Carl F.H. Henry: Leader of the Evangelical Renaissance

by Beth Spring

Good News
March/April 1983

What could an eminent theologian and a gray-haired Methodist widow have  in common? The theologian – now a leading spokesman for evangelical Christianity – is Dr. Carl F.H. Henry (1913-2003). In the early 1920s, however, his only credential was: sports reporter, the Islip Press, Long Island, New York.

The widow, Mother [Mildred] Christy, was a proofreader for the same newspaper. Her spiritual credentials included a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and she was eager to share this experience with the young sports reporter.

“I remember Mother Christy,” Henry now recalls. “She took a personal interest in me while I was working toward a fulltime position with the newspaper. After I got the job she talked to me about Christ. Occasionally I would drive her home after work, and she always spoke to me of Christ who was so precious to her.” The widow never dreamed her words would help propel Carl Henry toward a lifetime of distinguished Christian service. He is perhaps most widely known as the founding editor of Christianity Today magazine, a position he held from 1956 to 1968.

Scholarly impact. Respected as an intellectual spokesman for evangelical Christianity and a strategist for evangelism, Henry has authored nearly 30 books. Frequently he lectures for World Vision International, and has served as president of both the  Evangelical Theological Society and the American Theological Society.

His scholarly impact on behalf of evangelical thought is often likened to Billy Graham’s evangelistic impact. Currently he is writing a six-volume treatise on God, Revelation and Authority, scheduled for completion this year – 50 years after Henry accepted Christ as his Savior.

He had heard little about Christ before the Methodist widow gave her witness even though his mother was a Roman Catholic and his father Lutheran. “I was born at the juncture of the Protestant Reformation,” he says with a smile, “yet in our home we had nothing – no Bible, no grace at table, no prayers.” His only religious instruction came from an Episcopal Sunday school, where his teacher rewarded him for courtesy in the classroom by escorting him to a Jackie Coogan movie.

By the time he left school and joined the newspaper staff, he viewed Christianity as “something one inevitably outgrows in the teens and wisely forgets in the twenties.” Regarding salvation, Henry remembers that “I thought I had everything churchianity had to offer – the rites of baptism and confirmation.” But the good news about personal rebirth in Christ came unexpectedly from Mother Christy and from a former classmate.

In 1933, the classmate [Gene Bedford] made an appointment to see Henry. “I did not at first surmise his purpose: to share with me what Jesus Christ can do for one who personally trusts Him. When I sensed what was in the air, I broke that appointment three times in a row. But finally I kept it.”

Henry and his university friend knelt by an automobile that June day. “I really didn’t know how to pray, so my friend prayed and I repeated the words. When we finished, I knew that God as my friend, that my sins were forgiven, that Christ  as my Savior, and that the Spirit, of God was a new source of moral strength.”

He recalls that he “would have gone to China for Christ the very next day.”  Instead, he joined a neighborhood prayer group that met at Mother Christy’s home. Eventually Henry was divinely led to attend Wheaton College, in Illinois, in preparation for Christian service. He published his first book during his graduate seminary years and dedicated it “to Long Island’s Mother Christy, who first pleaded with the author to receive Christ as Savior.”

At Wheaton, Henry earned college expenses by working as a newspaper reporter at the Chicago Tribune and other papers, and by teaching classes. More than once he dragged himself to an eight o’clock class after an all-night assignment that would show up on the front page of the Wheaton Daily Journal with a seven-column headline bearing his byline.

“My literature teacher would note that I had mixed figures of speech or used some barbarism,” he recalls, “while my Latin professor, despairing that I hadn’t prepared for class, would quote the principle parts of a Latin verb she invented: ‘flunko, flunkere, faculty flunctus.’”

In spite of the pressures job and studies, Henry graduated an honors student. He pursued graduate studies at Boston, Indiana, and Loyola universities, as well as post-graduate work at New College, Edinburgh, and  Cambridge University, England. Henry went on to earn Ph.D.s in both theology and philosophy, and he also became an ordained American Baptist minister. He has served on the faculties of Northern Baptist, Fuller, and Eastern Baptist theological seminaries.

Carl Henry is best known in the seminary classroom not  as a professor, but as an author and thinker. When he wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism in 1947, Henry was a full 25 years ahead of current evangelical interest in public affairs. In this book he prodded fellow  evangelicals to rethink their withdrawal from cultural and political concerns. Yet he is an outspoken critic of New Right groups which have tried to garner support for their single-issue, single-candidate approach to politics. “A litmus test that puts one’s attitude toward the Panama Canal treaty on the same level with morality on the abortion issue is ethically confusing,” he said.

Radical inversion. Apart from his efforts to keep evangelicals on an even keel, Henry is deeply concerned about society’s “pervasive assumption that if ingenious modern man tries hard enough, he can forestall any crisis that threatens human destiny.”

Popular belief in western society has shifted steadily away from the view that God is the source of truth, good, and justice, Henry believes. He calls this shift “the most sudden, radical, sweeping inversion of ideas and ideals in the history of human thought.” It is also “the most costly,” he adds.

The outcome of humanism, in Henry’s words, will be “sheer skepticism and an assured collapse of human civilization into moral and theoretical  relativism.” His answer? “The recovery of the living God of the Bible, the self-revealing God who makes known His will and purpose for mankind, and who offers forgiveness of sins and new moral life in Jesus Christ.”

This alternative is what Henry expounds in his multivolume literary effort called God, Revelation and Authority. He elaborates upon one of evangelical Christianity’s most basic tenets: God reveals himself to man through the Bible, in words that mean what they say. The four volumes which are currently in print have been hailed by The New York Times as “the most important work of evangelical theology in recent years,” and they are being translated into Korean, German, and Mandarin.

Henry regularly interrupts his writing schedule for global lecture tours on behalf of World Vision International. At the 1980 World Evangelization Crusade in Seoul, Korea, he addressed 12,000 university students.

He and his wife, Helga, spent the 1980 Christmas season lecturing, preaching, and teaching in Hawaii, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan. Henry also chaired the 1966 World Congress of Evangelism in Berlin and was program chairman of the 1971 Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy.

Top priority

But Henry’s top priority remains his writing, which proceeds from the basement of his Arlington, Virginia, home where built-in bookshelves break under the weight of a 10,000-volume library. In the evening after the dinner dishes are put away, Helga often lends a critical eye to her husband’s ongoing work. She holds two master’s degrees and taught Christian education and literature.

When they celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary, Henry   commented, “We’re still in love.” They met at Wheaton, where Carl proposed by asking her to pair her word skills with his in a writing ministry. As Helga puts it today, “But how was I to know he meant 27 or more books?”

She was born in the African Cameroons, the youngest daughter of missionary parents whose memoirs she is currently compiling. She also wrote Mission on Main Street and translated from the German a book on the history of evangelism.

The Henrys have a son, Paul, a daughter, Carol. Paul is his third term with the Michigan State Legislature and served as a congressional aide to former Illinois congressman John B. Anderson. Carol teaches in the music department of the University of South Carolina.

Henry has come a long way from his days in Mother Christy’s prayer group, but he and his wife are still involved in a neighborhood Bible study. The group has been meeting since 1973, when a newly converted young man expressed concern to the Henrys about his unsaved parents.

Whether it’s in a neighbor’s living room or before multitudes in Korea, Henry’s clear communication of the Gospel remains the same:

“The world has tried everything else. It’s time for the living God to have His day. Many of the things we prize will vanish under His inscrutable judgment. But a life built on the grace of God is forever.”