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The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. By Carl F. H. Henry. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003, xxii + 89 pp., $12.
Carl Henry's Uneasy Conscience is back, and not a moment too soon. Over fifty years after its debut, Eerdmans has reprinted the little volume just as evangelicals are reconsidering the prospects and limits of cultural and political engagement. The importance of this little book might escape the contemporary generation of American evangelicals. In 1947, the young theologian issued a jarring manifesto calling for a theologically informed and socio-politically engaged evangelical movement. Henry indicted conservative Protestantism with an isolationism rooted in an inadequate understanding of the Kingdom of God. He was right-then and now.
Henry's cannons were aimed at two fronts-detached fundamentalism and social gospel liberalism. On the one hand, Protestant liberals, Henry insisted, had replaced the gospel of redemption through Christ with a political program. At the other extreme, however, Henry warned that fundamentalists had over-reacted to the social gospel. Conservatives had embraced a wholly future vision of the Kingdom of God, a wholly otherworldly vision of salvation, and a wholly spiritual vision of the church. Fundamentalist isolation was, for Henry, not primarily a political issue but a theological one. By segregating social and political concerns from the gospel, the fundamentalist evacuation from the public square had conceded it to liberals such as Walter Rauschenbusch, Harry Emerson Fosdick,...