14
Lord of all, stands at the center of divine disclosure, guarantees a unified divine
revelation."
19
Every condition of knowledge (i.e. justified true belief), therefore, stems from an
allowance of either common or particular grace to the end that we live in the world God
has actually created and glorify the agent of said creation, even Jesus Christ. In an
address before an emerging evangelical audience at Soong Sil University in Seoul, South
Korea in 1987, Henry summarized his views thus:
The Christian ontological axiom is the living, self-revealed God. The
Christian epistemological axiom is the intelligible divine revelation. All the
essential doctrines of the Christian world-life view flow from these axioms:
creation, sin, and the fall; redemption, by promise and fulfillment; the incarnation,
substitutionary death and resurrection of the Logos; the church as the new society;
the approaching divine consummation of history; the eschatological verities.
20
Certainly the most programmatic exposition of Henrys Reformation-inspired
epistemology comes from the panoramic God, Revelation, and Authority, Henrysix
volume magnum opus which is often alluded to, but seldom read with patience. The
fifteen theses spell out in brief what Henry delivers in detail throughout volumes two and
three of GRA. In thesis five in particular, Henry happily shows his voluntaristic colors:
5. Not only the occurrence of divine revelation, but also its very nature,
content, and variety are exclusively of God's determination.
God determines not only the if and why of divine disclosure, but also the
when, where, what, how, and who. If there is to be a general revelationa
revelation universally given in nature, in history, and in the reason and conscience
of every manthen that is Gods decision. If there is to be a special or particular
revelation, that, too, is Gods decision and his alone. Only because God so wills
it is there a cosmic-anthropological revelation. It is solely because of divine
19
Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, vol.2: God Who Speaks and Shows
(Waco, TX: Word Books, 1976), 9.
20
Carl F. H. Henry, gods of This Age, or God of the Ages? ed. R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
(Nashville: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1994), 209.