Ginsberg does offer good information in his chapter on “The Realpolitik of Race and Gender,” showing how the “moral imperatives” of the professoriate give administrators the opportunity to grab hiring decisions from the faculty by forging “tactical alliances with representatives of minority groups.” But neither Worthen nor Ginsberg apparently grasps how corrupt academia has become. Both Carl Henry and Francis Schaeffer did.

Two new books have as a crucial figure Carl Henry, the Christianity Today editor who wrote columns for WORLD in the early 1990s. Gregory Thornbury, inRecovering Classic Evangelicalism: Applying the Wisdom and Vision of Carl F.H. Henry (Crossway, 2013), lists some intellectual defections from Protestantism but doesn’t think the solution is to give up distinctives. Instead, he says “evangelicals must remind themselves of the glorious advances that were secured as a result of the Reformation and its heirs. Our shortcomings are often the result of an abandonment of the presuppositions that once made evangelicalism great.”

Thornbury, who recently became president of The King’s College in New York City, also doesn’t seem ready to appease Darwinists: He sees that “abandoning the notion of Adam and Eve as historical persons … has massive ramifications for soteriology and the entire system of theology.” He quotes Carl Henry’s comment about the “disintegration” that begins in “a society that refers origins to evolution, conscience to culture, nature and history to happenstance.” Henry in his 1989 Rutherford Lectures showed that every view of reality is based on theological assumptions, and Thornbury says he has become skeptical about “the persuasive power of natural law in matters related to public square issues”: Thornbury wryly concludes, “As long as you bear the stigmata of being a Christian … you might just as well go ahead and cite Scripture passages in support of your position while you’re at it.”

Recovering Classic Evangelicalism displays an author’s caring involvement in the controversies he describes. In contrast, Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2013), reads more like a smart but supercilious author’s trip to the zoo. Carl Henry keeps popping back unhappily into this intellectual history of a frequently anti-intellectual (yet not anti-intellect) movement, but Francis Schaeffer comes off the worst. Worthen calls him a “brilliant demagogue” and demeans him as merely “a brazen editor of history” who offered a “hamfisted caricature of history [filled with] exaggerations, oversimplification, and misinformation.” The horror is even greater: Schaeffer had the unfortunate habit of drawing a “foreboding graphic on the blackboard at every opportunity.”

Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty (Oxford, 2013) has as its subtitle The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters—but it leaves me wondering why it does matter. Since so many professors are propagandistic and so many administrators are annoying, don’t they deserve each other? Ginsberg does offer good information in his chapter on “The Realpolitik of Race and Gender,” showing how the “moral imperatives” of the professoriate give administrators the opportunity to grab hiring decisions from the faculty by forging “tactical alliances with representatives of minority groups.” But neither Worthen nor Ginsberg apparently grasps how corrupt academia has become. Both Carl Henry and Francis Schaeffer did.

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