Carl F. H. Henry, Old Princeton, And The Right Use Of Reason: Continuity Or Discontinuity?

By Paul Kjoss Helseth

[Paul Kjoss Helseth is Professor of Christian Thought at Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minn., and is currently Scholar-In-Residence at The MacLaurin Institute on the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota.]

I. Introduction: Knowing “Aright”

In the fifth volume of his magnum opus, God, Revelation and Authority, Carl F. H. Henry distinguishes himself from his more theologically liberal contemporaries by insisting that “rational discourse” is essential to biblically faithful Christian theology.[1] According to Henry, John 17:3, which says

“This is eternal life, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” . . . is a fundamental postulate of the Christian religion; that he must be known aright for life abundant and life eternal is an emphasis integral to the Gospels. That God can be known, that divine revelation is rationally given and is to be rationally understood, is a basic presupposition of biblical theology.[2]

Given the emphasis throughout Henry’s writings on “the necessary centrality of reason in the service of God,”[3] the question arises as to what he believes it means to know God and the substance of what he has revealed in a true or “right” fashion.[4] In the discussion that follows I explore a possible answer to this question by comparing Henry’s understanding of the right use of reason with that of B. B. Warfield, who for the purposes of this article is representative of the best theologians at Old Princeton Seminary. What I hope to establish is that while Henry and Warfield share an emphasis upon the “primacy of the intellect” in faith and in the doing of theology more generally, they conceive of the “primacy of the intellect” and the right use of reason in significantly different senses for reasons that are ultimately grounded in disagreements regarding: (1) the epistemological entailments of the Creator/creature distinction, and (2) the effects of the fall upon the human capacity to know. Indeed, whereas Henry conceives of knowing reality “as God preserves and knows it”[5] as an activity that is focused almost exclusively on the rational faculty of the soul—a faculty that he believes retains its capacity to know “rightly” despite its finite and fallen condition—Warfield conceives of reasoning “rightly” as a capacity that is possessed by the regenerate alone, for he recognizes that it is only the regenerated soul as a thinking-feeling-willing whole that has the capacity to see revealed truth more or less for what it objectively is, namely glorious. As such, what I suggest in the forthcoming discussion is that although there is some continuity between the methodological assumptions of Henry and Warfield with respect to the “primacy of the intellect” and the right use of reason, there is significant discontinuity as well for what are clearly substantial theological reasons.

II. The Symbolic Nature Of Religious Language

1. Henry On Symbolic Language

One way of transitioning to a brief consideration of what Henry and Warfield mean when they refer to the right use of reason is to summarize their differences with respect to the epistemological significance of symbolic language. Whereas both Henry and Warfield acknowledge that symbolic language plays an important role in Christian reflection, their differing assessments of the kind of knowledge that is communicated by symbolic language is significant because it points to the epistemological disagreement that is at the heart of their methodological differences. According to Henry, evangelical Christians will “have no dispute” with the notion that “all religious language is . . . symbolic” as long as those who endorse the notion do not pretend that it prevents those who are created in the image of God from having literal, univocal knowledge of God and the truth that he has revealed.[6] If the “critics of literalism” suggest that “because of their conventional or symbolic nature, words can convey no literal truth, then,” Henry argues,

their thesis is self-refuting, since if no literal truth can be conveyed because words are symbolic, it is impossible to communicate even this literal truth about the nature of truth. . . . [Thus,] if all we mean by language as being symbolic is that all words are symbolic, then religious language is no more threatened than any other language; if literal truth can be conveyed anywhere, it can be conveyed by religious language as readily as by language about nonreligious reality; if literal truth is precluded because religious language is symbolic, then it is in principle precluded likewise in other realms of discourse.[7]

