God, Revelation and Authority: God Who Speaks and Shows (Vol. 1): God Who Speaks and Shows: Preliminary Considerations

Series Preface

AUTHENTIC CHRISTIANITY is always rooted in a sense of God’s sovereign timetable. We cannot be indifferent to the past, nor to the future-embracing as it does the new millennium and, in due season, the Lord’s return. Likewise, we dare not be indifferent to the present-as each generation of Christians is responsible for its own spiritual decisions, and upon these, destiny revolves.

Having lived through most of the twentieth century, I have touched the course and conflicts of modern theology in a variety of contexts: first as an unrepentant churchgoer, later as a questioning newspaper reporter and editor, still later as an inquisitive seminarian, and eventually as an academician pursing the exposition of evangelical distinctives.

The six volumes of God, Revelation, and Authority represent my effort to challenge the course of modern theology. In 1978 Time magazine recognized that the series offered far more than mere commentary on religious events. God, Revelation, and Authority is a challenge to the fluctuating theological outlook of a century that lacked religious compass bearings.

My intention was to confront the vacillating liberalism that had overtaken the spiritual arena. In a plea for recovery from this directionless outlook, the project issued a call to reconsider and reevaluate the forfeited distinctives of the biblical heritage. Here was a serious attempt to state the scriptural revelation on its own terms-fully aware of the issues at stake both in the history of Western thought and in contemporary theology.

Just thirty years before the publication of the first volume of God, Revelation, and Authority, I had called conservative Christians to reenter the cultural arena from which most of them had retreated (see The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Evangelicalism, 1947). By the late 1970s, a growing army of disappointed modernists and apprehensive Barthians recognized that a comprehensive world-and-life view must underlay any recovery of Christian social activity and reaffirmation of a revelatory theology. The 1960s-when even some professing Christian theologians had insisted that God is dead-attested only that the surviving liberalism was built on quicksand.

By then it was evident that Barthianism-no matter how aggressive-could not sustain a permanent theological outlook. With its welcome of higher criticism and its marginalization of history and nature, Neo-orthodoxy lacked consistency and the power to prevent the degeneration of humanism to raw naturalism. In the end, Barthianism accommodated the collapse of modernism into postmodernism, and its vengeful repudiation of any objective conception of deity, truth, and goodness.

My ambition in God, Revelation, and Authority was not, however, merely to note the enfeebling weaknesses and costly consequences of modernized theology. I aimed to exhibit the logical power of truth and the permanent relevance of the scriptural alternative.

It is sometimes said that ancient philosophy grappled with the problem of being and becoming, medieval philosophy with the problem of guilt and redemption, and modern philosophy with the epistemic problem of probability and truth. The concerns of philosophy in the postmodern era are innumerable. Yet, the spirit of our end-of-an-era age longs for hope. Unfortunately, not all that passes for hope is genuine. The New Testament exhortation is for Christians to be always ready to defend our claims against anyone who asks a reason for the hope we hold (1 Peter 3:15). Hope without reason has little in common with the Christian hope-which is focused on Jesus Christ, who has come and is coming again. True Christian hope is always Christological in its foundation.

This is immensely different from modern liberation theologies that tend to view the Kingdom of God in terms of immanent evolution, and the eschatological millennium as a human achievement. In contrast, Christian hope anticipates the sudden and unpredictable transformation of all earthly values through the manifestation of the Kingdom of God in fullness.

The Christian hope is diluted whenever theology clouds the reality of humanity’s twofold eternal destiny. Among the ironies of our time is the fact that some quasi-evangelical theologians profess to honor the love of God by denying the divine justice. A distorted view of God’s character is made to excuse the most horrific evils. A loving God thus becomes indifferent even to monstrous wickedness.

Some theologians who acknowledge an evil reality akin to Satan nonetheless have no room for the doctrine of an eternal hell. God’s unconditional love is said to close hell’s doors from access. Yet, so violent have been the evils of our times-terrorist bombings and mass murder, chemical weaponry and nuclear warfare-that these are not reducible to the personified wickedness of our era. These evils cry out for God’s righteous justice.

The attempted assimilation of these evils under a comprehensive divine love and into a doctrine of final reconciliation and universal salvation is a direct subversion of the scriptural message. The Apostle Paul’s comments on God’s comprehensive rescue and redemption appear in a context in which he pleads for personal faith in Christ as the only alternative to doom.

