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Overview
A monumental six-volume set that presents an undeniable case for the revealed authority of God to a generation that has forgotten who he is and what he has done.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781433531743 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crossway |
| Publication date: | 01/25/1999 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 3030 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The Crisis of Truth and Word
No fact of contemporary Western life is more evident than its growing distrust of final truth and its implacable questioning of any sure word. The prevalent mood, as Langdon Gilkey tells us, is "sceptical about all formulations of ultimate coherence or ultimate meaning, speculative as well as theological" and "doubts the possibility both of philosophical knowing and religious faith" (Naming the Whirlwind, p. 24). The "man from Missouri" long lampooned as a provincial doubting Thomas has now found a well-nigh universal and sophisticated counterpart. So widespread is the current truth-and-word crisis that, according to some observers, the night of nihilism — a new Dark Ages — may be swiftly engulfing the civilized world, and particularly the West which long has vaunted itself as the spearpoint of cosmic progress.
Underlying this clash over what and whose word is worthy flares a deep disagreement over which of the diverse media everywhere facing mankind reliably discloses the true nature and course of human events. In particular, two powerful forces — in many ways the most fantastically potent influences known to the history of man — are today pursuing and competing for the beleaguered human spirit.
On the one hand, the God of Judeo-Christian revelation, whose truth and Word nullified pagan deities in the ancient past, still holds modern secular man wholly answerable to the theistic exposition of human life. The living God of the Bible inescapably and invincibly shows up and speaks out; the divine Logos is the round-the-clock and round-the-world channel of supernatural revelation. The self-disclosing God attributes human defection from truth and wobbling with words solely to man's devious ways, and continuingly implores a disaffected humanity to lift hearing ears and seeing eyes to his proffered revelation and redemption.
On the other hand, the secularizing speech of audio-visual technology more and more sets the tone for human thought and conduct. Deliberately and universally the mass media encroach upon modern man. Enhanced by color and cunning, television or radio or the printed page makes every last human soul a target of its propaganda. So astonishingly clever and successful have been these media in captivating the contemporary spirit — haunted as it is by moral vacillation and spiritual doubt — that Yahweh's ancient exhortation to beware of visual idols would seem doubly pertinent today.
The mass media, to be sure, make no overt or covert claim to play God, far less to specify timeless truth and unchanging commandments. They do not pretend to function as para-Logos, a surrogate medium of ultimate revelation. It would therefore be misleading to align God against the modern media as if Satan, that insidious "angel of light," had now ingeniously dissolved himself into television technology. The media are "not the cause, but the expression of contemporary vacuity," writes Malcolm Muggeridge in Esquire (Jan. 1973, p. 52). Marshall McLuhan, he adds, "when he delivered himself of his famous dictum that the medium is the message, overlooked the fact that the medium has no message. In the last resort, the media have nothing to say. ..." Yet to say that the mass media are but highly polished mirrors reflecting today's spiritual mindlessness can be challenged on two grounds. Something more must be said than simply that whereas the Logos of God as the divine medium of ultimate revelation both has and is the message, the mass media neither are the message nor have one. Obviously the mass media have not originated the bewilderment of our age; they have, however, indubitably widened and compounded the crisis of truth and word.
For one thing, in reply to critics who charge newscasters with fabricating the facts, media spokesmen assert that — in distinction from special interest groups such as government, industry and labor — the networks portray the modern scene (in Walter Cronkite's reassuring signoff) the way it is. The media claim to convey truth and fact as they are. The Watergate-related exposure of illegalities and moral wrongs that contributed, however painfully, to the conviction of Nixon aides and the resignation of the president himself, remains a tribute to a free and bold press that a badgered communist regime would surely have stifled. For all that, the media seldom grapple seriously and in depth with ultimate principles. Where, even in the Watergate context, was equal time given for such facets of reality as the inflexible nature of the moral order; the insistent biblical demand that "yes be yes and ... no no" (James 5:12, RSV; cf. Matt. 5:37); the connection of all equivocation and falsehood with the Evil One; the inviolable commandments of God that whenever we think we can break them with impugnity in fact break us? Final truth, changeless good, and the one true and living God are by default largely programed out of the real world. Despite occasional ethical commentary and some special coverage of religious events and moral issues, the media tend more to accommodate than to critique the theological and ethical ambiguities of our time. Their main devotion to what gratifies the viewing and reading audiences plays no small part in eclipsing God and fixed moral principles from contemporary life.
