious epistemology, special revelation, biblical inerrancy, and the doctrine of God.
Interestingly, volume six includes a short supplementary note titled “The Christian and Political Duty,” which follows two chapters that discuss a Christian understanding of justice. Henry roots his arguments in one of the recurring themes in his thought over the decades: that God is the God of both justification and justice. Writing in the early 1980s, Henry applies his views on justice to the question of Christian political engagement, focusing more on principles and priorities than policies.
Henry offers five preliminary principles, which he concedes are just the starting point for his discussion.
(1) God’s transcendent will has an absolute claim as justice; (2) Christ alone is the wholly just man in a fallen race, and the Savior of sinners; (3) the resurrection of the crucified Jesus openly identifies the divinely appointed judge of mankind (Acts 17:31; John 5:27) who guarantees the final victory of justice and righteousness in a triumphant personal return in power and glory that Christians are patiently to expect; and (4) Christians stand in the tradition of the godly prophets who proclaimed the justice of God and deplored injustice even at great personal risk. The Bible declares in addition that (5) God wills civil government as a framework in fallen human history for preserving justice and restraining disorder (Rom. 13:1 ff.).
He then moves to his larger argument. Christians understand that true public justice is found only through the saving work of Jesus Christ in both its personal and cosmic implications. Jesus not only died in the place of sinners, but he conquered sin and death, signaling the death knell of all injustice and oppression. The church, as the regenerated community who embody the Way of Christ, is to be salt and light as we demonstrate to the watching world what it means to live under the reign of the King.
In the 1940s, Henry had been discouraged by evangelical political disengagement. Four decades later, with the rise of the Religious Right, Henry acknowledges that evangelicals are more politically active than at any point in recent history. He critiques some evangelical movements, including Kuyperians who are drawn to confessional understandings of the state, revivalistic evangelicals who imply that only born-again believers can be good politicians, and theonomists who wish to impose Old Testament law on the United States.
Henry strives for realism: “Giving political expression to evangelical principles and ideals is not easy, for the crucial problem is how to bridge from normative principles to specific proposals.” Politics is often messy and always complicated. However, that does not mean evangelicals should be inert in their political witness. Christians know that God has ordained civil government, the powers of government are limited, and he holds all nations accountable. Within this understanding, a biblical view of justice and a commitment to neighbor-love should animate the Christian’s social conscience and lead us to identify with the oppressed.
Henry closes his reflections with two claims that I believe are distinctively, if not necessarily uniquely, evangelical. First, he suggests that political engagement and personal holiness should always go together. “Yet justice in the context of the kingdom of God must always correlate outer action with inner character. Duty fulfilled out of wrong motives, or by chance rather than intention, coincides with justice only incidentally or accidentally.” Political engagement should not be divorced from our pursuit of Christ; in fact, the latter should fuel the former.
Second, Henry claims that national renewal will only fully be realized as a fruit of spiritual revival. “If modern culture is to escape the oblivion that has engulfed the earlier civilizations of man, the recovery of the will of the self-revealed God in the realm of justice and law is critically imperative…. The alternatives are clear: either we return to the God of the Bible or we perish in the pit of lawlessness.” Political engagement should not be divorced from our longing for spiritual awakening, the latter of which is a work of God.
Our context today is different than when Henry was writing during the Reagan Administration. The Cold War is over and the War on Terror has come and mostly gone. Political liberalism is being questioned by post-liberals on both the Right and the Left, while populist movements are gaining traction all over the West. Judeo-Christian values are not only not taken for granted but they are often viewed as morally repugnant in an increasingly decadent society. Secularism and neo-paganism are not so much gaining ground, as they were in the 1980s, but are now part of the air we all breathe.
And yet, Henry still has much wisdom to offer. Christians should wisely and, at times, prophetically advocate for public justice, even in a culture where many have lost the plot on this very question. We should be crystal clear on biblical principles, even as we seek wisdom and engage charitably when it comes to our application of those principles. We should remember that cultural witness, perhaps especially in political engagement, should be an expression of our personal pursuit of Jesus. Finally, we should long for revival, knowing that apart from what Jonathan Edwards called a surprising work of God, whatever political gains that are made, in part, by Christians today may well fade to dust tomorrow.
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