It was gratifying that the six volumes of God, Revelation, and Authority were welcomed as a long overdue exposition of evangelical theology and its cognitive defensibility. At the time, most contributions to theology were variants of the current confusion.

Systematic theology had been neglected as much in evangelical circles as among non-evangelicals. Since then, perhaps under the stimulus of God, Revelation, and Authority, over a dozen systematic projects have appeared. Some are more worthy than others, of course. A few are concerned to exhibit a single denominational track. Some seek points of mutuality with non-evangelical theologies, thus conceding evangelical essentials through recourse to Narrative Theology and Postmodernism.

If I were writing God, Revelation, and Authority today, I would add material to address these new concerns. I did address those issues in Toward a Recovery of Christian Belief (Crossway, 1990), which was based upon my Rutherford Lectures delivered in 1989.

It is specially gratifying that God, Revelation, and Authority has retained its interest among a new generation-holding steady for the faith once for all delivered. A corps of devout and intellectually dedicated young leaders are themselves now making effective contributions to theological scholarship. Not a few of them I met and encouraged in their student days-among them R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Timothy George, Mark Dever, and Mark Peters. Many have been in touch across the years by mail and by small colloquies in our tiny Wisconsin apartment, where not only young theologians but business executives, lawyers, and pastors have eagerly pursued conversation about the condition of our churches and the difference dedicated Christians can make.

Those who have been frustrated in seeking God, Revelation, and Authority-often going to extraordinary lengths in their search-will join me in expressing appreciation to Crossway for this new edition.

At eighty-five years of age, given the encroaching infirmities of old age, I can no longer turn our modest apartment into a place of dialogue. But I am grateful that the conversation can continue through God, Revelation, and Authority.

CARL F. H. HENRY

Watertown, Wisconsin

January 1999

Preface

WHEN IN 1933 I received Christ Jesus as personal Savior and Lord, I had not the slightest notion of ever writing a book; least of all did I envision serious work in theology. Ours was an immigrant family, rich neither in things nor in spirit, although not consciously miserable nor unhappy. No one in our home was an evangelical believer, no one had attended college or expected to do so, and our main interest in the world was to eke out a tolerable survival.

After becoming a believer I wanted to learn more about the ultimately real world and a truly rewarding life, about human history and the role of science, and especially about the nature of God and his purpose for me and for the world. These interests spurred me on as a young Christian journalist to seek a liberal arts education and to grasp the essentials of the Christian life-world view. I ventured into graduate and postgraduate schools, some of them friendly, some hostile, others indifferent to evangelical concerns, to pit and test Christian claims against rival religious and philosophical views.

In the course of my training, teaching and writing I have spent memorable hours with twentieth-century luminaries like Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, G. C. Berkouwer, Geoffrey Bromiley, Gordon Clark, Donald MacKinnon, Leon Morris, Charles F. D. Moule, Anders Nygren, Hermann Sasse, Cornelius Van Til, Gustave Weigel and others. These scholars represent much of the wide spectrum of contemporary theology; some are revered mentors and friends.

Evangelical theology is heretical if it is only creative and unworthy if it is only repetitious. That it can be freshly relevant for each new generation of persons and problems is a continuing asset. One often hears that nonevangelical theology seems to speak more directly to the dilemmas of the age but that its message forfeits the timeless biblical heritage. Evangelical theology, on the other hand, while preserving the Judeo-Christian verities all too often fails to project engagingly upon present-day perplexities. Obviously before one can address the contemporary scene one must know what the moderns are thinking and saying and doing. This investigation often involves speaking a language strange to past generations and to the public at large, a language sometimes idiosyncratic in meaning and in need of revision. But unless one knows this language and what it depicts, one can hardly engage in effective conversation. Contrary to what some people may think, it is not because they sleep on Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary that theologians are now trapped in a vocabulary strange to twentieth-century gospel songs. The fact is that words like demythologize, dialectical, existential, linguistic analysis, and so on, have become part of the inescapable vocabulary of serious religious discussion in our generation. To ignore what these terms mean and involve is to cut oneself off from articulate theological discussion with those most in need of evangelical perspectives.

On the other hand this professional tendency to speak in enigmatic tongues contrasts sharply with the lucid proclamation of the biblical revelation to ordinary mortals. The Christian message is good news for the masses, and unless theologians are intelligible in the public mart and in the public press, both will ignore them. Even in Germany, where formal university training imparts greater familiarity with the history of ideas than does most American learning, more than one professor has observed that the intricacies of contemporary theology are so complex that its subleties are lost on many an entering divinity student. Only the inescapable importance of the issues involved can therefore justify our ongoing interest in them.

