Introduction to Theology. |
By Carl F.H. Henry.

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? More than 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 …  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.

— Taken from his God, Revelation and Authority Vol.1