For Henry, then, while evangelicals must acknowledge that religious language—like all language—is inherently symbolic, they need not concede that theological knowledge must therefore be “symbolic” or non-literal as well.[8] On the contrary, they must insist that despite the symbolic nature of religious language, those who have been created in the image of God can still know that the substance of what God has revealed through symbolic language is true “in the same sense that any and all truth is true,”[9] for even as finite and fallen sinners and apart from regenerating grace they have the capacity to know univocally, even if they cannot know comprehensively because their minds have been “vitiated” by the fall.[10] Indeed, they can discern that symbolic language conveys truth not just about God “as he is in himself,”[11] but truth about what he has revealed as it is in itself, and they can do this despite their finitude and despite the fact that sin in some sense compromises all of their attempts to know in this world.[12]

2. Warfield On Parabolic Teaching

Whereas Henry is persuaded that religious language communicates literal truth that is “universally accessible” because it is essentially no different from the more mundane kinds of truths that can be found within the horizon of this world,[13] B. B. Warfield’s understanding of parabolic or symbolic teaching is markedly different because it both reinforces and builds upon his endorsement of what J. V. Fesko calls “a hallmark teaching of the Reformed faith, namely the difference between theologia archetypa and theologia ectypa.”[14] According to Warfield, parabolic teaching presents itself as “the test of men”[15] not because it communicates literal, univocal knowledge of God and the truth that he has revealed, but because it communicates a kind of ectypal knowledge that is universally accessible in one sense, but not in another. According to Warfield,

All teaching as to divine and heavenly things is, in a measure, parabolic; we can reach above the world and ourselves only by symbols. All such teaching comes to us, then, as a test, and the proximate account of its varied reception may be found in the condition of the ears that hear it. Have we ears to hear this music? Or does it beat a vain jangling discord only in our ears? The philosophy of the progress of the Kingdom in the world rests on the one fact—the condition of the hearer. He that has ears to hear, hears; he that has no ears to hear this music, remains unmoved.[16]

For Warfield, then, the accessibility of one human being or another to the substance of what God has revealed in parabolic teaching is determined neither by the objective adequacy of the truth that he has revealed, nor by a capacity for univocal knowledge that allegedly survives the fall, but by the subjective condition of those who hear it. “Whether men understand or do not understand the teaching veiled in the parable,” Warfield argues, “is the revelation of their state of mind and heart, or, as it is fashionable nowadays to call it, of their receptivity.”[17] In what sense, though, does the substance of what God has revealed in parabolic or symbolic teaching remain inaccessible to those who do not have ears to hear? In what sense, in other words, does the ectypal knowledge that is revealed in parabolic teaching remain veiled to those who do not have the subjective capacity to discern what is objectively present to their understanding, that is, to reason “rightly”? Warfield’s answer, which is found in a sermon on Eph 3:14-19 entitled “The Fullness of God” points not just to the quantitative difference between the ectypal knowledge of those who have ears to hear and the ectypal knowledge of those who do not, but to the qualitative difference that characterizes this ectypal knowledge as well.

In Eph 3:14-19, the Apostle Paul prays that his readers would know “the love of Christ” in the fullest creaturely sense of the term so that “they may be filled unto all the fullness of God, that is, that all of God’s inestimable treasures of spiritual blessings—life, strength, love, holiness,—shall be poured out immeasurably unto them,—that they should be filled with all those spiritual perfections which assimilate them to the fullness of God.”[18] But what is entailed in knowing “the love of Christ” in the fullest creaturely sense of the term? In what sense, in other words, is the ectypal knowledge that is possessed by those who have “an adequate apprehension of the riches of the ‘Gospel’”[19] both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the ectypal knowledge of those who do not? According to Warfield, the knowledge that Paul desires for his readers “is not to be had by mere publication,”[20] that is, by merely communicating more information to the minds of his readers. Rather, this knowledge is to be had by a work of the Spirit, for it is the work of the Spirit that enables his readers to stand “on an indefinitely higher plane of thought than that occupied by sinful man as such,”[21] and thereby to see the substance of what God has revealed more or less for what it objectively is, namely as something that is not just propositionally true, but as something that is propositionally true and glorious itself. In short, what Paul desires for his readers is