I am deeply indebted to scholars of various traditions, especially to competent philosophers under whom I have studied like Gordon H. Clark, W. Harry Jellema and Edgar S. Brightman. Since the early days when Edward John Carnell and I became seriously interested in evangelical literary engagement, I have been challenged and enriched by many theologians and others with whom I have dialogued and whose works I have read. My indebtedness to them is expressed wherever I specifically recall it, although a few instances may have eluded me. I remember, for example, happening upon Nygren’s untranslated Religiöst Apriori and meeting Saturday mornings in Los Angeles with a Swedish pastor who worked through it with me. To no contemporary do I owe a profounder debt, however, than to Gordon Clark, as numerous index references will attest. Since the thirties when he taught me medieval and modern philosophy at Wheaton, I have considered him the peer of evangelical philosophers in identifying the logical inconsistencies that beset nonevangelical alternatives and in exhibiting the intellectual superiority of Christian theism. He has offered helpful comments on many of the chapters.

In sections of Chapter 5 (The Rise and Fall of Logical Positivism) and in the Supplementary Note to Chapter 10 (Theology and Science) on Science and the Invisible, I acknowledge helpful use of Peter Genco’s unpublished Ph.D. dissertation on Verification, Falsification, and the Language of Christian Theism; in Chapter 15 (Empirical Verification and Christian Theism) I am somewhat critical of its approach.

To my beloved wife Helga I owe a debt beyond words. She has patiently and sacrificially read much of this material, offering literary suggestions and clarifying the expression of thought, and now and then even elucidating notions that I had not intended. Her facility with modern languages has been a boon; long before it was available in English translation we worked together, for example, through Brunner’s Die christliche Lehre von Gott.

I am highly grateful also to World Vision International which has encouraged my completion of this effort in time not preempted by teaching and lecturing commitments and, after the completion of Volume One, made available to me secretarial help that I have not had since leaving Christianity Today in 1968. Providentially, the retirement to Monrovia, California, of Irma Peterson, my long-time secretary, permitted her to resume this relationship at an airmail distance of 3,000 miles.

This four-volume effort represents hitherto unpublished material on which I have worked on and off during the past twenty-five years of teaching, researching and lecturing. It is no overnight venture. A year of postgraduate research abroad at Cambridge University as well as an earlier period at New College, Edinburgh, contributed to its preparation. Some of the content has served along the way as lecture material either in academic series or when serving as visiting professor at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and also abroad in 1974, 1975 and 1976 at the Asian Center for Theological Studies and Mission in Seoul, Korea. I should also note with appreciation various campuses on which I have presented one or several units of this work in brief lecture series: Asbury Theological Seminary, Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, Albion College, Eastern Mennonite College, Grand Canyon College, Greenville College, Mars Hill College, Mount Vernon Nazarene College, Olivet Nazarene College, Pacific Union College, Trinity Christian College, Northwestern University, Ball State University, Loma Linda University, Pacific Lutheran University, Valparaiso University, University of Delaware and Western Kentucky University. In addition some lectures were given in Latin America, at Central America Mission in Guatemala City; Latin America Biblical Seminary in San José, Costa Rica; Evangelical Seminary of Lima, Peru; Instituto Biblico in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Baptist Seminary in Recife, Baptist Seminary in Rio de Janeiro, and Baptist Seminary in Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Seminario Evangelico Asociado, Maracay, Venezuela. Some were given in Asia at the Chinese Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong and China Evangelical Seminary in Taipei, Korea Baptist Theological Seminary in Daejeon, Presbyterian Theological Seminary and Seoul Theological Seminary in Korea, and at the 1974 training sessions of Evangelism International in Singapore. In New Zealand lectures were given at Auckland University and Bible College of New Zealand; and in Australia in Moore Theological College of Sydney, Baptist College of New South Wales, Ridley College of Melbourne, Bible College of South Australia, Baptist Theological College of West Australia, and Perth University.

If God be pleased, and may it be so to his glory, Volumes One and Two are scheduled for publication by Word Books at Thanksgiving, 1976, and will be followed by Volume Three at Thanksgiving, 1978, and hopefully by Volume Four at Thanksgiving, 1980.