Defenders sometimes reply, moreover, that the mass media have no special mandate to provide norms or standards by which society is to judge itself. Television, after all, is primarily an entertainment medium. This response is superficial and evasive; indeed, it is doubly disappointing at a time when the wild, licentious winds of modernity have all but stripped away any sure Word of God. Such response caters to the assumption that there are many gods, and that unchanging truth and the good are fictions. Whether acknowledged or not, no one lives for a moment without theologico-ethical commitments, however superficial. The media themselves profess to honor codes of good telecasting, broadcasting and journalism. Why cannot such codes also underwrite a concern for the truth and the validity of values? The American tradition of church-state separation, it is sometimes stressed, precludes a partisan public commitment to a preferred theological-moral framework; synagogues and churches should therefore not expect the entertainment industry to promote their particular tenets. All this may be true. On the other hand does church-state separation bestow a license to denigrate the right and the good? By conditioning the public to an acceptance of moral decline, the entertainment media strangle the disposition to self-judgment and conceal the approaching doomsday of civilization. Malcolm Muggeridge observes "that what is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and that another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing ... by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values" ("Living through an Apocalypse," p. 4).
Whether they profess to tell the unadorned truth or to be necessarily indifferent to the truth of truth, the media seem in either case to abandon God and morality to the skeptics. Television has often been suspected of breeding violence and of carrying commercials that are misleading; it has seldom if ever been accused of breeding incisive theologians and ethicists. In many respects the crisis of truth and word shapes up as a conflict between the Logos of God as the medium of divine revelation, and the modern mass media as caterers to the secular spirit. Alongside sporadic and seldom persuasive fragments of ultimate concern, the media lend themselves to dignifying sham gods, spurious values and pseudotruth. By clouding the reality of God and the fixity of truth and the good, they abet the storm of skepticism that inundates contemporary civilization and abandons modern man to relativity in ethics and to a multiplicity of false deities. Yet their colossal power over modern life makes of the media an almost superhuman force. Only a recovery of the truth of revelation can therefore still the wayward winds that these media accommodate. But if no effective counterthrust can be marshaled through these influential agencies themselves, then it appears quite unlikely that any remedy can hope to succeed apart from or independently of them.
When listeners or viewers turn on radio or television they expect immediate and direct access to whatever is important in the contemporary world. For that reason secular man is all the more prone to demean Christianity as second-hand religion that conditions human salvation upon events consummated long ago and far away. To say that biblical religion excludes direct relationships between God and man is, of course, ill-founded. While the God of the Bible may be known only through a mediated revelation, he is nonetheless everywhere directly knowable, and calls man everywhere to indispensable decision in the present. On the other hand, the popular notion is preposterous that television or radio can mesh anyone directly and at once to the objective course and meaning of the external world of events. While viewers may indeed feel that they have a ringside seat on all facts and events, the camera severely limits the viewers' field of vision; viewers are actually restricted, in fact, to what producers schedule and depict, and what program monitors select. What's more, viewers do not even actually see what commentators and cameramen see, since each person's sense impressions are of necessity his and his alone.
Liberty in reporting, in selecting and interpreting media content, varies widely from culture to culture. How totalitarian tyrants exploit the power of the media to enslave the masses by seizing control of radio, television and the press is well known. In communist countries the party line dictates what the public has a right to hear and see; the media are a tool for extending Marxism. No less aware of the media's pervasive influence are free world entrepreneurs who enlist Madison Avenue to promote products, personalities or principles of varying merit or demerit. According to Burt Zollo some seventeen hundred public relations agencies and sixty thousand promotion specialists are engaged to establish the public image of corporations and executives in the United States and to stimulate sales (The Dollars and Sense of Public Relations, p. 2).
Fantastic myth-making possibilities hover over this technocratic world of magic whose creative imagination and artful visualization seem able to shape a new reality almost at will. Periodic warnings suggest the awesome possibility of manipulating entire masses of people by careful contrivance. Certain countercultural radicals have charged, for example, that a military-industrial complex controls the American media even though, in fact, the media have often and boldly challenged the military by critical and even unsympathetic reporting. Black revolutionaries for their part assert that Euro-American white cultural values saturate the media. Others suggest that so-called Western-white values are often insinuated so overpoweringly that the intelligent viewer is frequently turned off to other alternatives.