not merely that they may be, in an intellectual and mechanical way, informed that nothing can account for Christ’s work but love, love compelling Him to leave His glory behind Him in heaven and come to earth as a servant to save men. . . . [Rather] he wants them to understand, feel, and realize this; in the language of the present passage, to apprehend it in its height and breadth and length and depth: to have a realizing sense of it. For this, something more than mere informing is needed: even a preparation of the heart. . . . So the knowledge which the Apostle desires for his readers is not merely external mind-knowledge, but the real knowledge of full feeling and apprehension; knowledge not of the mere head but of the heart. And for this, something more is needed than the mere proclaiming of the Gospel, which may be grasped in its propositions by the mere mechanical action of the intellect: even a new heart, Spirit-made and Spirit-determined.[22]

What this quotation suggests, then, is that for Warfield, the ectypal knowledge that is the means to being filled “unto all the fullness of God” is qualitatively superior to the ectypal knowledge of those who are without the Spirit because there is an aesthetic quality to “real” ectypal knowledge that corresponds to the true nature of what God has made known through parabolic teaching. In short, the “real knowledge of full feeling and apprehension” is qualitatively superior to “merely external mind-knowledge” because it lays hold of what God has revealed with the whole soul and in a fashion that corresponds more or less to the way this revelation objectively is, and for this reason it issues in saving faith as well as in the ability “to live a Christian life.”[23] It is important to note, however, that for Warfield, not even “real” ectypal knowledge will ever be univocal, archetypal knowledge, for we know always and everywhere—even at our best in the new heavens and the new earth—as creatures that are dependent upon God for their existence from one moment to the next. “Only in God’s mind,” Warfield argues,

does [theological] science lie perfect—the perfect comprehension of all that is, in its organic completeness. In the mind of perfected humanity, the perfected ectypal science shall lie. In the mind of sinful humanity struggling here below, there can lie only a broken reflection of the object, a reflection which is rather a deflection.[24]

3. Naïve Theological Realism?

When we consider the difference between Henry’s understanding of the epistemological significance of symbolic language and Warfield’s understanding, the question arises as to how we should account for Henry’s eagerness to insist that “right” knowledge of God is “univocal,” merely rational knowledge of God.[25] In my estimation, one possible way of accounting for the clear difference between how Henry and Warfield conceive of knowing “aright” may be found in the form of realism that each theologian appears to embrace. I have argued elsewhere that the theologians at Old Princeton Seminary were “sophisticated theological realists” rather than “naïve theological realists” not only because they recognized that the regenerate stand “on an indefinitely higher plane of thought than that occupied by sinful man as such,” but more importantly because they recognized that the knowledge that is possessed by the regenerate is not on the same “plane” as the knowledge that is possessed by God.[26] They recognized, in other words, that the knowledge that is possessed by the regenerate is “modeled on” and is therefore of a “lesser” or lower order than the knowledge that is possessed by God.[27] Thus they embraced the kind of realism that informs what Herschel Baker calls a “sacramental” view of the universe, the kind of realism that demands, among other things, what Baker calls an “organic”—that is, a “whole-souled” rather than an exclusively rational—epistemology.[28]

Given Henry’s unambiguous commitment not just to the possibility but to the actuality of univocal knowledge, might it be the case that his understanding of knowing “aright” is different in essential ways from the understanding of the Old Princetonians because it is grounded in a kind of realism that tends to be more “naïve” than “sophisticated”? Might it be the case, in other words, that in affirming that univocal knowledge of God and the truth that he has revealed is not just possible but attainable through the activity of the rational faculty alone, Henry betrays a metaphysic that flattens reality and promotes an epistemology that, among other things, subverts what it means to know God in the fullest creaturely sense of the term by presuming that, to use the language of Peter Hicks, “if truth about God exists it may be known in essentially the same way as truth about anything else” within the horizon of this world?[29] In the remainder of this article I examine an important aspect of Henry’s religious epistemology that lends credence to the suspicion that at the foundation of his understanding of the right use of reason is a metaphysic that is essentially one-dimensional.