CARL F. H. HENRY

Arlington, Virginia 22207

New Year’s Day, 1976

Introduction to Theology

SPEAK OF AN INTRODUCTION to God, or to the science of God, and some people are sure to look for the nearest exit. An introduction to sex techniques—now there’s a best seller! Or a manual (not on avoiding the rise and fall of the American empire but) on turning Dow Jones averages into a John Doe windfall—that’s practical religion, that’s heaven on earth. What dangles a more fascinating future, after all, than the tips of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith, or of Johnson and Masters?

But what future has theology? If the future is any longer foreseeable, don’t astrological horoscopes now publish the truth and the way? Have wise men stopped reading the stars? A future for theology? Has it even a present? Haven’t theologians themselves been telling us that God is dead? Is theology a viable and serious intellectual pursuit at all?

A century ago the French author Jules Verne wrote extravagantly imaginative stories in which he foresaw many remarkable scientific achievements of our own day, such as submarines, aircraft and television. What he did not foresee was the loss, equally remarkable, of what was once almost everywhere taken for granted, the reality of God. For our generation, is not theology a questionable concern at best? Contemporary man is far more sure of the landing of astronauts on the moon than he is of God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ, more sure of scientists propelled into outer space than of the Logos that came down from heaven (John 3:13, KJV) as the eternal Word become flesh (John 1:14). To secular Western man in the late 1970s, no world seems more remote than that of theology.

Religion now has become everyone’s own kettle of fish—a matter of personal preference rather than a truth-commitment universally valid for one and all. The notion seems to be widespread that theology—whether Christian or not—is not truly a rational enterprise at all, but rather an outmoded superstition, like alchemy or astrology, that has unfortunately survived from the ancient past or from the Dark Ages. Religious propagandists themselves for so long have recommended decision not for truth’s sake but for the personal consolation and social stability it brings that untruths are increasingly thought to be the lifeblood of religion. Even neo-Protestant theologians today assert that divine revelation is to be believed without questioning, and that it cannot be integrated with any unified system of truth. One can more readily forgive Tertullian, who wrote to Marcion that because Christian assertions are absurd they are to be believed, than he can modern dialectical and existential theologians who uncritically espouse the same nonsense seventeen centuries later. So much has the leap of faith been exaggerated into a virtue that contemporary religionists have become more noted for their ingenious hurtling over rational objections than for their intelligible confrontation of the issues. That theology simply prepackages a platter of ideas to be hurriedly ingested rather than carefully savored by intellectual gourmets is a standard complaint of modern atheists and agnostics. The world religions offer, they say, a variety of man-made convenience frozen foods awaiting the moment when harried individuals run into unforeseen emergencies and are therefore willing to eat anything rather than starve.

If theology, then, is not dead, is it sheer bunk? Are we merely chasing a will-o’-the-wisp? Has theology not been taught for centuries by men ordained by the various world religions to raise their own flag? Is it, as someone has suggested, a specialized and rather bogus form of philosophy in which the conclusions are laid down before the argument begins? Is it a spurious form of philosophy that sets out with unquestioned and unquestionable assumptions, refuses to face problems, and corrals its converts into an irrational commitment that is academically closed and intellectually dishonest? Is the skeptic’s doubt about Christianity to be overcome by a hurried appeal to Pascal’s wager—a gambling of life on the view that even if a person is intellectually mistaken he stands to gain more by betting on God than on not-God?

Theology, we shall insist, sets out not simply with God as a speculative presupposition but with God known in his revelation. But the appeal to God and to revelation cannot stand alone, if it is to be significant; it must embrace also some agreement on rational methods of inquiry, ways of argument, and criteria for verification. For the critical question today is not simply, What are the data of theology? but How does one proceed from these data to conclusions that commend themselves to rational reflection? The fundamental issue remains the issue of truth, the truth of theological assertions. No work on theology will be worth its weight if that fundamental issue is obscured. Durable theology must revive and preserve the distinction between true and false religion, a distinction long obscured by neo-Protestant theologians. Either the religion of Jesus Christ is true religion or it is not worth bothering about. True worship is what Jesus demanded: God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth (John 4:24, RSV). Jesus broke with Jewish religious leaders in his day on the ground that they were falsifying the Old Testament revelation; he came very close, in fact, to denouncing some of the influential religious spokesmen of that time as liars (John 8:44 ff.). That strategy was hardly calculated to win him any brotherhood awards, but it did maintain top priority for truth as a religious concern.

Even a theologian who wrestles the case for Christian theism in the context of ultimate truth must on that very account remain acutely aware of his own finitude and faults. But he may hope and pray that his work at least will make it more difficult for inquiring minds to evade an introduction to theology, and that God may himself be pleased to honor a dedicated witness.

