Carl Henry

Who was Carl Henry? What part did he play in shaping modern evangelicalism? Today, Stephen Nichols tells us about the tremendous influence that Henry had in his roles as an academic, apologist, author, theologian, and more.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes In Church History. Back in 2019, we did an episode entitled “What Is An Evangelical?” And in that episode, I introduced two figures, architects of modern Evangelicalism. This would be Evangelicalism, especially in America from post-World War II on, and those two figures were the theologian Carl F.H. Henry and the evangelist Billy Graham. On this episode, let’s spend some time getting to know Carl Henry. He was born in 1913 in Long Island, New York. His parents came to America from Germany, and Henry and his parents spoke German in their home, and that would be a distinct advantage for him later as he engaged those German theologians. Well, Henry was a brilliant student. He graduated from high school a little early, at the age of sixteen, and he immediately went right to work in the newspaper business as a journalist. In three years, he was editor of the Smithtown Star, a town right in the center of Long Island, and he was also a regular contributor to the New York Times.

In the summer of 1933, he was converted, and that summer, he visited Frank E. Gaebelein of the Stony Brook School also on Long Island, and Gaebelein recommended that Henry go to Wheaton College and off to Wheaton he went. At the time, Jay Oliver Buswell was president. He was quite the theologian and philosopher, but it was the professor Gordon Clark who probably had the most influence while Henry was at Wheaton. In his senior year, Henry was tapped to teach the freshmen typing class. Those years as a journalist were paying off, and in that class was a student, Helga Bender, and Henry would go on to marry her. After Wheaton, he earned several graduate degrees. In 1941, he was ordained, and in 1942 he earned his first doctorate from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Chicago. In 1949, he earned his second doctorate, a PhD from Boston University.

But let’s go back to the year 1947. This was pivotal for Carl Henry. He was invited to be on the inaugural faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary. He was also put in as dean. At the time, Harold John Ockenga was president. He was the first president of Fuller. But in addition to being the president of Fuller on the West Coast in California, he was also pastor of Park Street Church on the East Coast in Boston. So, that meant that Henry was very much the leader of this fledgling seminary in getting it off the ground. Well, in that same year, 1947, Carl Henry published his book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Many see that book as pivotal in the beginnings of Evangelicalism. Henry would go on to write many, many books. In the next year, he wrote one of my favorites of his, Remaking the Modern Mind. Well, in 1956, L. Nelson Bell, that’s Billy Graham’s father-in-law, brought Carl Henry from California to Washington D.C. to be the editor of a brand-new magazine, Christianity Today. Henry was at that post for twelve years, from 1956 to 1968.

In those years, Christianity Today was a rather serious magazine with heavy-duty theological articles, and helming it was Carl Henry. He also began in the 1970s putting out his massive six-volume God, Revelation, and Authority. In 1986, he published his autobiography, Confessions of a Theologian. I’ve often thought that book is a great front-row seat to the history of Evangelicalism. Towards the end of his life, Henry was concerned that modern Evangelicalism, of which he was a major architect, was having too much uncritical accommodation, especially of postmodern ideas and other ideas that were ricocheting around American culture. In response, Henry stressed the necessity of propositional revelation, of propositional truth. Henry was also quite the apologist, and so he stressed the rationality of belief in God. He wanted Evangelicalism to stand for theological assertions. Well, that’s the one-time journalist and theologian Carl F.H. Henry. And I’m Steve Nichols, and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.