III. Religious Epistemology And The “Inordinate” Will

1. Whole Soul Or A Faculty Psychology?

From what I can tell, one of the primary indications that Henry may embrace a form of “naïve theological realism” is found in his denial that there is an important aesthetic, or, whole-souled dimension to the “right” knowledge of God and the truth that he has revealed. While Henry explicitly and repeatedly asserts that the soul is a single unit that always acts—including in cognition—as a single substance,[30] nevertheless his religious epistemology reveals a faculty psychology that denies this unity and at the same time minimizes the noetic effects of sin by suggesting that when all is said and done, the unregenerate do not have saving knowledge of God not because their knowledge of what he has revealed is not and never will be “right” apart from the regenerating work of the Spirit of God on the whole soul, but because they have a “renegade will” that “rails against the truth of God and distorts truth about mankind and about the cosmos,”[31] thereby diminishing—but not extinguishing—the amount of revealed truth that is reflected rightly in their minds.[32]

In my estimation, this denial of the essential unity or “wholeness” of the soul—the denial that reveals an endorsement of a “naïve” rather than a “sophisticated theological realism”—is particularly evident in Henry’s functional separation of the intellect and the will, that is, in his contention that “the fall affects the functions of the reason and of the will in different ways.”[33] In a passage that is striking because it points to a philosophical psychology that regards the soul not as a thinking-feeling-willing whole but as a collection of faculties or powers that can act more or less independently of one another, Henry argues,

Revelation itself affirms that man is depraved in consequence of the fall, and that this depravity affects him in the entirety of his being—in volition, affection and intellection. 

But this hardly means that man cannot comprehend God’s revelation, or that he cannot do so prior to the regenerative or illuminative work of the Holy Spirit; far less does it mean that man’s rational abilities are wholly nullified. The fall conditions man’s will more pervasively than his reason. Man wills not to know God in truth, and makes religious reflection serviceable to moral revolt. But he is still capable of intellectually analyzing rational evidence for the truth-value of assertions about God. If the noetic effects of the fall were totally and utterly damaging, thus making man incapable of thinking aright and immune to the rational validity of the basic categories of logic (e.g., the law of contradiction), then no rationally persuasive case could be mounted for or against anything whatever. There are but two ways of thinking—not regenerate and unregenerate, but valid and invalid. There is but one system of truth, and that system involves the right axiom and its theorems and premises derived with complete logical consistency. But the latter does not . . . require a presuppositionalist to extrapolate an entire system of theology conformably to a coherence theory of truth, nor does it necessitate a denial of all common ground between the believer and the unbeliever.[34]

2. Whither “Thinking Aright”?

If it is therefore true that for Henry, the fall of man into sin “[did] not wholly destroy the mind’s objective competence” but surrendered reason “to the service of an inordinate will,”[35] then what does it mean to think or know “aright” when the alleged vitiation of the mind does not preclude the possibility of thinking “rightly”—that is, of having univocal rational knowledge—about God and the truth that he has revealed? What does Henry’s apparent separation of the functions of the intellect and the will suggest, in other words, not just about what is entailed in “thinking aright,” but about the objective reality that fallen sinners—including even unregenerated sinners—apparently have the capacity to “think aright” about? What it suggests, in short, is that “thinking aright” does not have to do, as it does with Warfield and the Old Princetonians, with an aesthetic or whole-souled ability to see the substance of what God has revealed more or less for what it objectively is, namely, as something that is not just propositionally true but as something that has a larger, sacramental significance built into it. It has to do, rather, with the natural capacity to think logically and therefore validly and “rightly” about the propositional content of the “rational and intelligible communication” from God’s mind to our minds,[36] propositional content that communicates univocal knowledge “of God himself and of his revealed purposes.”[37] The laws of logic, Henry insists, “belong to the imago Dei, and have ontological import,” for they enable us to know not just an image of reality, but “the Real itself” as it is in itself.[38]