The structure of this work is as follows. Volumes One, Two and Three, titled God Who Speaks and Shows, expound the nature of religious knowledge. This initial volume deals largely with theological prolegomena; Volumes Two and Three will develop each of the fifteen theses on divine revelation summarized in the introduction to Volume Two. Volume Four, titled God Who Stands, Stoops and Stavs, expounds the nature of God.

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,¹ 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.

That God is a nonsensory reality is not what gives him a poor press; justice, love, human rights and much else that makes the news are also nonsensory. But by thrusting upon viewers and auditors the Israeli-Arab tensions, the Sino-Soviet cleft, the economic dilemma, and the energy crisis as the decisively real world, the media foster an almost purely sensate misunderstanding of reality. Their loud and vigorous competition for audience interest tends to focus on secular issues alone as being important. All communications media force upon their followers a mood of perpetual crisis in the sociopolitical sphere rather than in the ethicospiritual realm. No reflection is here intended on the honesty and integrity of professional journalists, no implication that taken as a class newscasters misrepresent the facts as they see them. The free world press has faults, but its outstanding reputation for dedicated and effective coverage cannot be gainsaid. The legal and moral issues surrounding the Watergate events during the Nixon administration were, in fact, boldly pursued by the news media in the face of highly adverse pressures. Yet the reporting of international hostilities, of the deployment of incredibly destructive weaponry, of routine on-target delivery of missiles at vast distances, and of the tumult on the domestic scene batters the individual into a confused identification with what he hears. This aspect of the modern crisis of truth and word pushes the human spirit almost to the breaking point, inasmuch as man’s own survival and destiny seem up for grabs in a world vexed by credibility gaps and seeming meaninglessness.

On the one hand, therefore, the vivid coverage of events heightens individual response almost to the point of personal engagement; on the other, the constant repetition of emotion-laden experiences, and the exposure to incessant barrages of superpowered appeals, drives listeners to steel themselves against emotional exhaustion and dulls their desire for personal involvement. Sydney A. Ahlstrom notes that this exhausting impact of media presentation tends also to rob religious confrontation of the effectiveness it once enjoyed: Moonshots, nuclear testing, discussion of an ABM defense system, and the stark possibility of human extinction drain away the vitality of traditional belief (The 1960s: Radicalism in Theology and Ethics, p. 13, n. 28). The mass media devotee thinks that religion should dispense the same emotional wallop as the launching of a moon missile, or whatever else has replaced the first excitement of Cape Kennedy extravaganzas. The longing for miracle words as for miracle drugs of re-creative power (cf. Medical Economics, Mar. 2, 1970, p. 111) may evidence a generation that not only has lost the life-giving Word of God, but also turns readily to the demonic and occult to fill the vacuum in human experience. The fading from prime time of effective presentations of the biblical heritage is a significant fact of our television age. Public service time allocated to religion is mainly absorbed by ecumenical agencies whose interest centers more in social activity and religious novelties than in the historic faith of the Bible. As exposition of the spiritual and moral heritage of Western civilization diminishes, the media give increasing prominence to other religious expressions. Often belief in the supernatural is correlated with superstition.

The mass media, in summary, are amazingly adroit in supplying new dimensions to the age-old crisis of word and truth. Their indecision about spiritual realities, their deference to moral relativism and spiritual vagabondage, and their obvious accommodation of a materialist and sex-centered view of life are familiar devices for gaining attention and manipulating minds. The present crisis is far more complex and cuts distressingly deeper than this, however.

Few times in history has revealed religion been forced to contend with such serious problems of truth and word, and never in the past have the role of words and the nature of truth been as misty and undefined as now. Only if we recognize that the truth of truth—indeed, the meaning of meaning—is today in doubt, and that this uncertainty stifles the word as a carrier of God’s truth and moral judgment, do we fathom the depth of the present crisis. When truth and word remain as the accepted universe of discourse, then all aberrations can be challenged in the name of truth. Today, however, the nature of truth and even the role of words is in dispute.

The breakdown of confidence in verbal communication is a feature of our times. More is involved here than simply a call for sincerity and integrity in verbal exchange. The widespread manipulation of and disenchantment with words is increasingly thrust upon politicians who are elected on one platform and then chart a contrary course, and upon religious groups that profess one thing in doctrine and display contrary social attitudes, or even receive funds for one purpose and expend them for another.