The crisis of word and truth is not, however, in all respects peculiar to contemporary technocratic civilization. Its backdrop is not to be found in the mass media per se, as if these sophisticated mechanical instruments of modern communication were uniquely and inherently evil. Not even the French Rèvolution, which some historians now isolate as the development that placed human history under the shadow of continual revolution, can adequately explain the ongoing plunge of man's existence into endless crisis. Why is it that the magnificent civilizations fashioned by human endeavor throughout history have tumbled and collapsed one after another with apocalyptic suddenness? Is it not because, ever since man's original fall and onward to the present, sin has plummeted human existence into an unbroken crisis of word and truth? A cosmic struggle between truth and falsehood, between good and evil, shadows the whole history of mankind. The Bible depicts it as a conflict between the authority of God and the claims of the Evil One. Measured by the yardstick of God's holy purposes, all that man proudly designates as human culture is little but idolatry. God's Word proffers no compliments whatever to man's so-called historical progress; rather, it indicts man's pseudoparadises as veritable towers of Babel that obscure and falsify God's truth and Word.
We need therefore to abandon the notion that modern science and its discoveries are the major obstacles to a living faith in the God of revelation and redemption. In earlier prescientific times, men negotiated their spiritual revolt just as vigorously and did so without invoking science and technology as a pretext. Oscar Cullmann writes with discernment: "We must reject the false notion that our separation from the biblical witnesses has been caused by the progress of modern science, so that today we cannot believe in salvation history because our world-view has changed. We must see clearly ... that the most recent discoveries ... in no way make faith in salvation history more difficult than it was for men during the days of early Christianity. This faith was just as difficult for men at that time and for philosophers of that age as it is for us, even though their philosophy was different from that of our age" (Salvation in History, pp. 319 f.). In other words, the modern crisis of truth and word is not something historically or culturally unique.
Despite the agelessness of man's predicament, its modern guise exhibits something new, however. Scientific ingenuity and technological genius have added novel and overwhelming dimensions to our spiritually imperiled life. By their worldwide coverage of breakthrough events, the mass media lend to the scientist a cloak of omnicompetence and latent omniscience. The atomic bomb erasure of entire cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the incredibly accurate propulsion of missiles and men onto the surface of the moon, and the virtual resurrection of the doomed and dying to life by organ transplants attest the scientist's astonishing access to secrets of the external world. At distances ranging from hundreds and thousands of miles on our own planet to hundreds of thousands of miles into space, earthlings can witness the ongoing scientific penetration of new frontiers and hitherto obscure boundaries. An estimated 528 million television viewers watched the departure of the first astronauts for a mission on the moon. The fact, however, that the last moon mission lacked sufficient audience interest to justify full network coverage of the return to earth indicates how quickly the novelty of new scientific spheres is absorbed into people's everyday expectations. The man in the street quickly absorbs the secular humanist's trust in scientific ingenuity and technocratic planning as the only guarantee of a rewarding future; he buries heretofore unknown possibilities for human destruction under the prospect of earthly utopia.
It alters nothing to emphasize that the Christian doctrines of God and of a creation pervaded by intelligible continuities long supplied metaphysical supports for Western scientific developments, and did so without issuing in notions of scientific omnicompetence. There was indeed a time when a crowning belief in the acting and speaking God of propheticapostolic revelation, supremely manifested in the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, held far greater fascination for the mind and will of the multitudes than does even technological science today. Not only the common people but also the noblest and most discriminating began the day with prayer, offered thanks to God at table, welcomed scriptural guidance amid the daily pursuits and exigencies of life, walked in fellowship with God throughout the day, and faced death with sure confidence in a blessed afterlife. Today, however, many accept not the Spirit-breathed Word of God but the experimentally based pronouncements of science as the one and only avenue to truth and life.