From what I can tell, it is this reduction of the capacity to “think aright” from an aesthetic to an essentially logical or rational capacity that points to a “naïve” rather than a “sophisticated theological realism,” for it suggests that the substance of what God has revealed (and even God himself) is known “rightly”—that is, “as God preserves and knows it”—when it is known in an intellectual, merely rational sense, the sense that is within the reach of finite moral agents who remain dead in their sin. “In the biblical view,” Henry concludes,

God’s self-revelation to man, created in the divine image for the knowledge and service of his Maker, vouchsafes valid knowledge of God. Knowledge that is literally true of God has its basis not in abstractions from human experience and relationships projected upon the infinite in a superlative way, but in God’s own initiative and intelligible disclosure. In answering the question of authentic knowledge of God, evangelical theology appeals not simply to an a priori ontology. It notes the scriptural emphasis that, as a creature of God, man has revelational knowledge of God as he truly is, and stresses also the logical consistency and superiority of the biblical view as against alternatives prone to skepticism.[39]

IV. Conclusion: Implications For The “Propositionalist Understanding Of The Theological Enterprise”

If the foregoing analysis accurately summarizes the primary differences between Carl F. H. Henry’s understanding of the right use of reason and that of B. B. Warfield and the Old Princetonians more generally, then it seems that at least one of the conclusions that we can draw from this analysis—a conclusion that is particularly relevant to the ongoing debate within the evangelical camp over the proper way to conceive of theological method—is that there is more than one way to conceive of what has come to be known as the “propositionalist understanding of the theological enterprise.” Whereas there is little or no basis for concluding that the theologians at Old Princeton Seminary were rationalists who conceived of the task of theology in an intellectualistic and therefore wooden sense,[40] there is perhaps a basis for concluding that Henry did conceive of the task of theology in such a fashion. Indeed, it seems that a plausible case could be made that Henry distinguished too sharply between the functions of the intellect and the will, and in so doing advanced a theological method that is grounded in the kind of realism that obscures the significance of the fall and the centrality of the heart in religious epistemology by denying that there is an important moral or aesthetic dimension to the knowledge of God and the truth that he has revealed. If this is the case, then it goes without saying that we really should distinguish between a “propositionalist understanding of the theological enterprise” that is grounded in a kind of whole-souled religious epistemology, and a “propositionalist understanding” that is grounded in little more than the universal human capacity to think logically.

