Carl F. H. Henry was the editor of Christianity Today, a publication he helped begin in 1956. He cared deeply that the faith not be limited to conversations between pulpit and pew but that the message of the Cross be proclaimed and lived in the world. In 1967, while editing the magazine, Henry also wrote Evangelicals at the Brink of Crisis. In one chapter, “Evangelicals and the Social Crisis,” he explicitly charged believers to engage the culture. This is done by defining God’s standards for the world—individuals and nations. In other words, it is the duty of the Church to explain that God demands justice.
Man cannot live alone—he must live his life in society if he is to be truly man. Indeed, if he is to be ideally man—in the image of God—he must be told the criteria by which God will judge men and nations, that is, the standards by which the Creator expected human life to be ordered in obedience to His commands, and the message of redemption that regenerates men in holiness. In the crisis of our times the task and duty of evangelical Christians is to proclaim to men everywhere what the God of justice and of justification demands.1
Footnotes:
1 Carl F. H. Henry, Evangelicals at the Brink of Crisis (Waco, TX.: Word Books, 1967), 79.