Such preference for the nonverbal is especially conspicuous among the younger generation who increasingly surmise that words are a cover-up rather than a revelation of truth; that is, words are used to conceal, distort and deceive. Marshall McLuhan’s theory of communication assumes the obsolescence of words.

If we probe the reasons for this mood, we cannot escape some reference to the mass media as manipulators of the word. They reflect on a colossal scale the license taken by advertisers in promoting consumer wares, fortunately increasingly regulated by government (in the absence of voluntary controls) insofar as it endangers health and borders on consumer fraud. A Newsweek survey (Aug. 16, 1971, p. 9) shows marked public disbelief of television commercials: even as early as the second grade, children indicate ‘concrete distrust of commercials, often based on experience with advertised product’ ; by the fourth grade they have ‘distrust for specific commercials and tricky elements of commercials’ ; and by sixth grade they show ‘global distrust of all commercials except public service announcements.’ On the edge of this trend toward cynicism as early as the second to the fourth grades, Newsweek raises the question of the violence commercials may do to a child’s capacity for trust. According to current network estimates, the typical American child has watched over twenty-five thousand hours of television and viewed about three hundred fifty thousand commercials by the time he reaches his eighteenth birthday. Early disbelief of verbal claims, because of indifference to truth—let alone disregard for health—has already evoked demands for policing or banning commercials on children’s television programs. What bearing this distrust may or does have on the hearing of religious claims poses interesting problems also for those who underscore the connection between Christianity and capitalism but do not criticize the misdeeds of free enterprise.

Promoters exploit religious and ethical terms to commend potentially injurious products—not only physically harmful items such as cigarettes and alcohol, but culturally questionable commodities as well. Cigarettes, for example, are proclaimed a real good thing and the problem with calling a Winston good is reduced to a debate over grammar, not a concern of ethics and truth. In striving for sales success, Madison Avenue thus abuses words as a vehicle of truth. Sometimes even Bible terminology is wrested from its hallowed spiritual and moral context and deployed to promote what is merely mechanical, ethically dubious or physically harmful. Two obstacles are thereby interposed for comprehending spiritual and moral concepts; words are emptied of traditional meaning, and are sales-pitched toward questionable ends. As an audience manipulation technique, such commercial tactics often smack of a radical approach that retains noble concepts for motivational value but avoids any definition of terms. This procedure can so distort the good that, as Francis Schaeffer has somewhere remarked, a young man is encouraged to become christlike by sleeping with a girl that needs him.

Had they effectively championed the integrity of truth and word in the public arena, the Christian churches could and might have challenged the prevalent misuse of words to conceal and distort the truth; they might have made the twentieth-century mass media more serviceable to the gospel of Christ than was even the printing press during the Reformation. But many modern churchmen, confused by higher criticism and enamored of existential theology, have themselves contended that the content of the Word of God cannot be formulated in words. Young theologians have promoted emphases like Sigmund Mowinckel’s that God’s word is not utterances, nor verbal expression of ideas, concepts and thoughts, but deed (The Old Testament as the Word of God, p. 42) or the tenet of kerygmatic theologians that God’s Word consists in personal divine presence incapable of formulation in words.

Neo-Protestant ecumenism, moreover, put its own premium on verbal ambiguity as being useful for promoting ecclesiastical unity. Such semantic juggling is not unlike the commercial practice of abusing sacred symbols for the sake of pushing sales. Editorial revisers have similarly welcomed and relied on verbal obscurity to advance the cause of church merger; long-standing creedal differences are glossed over by artful generalities. If linguistic games played by secular politicians deflated confidence in democratic processes, the consequences were no less devastating where ecclesiastical bureaucrats relied on religious double talk to promote vested interests. As a consequence, churchmen were hardly in any strategic position to protest a worldly misuse and abuse of religious symbols.

Nonverbal communication now increasingly clamors for attention if not priority. We often hear it said today that the time for words has passed, that for modern man words have lost their meaning and power. In deference to the consequent anti-intellectual and existential approaches to life, radio and television programs now often concentrate on sound and imagery to secure emotive rather than cognitive audience response. The misimpression grows that ordinary language is inadequate to express truth and to depict reality. Music and the arts become subjectively introverted and tend to lose significance as a realm of shared experience and communication. When the notion flourishes that words are not to be trusted as carriers of the truth, and religious connotation terms are allowed to run wild and wicked, Christianity, because it is a religion of verbal revelation, suffers more than do other world religions.