Notes

1. Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, vol. 5, God Who Stands and Stays, Part One (Waco: Word, 1982; repr., Wheaton: Crossway, 1999), 381. Hereafter Henry’s six-volume work will be abbreviated GRA.
2. Henry, GRA, 5:381, emphasis added.
3. Ibid.
4. Note that for Henry, reason is not the “originating source” of our knowledge of God, but the “instrument” by which we know God (GRA, vol. 2, God Who Speaks and Shows, Fifteen Theses, Part One [Waco: Word, 1976; repr., Wheaton: Crossway, 1999], 73). Indeed, he insists that man cannot know God and the truth that he has revealed “by beginning with himself” (GRA, vol. 1, God Who Speaks and Shows, Preliminary Considerations [Waco: Word, 1977; repr., Wheaton: Crossway, 1999], 399). In this regard, see Henry’s brilliant critique of the Thomistic synthesis, which he believes presumed the natural competence of human reason apart from revelation and thereby “aided the concealment of the principle of special revelation” in the Middle Ages (Carl F. H. Henry, The Drift of Western Thought [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951], 98). According to Henry, the Thomistic synthesis obscured “the inner genius of Christianity” and aided and abetted the “collapse of medieval culture” and the transition to the modern world (ibid., 35, 34), for in presuming that human reason—and not revelation—“is the measure of all things,” it carried “the seeds of its destruction” within itself (Carl F. H. Henry, Remaking the Modern Mind [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1946], 228, 225). For an in-depth discussion of Henry’s reformational epistemological bearings, see the helpful article by Gregory Alan Thornbury, “Carl F. H. Henry: Heir of Reformation Epistemology,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 8 (2004): 62-72.
5. Henry, GRA, 5:387.
6. Henry, GRA, vol. 4, God Who Speaks and Shows, Fifteen Theses, Part Three (Waco: Word, 1979; repr., Wheaton: Crossway, 1999), 105.
7. Ibid., 105-6. For Henry, by saying that we cannot know God “as he truly and objectively is,” we condemn man “to religious symbols whose literal truth and propositional validity are suffocated by doubt” (GRA, 1:149).
8. Henry, GRA, 4:106.
9. Ibid., 109, emphasis added.
10. E.g., see Henry, Remaking the Modern Mind, 56.
11. Henry, GRA, 4:110.
12. With respect to the epistemological problem that characterizes the fallen human condition, Henry insists that the problem “is not one of fundamental intellectual incompetence, or men could know nothing at all. Nor is it that the canons of reason and forms of logic are irrelevant to ultimate reality. Were that the case, we would be doomed from the outset to ontological skepticism. Rather, man the thinker, for whatever reason (Judeo-Christian theology would point to the fall and sinfulness of man) employs his intelligence to formulate comprehensive explanations of reality and life that not only rival each other, but together stand exposed as inadequate, inordinate world-wisdom when evaluated by the transcendent cognitive revelation which Judeo-Christian truth affirms. The human spirit slants its perspectives in a manner that does violence to the truth of revelation, while its very formulations are at the same time made possible because reason is a divine gift whose legitimate and proper use man has compromised” (Henry, GRA, 1:91). For more on the fall and the human capacity to know truth, see nn. 31 and 32 below.
13. Henry, GRA, 1:229. Note that “the truth of revelation . . . is truth of the same kind as any other truth” (ibid., 200).
14. J. V. Fesko, “The Legacy of Old School Confession Subscription in the OPC,” JETS 46 (2003): 694.
15. B. B. Warfield, “Light and Shining,” in Faith and Life (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1916; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1974), 62.
16. Ibid., 63.
17. Ibid., 62.
18. B. B. Warfield, “The Fullness of God,” in Faith and Life, 282.
19. Ibid., 283.
20. Ibid., 284.
21. B. B. Warfield, “Introduction to Francis R. Beattie’s Apologetics,” in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield (ed. John E. Meeter; 2 vols.; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2001), 2:103.
22. Warfield, “The Fullness of God,” 284, emphasis added.
23. Ibid., 286.
24. B. B. Warfield, “A Review of De Zekerheid des Geloofs,” in Shorter Writings, 2:119.
25. Note that for Henry, “only univocal knowledge . . . is genuine and authentic knowledge” (GRA, vol. 3, God Who Speaks and Shows, Fifteen Theses, Part Two [Waco: Word, 1979; repr., Wheaton: Crossway, 1999], 364). The alternative to univocal knowledge, he insists, “is equivocation and skepticism” (ibid.).
26. See Paul Kjoss Helseth, “Right Reason” and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2010), 69-70, 151-52, 184-89.
27. Peter Hicks, The Philosophy of Charles Hodge: A 19th Century Evangelical Approach to Reason, Knowledge and Truth (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellon Press, 1997), 191-92.
28. Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth: Studies in the Decay of Christian Humanism in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 305, 124.
29. Hicks, The Philosophy of Charles Hodge, 191.
