Foreword

American evangelicals andserious theology are terms that do not just naturally snuggle up to each other with easy equipoise. That, despite the fact that Jonathan Edwards, the greatest theologian America has produced, stands at the headwaters of the evangelical tradition. The diminution of the evangelical mind since Edwards—and not only in theology—has been often rehearsed. The lure of pragmatism, individualism, revivalism (not to be confused with revival, about which Edwards knew a thing or two), expressivism, and fissiparous fundamentalism have all taken their toll when it comes to the nurturing of a theological tradition that is wise and deep. But in recent history, there is one evangelical theologian who stands above others in depth of insight and clarity of vision: Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry.

Born in New York City in 1913, Henry came of age at a time when the modernist-fundamentalist battles were going strong. But he heard no talk of these struggles, or of anything else religious, at the family dinner table. His father, a master baker from Germany, was a nominal Lutheran; his mother, a nominal Catholic.

Skilled in typing, Henry landed a job as a sportswriter. He eventually became a reporter and then an editor of the small newspaper on Long Island while also writing stories as a stringer for theNew York Times. By all accounts, he was a hard-nosed journalist given to pagan pleasures, with no knowledge or use for God, much less the church.

His conversion to Jesus Christ was dramatic, unexpected, and unforgettable. Sitting alone in his car in 1933, he was startled by a violent thunderstorm—shades of Luther. He later described this event in this way:

A fiery bolt of lightning, like a giant flaming arrow, seemed to pin me to the driver’s seat, and a mighty roll of thunder unnerved me. When the fire fell, I knew instinctively the Great Archer had nailed me to my own footsteps. Looking back, it was as if the transcendentTetragrammaton wished me to know that I could not save myself and that heaven’s intervention was my only hope.1

Henry the convert became Henry the evangelist and Henry the student. He went on to earn two degrees from Wheaton College (where one of his classmates was the young Billy Graham) and eventually the PhD from Boston University under Edgar S. Brightman.

Soon after the National Association of Evangelicals was formed in 1942, theChristian Century announced in a headline, “Sectarianism Receives New Lease on Life.” But sectarian retrenchment was the last thing Boston pastor Harold John Ockenga, the ringleader of the so-called New Evangelicalism, or the far-thinking Carl Henry had in mind. In 1947, thirty-four-year-old Henry publishedThe Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, a seventy-five-page booklet that sold for one dollar per copy. Henry called on his fellow evangelicals to leave behind the legalism, obscurantism, and judgmentalism that had left a blight on conservative Chris