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In the long list of 20^th-century books still relevant today, Carl F.H. Henry’s Twilight of a Great Civilisation fits well in the “I told you so” category.

Published in 1988, Henry’s 182-page foresight about the West’s drift toward neo-paganism joins the work with other late 80s and early 90s books like Jacques Ellul’s Jesus and Marx, or Gene Veith’s Modern Fascism.

While Henry’s work is applicable to more than just the Andrew Thorburn story, Henry warned complacent Christians of a coming time when that complacency would come home to roost.

He would not be surprised to read about a Christian being pressured from a dream job because far-left overlords, applauded by a fake church, forced them to choose between a job they love, and the Lord they serve.

Losing the Way

Henry, an American evangelical theologian, was no prophet, and yet Twilight of a Great Civilisation has an undeniable prophetic edge undeserving of the dust it has collected over the years from neglect.

In 1988, Henry warned that the Church was losing ‘missional momentum’ because it had married ‘liberal theology to the god of revolution and scuttled the criterion that distinguished the divine from the demonic.’ (p. 19)

The Barbarians are coming, Henry wrote, because,

‘The organised Church has been too busy either powdering her nose to preserve an attractive public image, or powdering the revolutionaries and reactionaries who need rather to be remade in Christ’s image.’ (p. 17)

He foresaw a future church that had rejected Christ, by joining forces with the brethren of Iscariot: a Church infatuated with the Social Gospel, infiltrated by Social Justice Warriors. A Church devoted to utopianism, appearances, and bureaucracy, ‘preaching an unclear Gospel from a blurred Bible.’

Discerning the false dawn of liberation theology, Henry warned, this ‘step-child to revolution theology was sociological, more than theological.’

False God

This future church was one led by Karl Marx, not Jesus the Christ.

Its goals are anti-Christ, powered by a transformation of theology, rather than the power of the Cross transforming society.

This was a Mark 7:8 church that ‘forsook the truth of revelation, and taught the doctrines of man instead.’

A church with a ‘skewed sense of justice,’ that ‘cloaked Marxist revolution in the symbols of Christianity, measured by political allegiance, not Christological Christian faith.’

This was a church, Henry stated, that ‘denied the centrality of Christ,’ and turned Christianity into just another ‘speculative cult.’ Marxism, Henry wrote, ‘is a secular version of Biblical soteriology.’

He predicted a Lordless church ripped from its moorings in revelation.

This would be a church that had replaced Christ with culture, voiding itself of joy, and hope, because it had assimilated with a ‘larger social context afflicted by a pervasive melancholy,’ which he said, was a symptom of the ‘breakdown of culture.’

He forewarned that ‘what was underway was a redefinition of the good life, a redefinition that not only perverts the word “good,” but perverts the term “life” as well.’ (p. 40)

Stay the Course

A few pages further along, Henry asserted, ‘Christianity is qualitatively different or it has nothing distinctive to offer — we need to do more than sponsor a Christian subculture. We need Christian counterculture.’

Admonishing the defeatist, “learn to lose well,” weak-kneed, “winsome” ethos of niceness preached by today’s clergy, Henry declared, ‘we must not be timid or isolate ourselves. We must not be held at bay by the powers of this world, or allow ourselves to be defanged by the spirit of our age.’ (p. 55)

‘We need,’ Henry stated, ‘a theology braced for the collapse of contemporary civilisation.’ (p. 56)

For the ‘fight of the day’ — the fight of our day — as Henry alluded, isn’t left vs. right, black vs. white: it’s truth vs. falsehood.

If the Church doesn’t stand as a distinct alternative to ‘modernity’s badly skewed ethical compass’, by holding to God’s revelatory truth, and His perpetual moral agenda,’ Henry warned, ‘it may find itself as an alien in a once promised land.’

He wasn’t wrong.

The darker the age, the brighter the Gospel shines, and the bolder Biblical Christians need to be.

Perhaps, if we hold the line, Henry concluded, ‘we may even be remembered as those who used their hands, hearts, minds, and very bodies to plug the dikes against impending doom.’

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Photo by Suliman Sallehi.