30. For example, while Henry insists that “in contemplating the divine image in man, it should be clear that the rational or cognitive aspect has logical priority,” nevertheless, he argues that “the divine image, a cohesive unity of interrelated components that interact with and condition each other, includes rational, moral and spiritual aspects of both a formal and material nature. We may isolate these various facets abstractly and examine them independently. Man’s ethical responses are not disjoined from intellection, however; his comprehension of truth is not sealed off from conscience, nor are his knowledge of the truth and his moral insights divorced from an awareness of answerability to God” (GRA, 2:125). For other examples, see ibid., 133; GRA, 3:271; and The Drift of Western Thought, 106-7.
31. Henry, GRA, 5:382. Henry insists that Christianity “traces man’s rejection of its claims not to rational but to volitional considerations” (GRA, 1:198). Note that for Henry, “the frustration of general divine revelation is due to obstinate and unstable human volition” (Carl F. H. Henry, Toward A Recovery of Christian Belief [Wheaton: Crossway, 1990], 57). It is due, in other words, to the “volitional rebellion” of fallen sinners (ibid.). The beclouding of general revelation that is the consequence of this volitional rebellion is more or less surmounted, however, by God’s revelation of himself in his Word. According to Henry, special revelation—which is “accessible to all” (GRA, 1:230) in part because it “sets the exegete’s fallibility in a revelatory framework that brackets the epistemic consequences of human revolt”—“objectively publishes and supplements the content of general revelation in perspicuous scriptural form” (GRA, 4:350-51). What this suggests, then, is that for Henry, special revelation is “remedial and corrective” (GRA, 1:405) because it “lifts the reason of man to the lofty knowledge which the turning aside to sin made impossible” (The Drift of Western Thought, 107). Indeed, it “not only gives us divine revelation in objective propositional-verbal form, but also sets before us the normative prophetic-apostolic explanation and proclamation of that very revelation” (GRA, 4:351). Since Scripture is the “universally accessible” means of “verifying the truth about God” (GRA, 1:229, 230), Henry argues that “neither man’s finitude nor his sinfulness can . . . completely relativize transcendent revelation” (GRA, 4:351). In short, even unregenerated sinners are capable of “thinking aright” (GRA, 1:226-27; cf. Henry, Toward A Recovery of Christian Belief, 51) about God and the truth that he has revealed, particularly when they look at God’s world in light of God’s Word. This explains why Henry concludes that “the rejection of special divine revelation . . . only furnishes a further evidence of the depth of man’s revolt against God” (The Drift of Western Thought, 117).
32. For Henry, “Children of the Risen Lord know more propositional content about certain relationships and realities than do unregenerate persons, and seek to live in and by God’s light” (GRA, 5:383). There is a sense, of course, in which this is obviously correct. However, such an emphasis becomes problematic when it is combined with the denial that there is an important qualitative dimension to knowing God and the substance of what he has revealed “rightly,” for it suggests that when all is said and done, knowing God in a saving fashion is grounded in little more than the amount of true or “right” information that a particular individual, for one reason or another, has chosen to embrace. It also begs the question of just how we are to understand the work of the Spirit in regeneration and illumination, and on this point, I would respectfully suggest that Henry’s views are less than clear. While Henry insists that the work of the Spirit “frustrates the disposition” (GRA, 1:272) of the fallen will to suppress the revelation of God in unrighteousness and while he even appears quite sympathetic with the Reformed notion that “only the Spirit’s illumination enables fallen human beings to see the truth of God for what it truly is” (GRA, 4:290), nevertheless he contends that “it is wrong to argue . . . that without the perspective-transforming work of the Spirit one cannot understand the teaching of the Bible” (ibid., 279) in a right fashion. Indeed, while Henry acknowledges that “the supernatural regeneration of sinners secures the acceptance of the divine revelation as true, on the part of individuals who previously disputed its truth” (The Drift of Western Thought, 117), nevertheless he insists that “to make the fact of illumination and need of appropriation a reason for compromising the perspicacity of scriptural teaching is unjustifiable” (GRA, 4:279), and it is so because the Word of God “is . . . not objectively inaccessible, but is conveyed in intelligible human speech, and its truth given in universally valid statements; it is not conditioned upon private decision or subjective response” (ibid., 314).
33. Henry, GRA, 2:135.
34. Henry, GRA, 1:226-27, emphasis added.
35. Henry, GRA, 5:383.
36. Henry, GRA, 3:248.
37. Henry, GRA, 5:380.
38. Henry, GRA, 3:229, 225.
39. Ibid., 365-66. For a helpful discussion of Henry’s “biblical foundationalism,” see Chad Owen Brand, “Is Carl Henry a Modernist? Rationalism and Foundationalism in Post-War Evangelical Theology,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 8 (2004): 44-60.
40. For substantiation of this claim, see Helseth, “Right Reason” and the Princeton Mind, Part 2.