But the modern cult of nonverbal experience poses a challenge not only to revealed religion; it makes trivial the whole cultural inheritance of the Western world as well. To strip words of any necessary or legitimate role as a revelatory resource denies not only the intelligibility of revelation, but also the very rationality of human existence. Nonverbal experience cannot supply today’s generation with fruitful alternatives to the spiritual emptiness of the times; the cavernous silence of a speechless world echoes not a single syllable of hope. To deverbalize an already depersonalized society is all the more to dehumanize it. Community life reduced to an inarticulate charade is merely a human Babel overtaken by mental and verbal exhaustion.

Those who resort to words to tell us that words distort reality and truth engage either in a futile or self-refuting activity. Radical theologians who decry Christian verbalization themselves often employ a torrent of words to demean or undermine the importance of words for theology. If words are considered intrinsically untrustworthy, then the future of a theology of verbal revelation and of verbal proclamation of the gospel— or for that matter of any other written or spoken formulation—is dim indeed. Judeo-Christian religion centers supremely in the living God self-disclosed in his Word, and this biblically attested Word is communicated intelligibly in meaningful sentences. If the only thing that can be said about the mass media is that their communication of man’s speech undermines its trustworthiness, then Christian theology and all other rational-verbal communication have very poor prospects in a technological age. But biblical Christianity has the least reason of all for accommodating itself to an antiverbal or to an antimedia approach to life. The claim of Jesus of Nazareth to know and proclaim the Word and teaching of God is nonsense if words are inherently distortive and deceptive. The delusiveness of the verbal would reduce his claims to chicanery: The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works (John 14:10, KJV); He that is of God heareth God’s words (John 8:47, KJV). Jesus’ reminder that Scripture cannot be broken (John 10:35, KJV) should reassure evangelicals that not even the most powerful technology can dissolve or destroy the force of the prophetic-apostolic Word.

Blanket judgment of the mass media per se as inherently evil, or even as specially culpable, would be a seriously mistaken reaction to the cult of the nonverbal. All human culture, including that propounding the nonverbal, displays ingredients of man’s revolt against the Word and truth of God; the media are not uniquely prone or alone serviceable to evil. To forfeit the media to unregenerate control renders them highly vulnerable to dubious use and ends. Lacking responsive leadership they easily serve the dilution of truth and the whims and wiles of words. But to judge them as inevitably traitorous to word and as per se hostile to truth manifests an unpardonable suspicion and distrust. Carried forward logically, such a view requires totally avoiding the media as channels by which modern man can be confronted intelligibly by either the Word of God or by the words of men.

Were Christians to forsake the media as tools of the devil, resourceful advocates of non-Christian and anti-Christian ideologies would have great reason indeed to be grateful. Jesus taught his disciples not by deeds alone, but by words also, and expected them to promulgate his message verbally as well as to appropriate it as a way of life. Indeed, he charged them to proclaim the good news to the ends of the earth, so that preaching and discipling constitute the church’s primary responsibility in the world. Protestant Reformers hailed the printing press as a divine provision for giving all men access to the inspired Scriptures; no less would they have hailed radio and television as means for further extension of the gospel. Christians have a mandated responsibility for verbal proclamation and rational persuasion. The printing press, radio, television and every mechanical help can be missionary tools not only for diagnosing the terminal illness of modern civilization but also for proclaiming worldwide the abiding truth and power of God. If God has given the church the job of bannering the headlines that the Son of God came to the planet called earth, as literature coordinator C. Richard Shumaker of Evangelical Literature Overseas remarks (Our Unsurpassed God, p. 6), then a mass communications era should settle for nothing less in fulfilling the Great Commission than an earth-circling satellite that proclaims the truth of God.

Evangelical Christianity today has inherited an unprecedented challenge to employ the media for proclaiming the truth and Word of God so that the tacit assumptions of the modern word-business and of the antiword revolt are themselves put to rout. The media traffic mainly in bad news; this does not mean that they are sold out to bad news, however, or are hostile to good news. Better than anyone else the evangelical ought to understand why world news tends to be bad, since he has no easy doctrine of sin or blithesome doctrine of progress. The Christian task is to exhibit the newsiness and newsworthiness of the Christian message, for the gospel is NEWS—big news, good news, true news.