So fantastically powerful have the mass media themselves become that their globe-spanning activity influences life and thought with an almost uncanny mystique. However conspicuously short they may fall of being able to produce a new humanity, they have nonetheless left their sure mark on modern man, and have shown themselves able to alter the mood, the social customs, and even the morals of people. Whatever one may think of McLuhan's thesis that the medium is "the message," the fact remains that as image-makers the communications media have unmistakably molded the thought, conscience and will of our generation by superimposing one set of culture-values upon another with great subtlety and sophistication. Especially reprehensible are false masochistic values that promise a "new me" in exchange for repudiating one's own cultural inheritance for misleading alternatives. (Blacks are not alone in resenting the emphasis that "blondes have more fun" and that identifying with the so-called Euro-American woman's life style promises an elevation of consciousness.) What people consider the ideal image inevitably reflects their view of God and ultimate values — whether it be shaped by a modern communications medium or by the medium of divine revelation. Inescapably important, therefore, is the question whether enduring concerns of spirit, conscience and truth are granted audibility and visibility — or whether men suppress the Word of the living God. Not alone human culture, but human destiny as well, depend on whether sight and sound are reserved only for human speculation and transitory happenings, or are lent equally to the Word and truth of God.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "God, Revelation and Authority Volume I"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Carl F. H. Henry.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Series Preface,
Preface,
Introduction to Theology,
1. The Crisis of Truth and Word,
2. The Clash of Cultural Perspectives,
3. Revelation and Myth,
4. The Ways of Knowing,
5. The Rise and Fall of Logical Positivism,
6. The Countercultural Revolt,
7. The Jesus Movement and Its Future,
8. Secular Man and Ultimate Concerns,
9. The Meaning or Myths Man Lives By,
10. Theology and Science,
Supplementary Note: Science and the Invisible,
11. Theology and Philosophy,
12. Is Theology a Science,
13. The Method and Criteria of Theology (I),
14. The Method and Criteria of Theology (II),
15. Empirical Verification and Christian Theism,
16. Man's Primal Religious Experience,
17. A Priori Explanation of Religion,
18. The Philosophical Transcendent A Priori (I),
19. The Philosophical Transcendent A Priori (II),
20. The Theological Transcendent A Priori,
21. The Philosophic Transcendental (Critical) A Priori,
22. Transcendental Religious Apriorism,
23. Reflections on Religious Apriorism,
24. The "Common Ground" Controversy,
Bibliography,
Person Index,
Scripture Index,
Subject Index,
What People are Saying About This
“The most important work of evangelical theology in modern times.”—Kenneth Briggs, New York Times
“Establishes Henry as the leading theologian of the nation’s evangelical flank.”—Richard Ostling, Time Magazine
“A must for every Christian leader.”—Billy Graham
“This great six-volume work confronts the confusion of our age with a clear affirmation and brilliant defense of the Christian faith.”—R. Albert Mohler Jr., President, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
“Carl Henry’s keen insights as expressed in God, Revelation and Authority are sorely needed.”—R. C. Sproul, Late Founder, Ligonier Ministries
“These volumes are a landmark work, fully biblical, intellectually coherent, powerfully persuasive, and genuinely spiritual.”—David F. Wells, Senior Distinguished Research Professor of Theology, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
“A sure-footed guide to a great many aspects of evangelical theology.”—D. A. Carson, Theologian-at-Large, The Gospel Coalition
“God, Revelation and Authority is a biblically faithful rock in the twentieth-century sea of theological experimentation.”—John Piper, Founder and Teacher, desiringGod.org; Chancellor, Bethlehem College & Seminary; author, Desiring God
“Dr. Henry’s God, Revelation and Authority should be on every evangelical pastor’s shelf. I recommend it to the upcoming generation of serious, thinking Christians.”—James Montgomery Boice, former Senior Minister, Tenth Prebyterian Church; author, The Heart of the Cross
“Carl F. H. Henry brings an incredible marriage of scholarship, conviction, and application to the matter of spiritual authority. I am happy to commend this significant work.”—Adrian Rogers, Former President, Southern Baptist Convention; author, A Family Christmas Treasury
“Henry’s six-volume work, God, Revelation and Authority, his magnum opus, covers most of the topics of systematic theology and also delves deeply into philosophical theology, ethics, and contemporary culture . . . Reading the first four of these volumes in preparation for an intensive summer class on contemporary theology with Carl Henry was one of the highlights of my education; and it has served as a significant foundation for my Christian worldview.”—Douglas Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy, Denver Seminary; author, Walking Through Twilight: A Wife’s Illness—A Philosopher’s Lament