History’s most unusual and momentous news continues to be the message that the holy God provides sinful man a way of escape from the damning consequences of sin, and proffers him a new kind of life fit for both time and eternity. This ongoing global news is more important than the Allies’ rollback of Hitler and the Nazis, or modern technology’s putting a man on the moon, or scientific research’s latest medical breakthrough. The gospel’s offer of spiritual rescue and renewal that leads to life in Christ’s image and an eternal destiny in God’s holy presence is earth’s best news. It is astonishingly true news; it may even strike some men as too good to be true. Small wonder that Jesus’ own disciples at first thought it beyond belief. Luke tells us that when the crucified Jesus showed himself alive, some of the eleven disciples were still unconvinced, still wondering for it seemed too good to be true (Luke 24:41, NEB). Never has this good news been so misconstrued as in our own time, while all the while it alone holds out more hope and promise than any other message.

The modern world of words has toppled from its divine intention. The authentically biblical four-letter words—free, good, true, holy, love, and others—have yielded to cheap and carnal imitations. Only by restoring human speech to the Word of God can the present futility of words be canceled and contemporary idiom be rejoined to truth and reality. According to a recent theory, the essence of communication is no longer to be found in the truth or falsity of statements but rather in the medium or means of communication. If the truth of truth is lost, then obviously the final import of each and every word vanishes also. We are left with only a multiplicity of latest words, none of them fixed and final. So an elite cadre of Athenian intellectuals devoted to novelty soon breeds an entire generation ever learning, and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth (2 Tim. 3:7, KJV). When truth is lost, falsehood no longer exists; everything becomes relative to its own situation. But the church of Christ knows that the positive, good and creative Word of God stands behind us and above us and ahead of us.

More is sacrificed by defecting from the truth of revelation than simply the truth about God and man and the world; loss of the truth and Word of God plunges into darkness the very truth of truth, the meaning of meaning, and even the significance of language. To sever the concerns of reason and life from the revelation of God as the final ground and source of truth and the good accommodates and accelerates the contemporary drift to nihilism. It is not merely Christianity that stands or falls with the reality of revelation. To avert a nihilistic loss of enduring truth and good, only the recovery of revelation will suffice. It should tell us something that amid American abundance four to eight million Americans suffer from mental depression, and that the wish for death plagues multitudes gripped by psychological poverty. Relativism begets pessimism, and pessimism begets nihilism. There is an abiding lesson in the scriptural sequence of the serpent’s Yea, hath God said . . . ? and the Lord’s query to fallen man, Adam, . . . where art thou? (Gen. 3:1, 9, KJV). The stench of moral death hovers over a generation that seals itself against enduring concerns of truth and conscience. A culture that welcomes its own glaring inconsistencies as inescapable will inevitably suffocate for lack of spiritual oxygen and find human existence devoid of worth and meaning. It is man who dies, not God, when the truth of truth and the meaning of meaning evaporate.

The mass media, especially television, have become the most influential intermediary between the outer world and the modern viewer; they serve in the lives of many as a hypnotic medium possessing almost oracular power. Strategically interposed as the supreme interpretative intermediary, the media cloud the agency of divine revelation, dim the disclosure of God in nature and history, and shroud the claim of the eternal spiritual and moral order on reason and conscience. An electronic intermedium, whereby a technocratic age has shaped unprecedented possibilities of massive misbelief and unmanageable unbelief, obscures the Mediator, the veritable Logos of God. The media are modern civilization’s mightiest middlemen, through which the gods of this age charm and captivate a vagrant generation. More neglected by the children of light than exploited by the children of darkness, these powerful media are free to enslave the hollow heart of a rootless society which desperately and most of all needs to be liberated for the truth and life of the Word of God. The concerns of spirit, holiness, conscience and truth are, after all, the hinge on which the stability and survival of any society ultimately turn. Loosed from the Word, a welter of words can spawn only a derelict destiny.

The world today vibrates under a communications cacophony. Twentieth-century technology has shaped a global village in which human beings are bombarded with more sights and sounds than in any previous generation in history. Words and events recovered from the ancient past, words and events of the pulsating present, words and events projected at tomorrow’s frontiers clamor for attention and hearing. No generation since Babel has faced so massive a communications problem, and to none has belief in transcendent divine disclosure seemed more suspect, and the sense of divine authority less clear.

Yet neither scientific searching nor secular philosophizing has compensated for the tragic loss of revelational realities, nor have these realities been done to death. For our generation no less than for any other there remains the promise of a better prospect: Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared . . . (1 Cor. 2:9, KJV). Nothing can now relieve the modern crisis of truth and word other than a reconciliation and restoration of the media of human communication to the Mediator of divine disclosure in order to transcend the present costly conflict between the two. The