Towering Theologian : Carl F.H. Henry
Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry learned to type when he was a student at Islip (Long Island) High School in New York State.
That, he says, is near the top of the list of the important skills he has acquired in life.
For, from early days, when he became a newspaper reporter and editor, to important posts in theological seminaries, to the editorship of an influential Christian magazine, Carl Henry has tapped out some of the most significant articles, books — even tomes — of evangelical theology in this century.
The American Baptist minister is generally acknowledged to be the most noted evangelical theologian in the United States. Before he was sixty-five, Henry had written more than two dozen books, edited nine others, and for twelve years was founding editor of the national journal of evangelical news and thought, Christianity Today.
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This is the era of the evangelical. Bible-believing Christians have emerged from the subculture into today's cultural limelight. Henry estimates their number at about 50 million, scattered both inside and outside of all of the religious denominations.
"Evangelicals have come out of the cellar coal bins, onto the front porches, and into the main streets of America," he observes.
Henry would be too modest to add that no small measure of the current visibility and respectability of evangelicalism can be traced to his influence — and his prolific pen.
And his typewriter keys keep flying as he continues to work on volumes three and four of his four-volume magnum opus, God, Revelation & Authority. The religion news editor of the New York Times has called the first two volumes, published in 1976, "the most important work of evangelical theology in recent times."
The intellectual challenge of lecturing and writing, and the satisfaction of seeing the widespread acceptance of works like God, Revelation & Authority delight the tall, bespectacled theologian-strategist, who lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife, Helga.
But, he said during a series of interviews on the sundeck of his attractive split-level hillside home, he has had many rewarding experiences since he first became a Christian in Long Island.
It was then that he thrust aside everything, including a promising newspaper career, to enroll in a Christian liberal arts school, Wheaton College in Illinois.
"As the oldest of eight children in a poor immigrant family I learned self-reliance at an early age," he recalled.
"But self-reliance will not qualify one for the Kingdom of God. Moral and spiritual vitality came only when the Risen Christ regenerated me at the outset of my journalis-
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tic career. I have learned that only a perpetually renewed infilling of the Holy Spirit thwarts the ever-reasserting old self, and imparts the virtues that mold us in the image of Christ.
"There is nothing in this world we can happily take with us into the world to come — nothing at all except what God has given us: a life created in His image, its sins graciously forgiven, its joys hopefully centered in Christ, and its future brightened by the prospect of the glorious presence of God."
Though that glorious presence of God had been patently real to young Henry, the only one in his family to attend college, as he set off for Wheaton, he soon ran head-on into something totally unexpected.
The episode may sound like something less than shattering. Still, Henry lists it as one of three or four of the most trying or difficult times in his growth and development as a Christian.
"God had promised me when I spent half a night on my knees in prayer in Long Island that He would financially see me through college to prepare me for Christian service. I wrote on a three-by-five card the ways that God would meet my college costs: teaching, typing, and newspaper reporting."
By pounding the streets Henry landed a part-time job stringing for the Wheaton Daily Journal and the Chicago Tribune. The college news bureau had hired a secular journalist to get press visibility for the school. And that journalist and Henry soon crossed pens.
"I apparently angered him," Henry remembers, "by certain articles that I wrote personally and for which I was reimbursed by these papers. He circulated the report that 'Henry claims to be a newspaper reporter, but he's had no journalistic experience whatsoever.' "
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I WAS CRUSHED
"I was crushed," Henry recalls painfully, "that I should run into that kind of thing on a Christian campus."
Henry's credentials included working his way up to becoming the youngest editor of the Smithtown Star, a weekly paper in the Long Island suburbs, and serving as a correspondent for several large dailies, including the old New York Herald Tribune, the New York Daily News and the New York Times. He had high prospects of a rewarding journalistic career before ever going to college!
Henry spent a sleepless night after the run-in with the other Wheaton reporter.
"I had romanticized a Christian college campus," Henry remarked, noting that this can be a pitfall for many a young, idealistic Christian student. "To have to cope with a member of the staff who dismissed me as a nobody in the area of my own special competence was a totally baffling turn of things."
But the last turn of events wasn't in yet. Through Henry's roommate, the school's dean heard about the problem, called Henry in and reached an agreement whereby stories about the college were to emanate only from the campus news bureau. In turn, the bureau would transmit releases for Henry's string of papers through him.
"God providentially turned this into a situation in which the newspapers reimbursed me when they used material that the news bureau prepared," Henry declared. "I had prayed with my roommate. I had confidence that God had the future in His hands. The outcome reminded me of Romans 8:28 (LB): 'And we know that all that happens to us is working for our good if we love God and are fitting into his plans.' "
A later twist — a further turning of the tables — brought added satisfaction to Henry: He subsequently was asked and agreed to teach journalism at Wheaton.
The second trying, but faith-strengthening, episode
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singled out by Henry occurred about ten years later when he was invited to give a series of lectures on "God and the Modern Mind" at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.
He was a member of the faculty at Fuller Seminary at the time. (Henry was acting dean there in 1947 and a professor between 1947 and 1956.) The invitation, as far as Henry could tell, came from the Willamette campus chapter of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. When he arrived in Salem, two students met him and drove him to a nearby hamburger stand for a bite to eat before moving on to the university, where Henry was schedule to speak.
"We couldn't have been more thrilled to get your letter of acceptance saying you'd speak," they told him. "But we should confess that we two students are the whole Inter-Varsity effort here, and we've been worrying about how we can pay your travel expenses. We've lined up a junior-high-school auditorium that seats twelve hundred. But we didn't get out any newspaper publicity. Only two posters got put up."
To make matters worse, Henry's lectures were scheduled simultaneously and competitively with the events of Religious Emphasis Week on campus. The students, again with good intentions, had hoped to inject an evangelical flavor into the proceedings by inviting Henry.
Henry swung into action quickly when the boys told him the unvarnished facts. He switched the meeting place from the auditorium to a small room that could hold only 150 people. "The auditorium would have been an unpopulated desert," Henry laughs now.
When 175 persons showed up, creating a standing-room-only crowd, the event was proclaimed a success.
In fact, the lectures were so well received that at the end of the week, the university president asked Henry if he would join the philosophy department the following year. Henry declined.
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Another bonus: Now-Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon attended Henry's lectures and later said that Henry was an instrumental force in his own Christian growth.
GOD WORKED
"God worked in that situation and once again vindicated the truth of Romans 8:28," Henry believes. "There were potential problems: The lectures might have been a reproach on the Lord's work because the means to make them successful were neglected. And there was the rivalry with the official university program of Religious Emphasis Week.
"But the inexpertise of the two students, one of them Doug Coe, now a leader of Fellowship House in Washington D.C. and instrumental in arranging the annual Presidential Prayer Breakfasts, was overruled by the sincere faith they had in God."
Henry believes the incident illustrates how God can be trusted in a situation with many embarrassing overtones. God used it as a means to good.
Carl, the two students, and a small remnant of Christians on campus joined together in prayer to turn the situation around.
"Through intercessory prayer," Henry recollects, "we claimed God's promise to honor a witness to the truth. And we were emboldened by the legitimate place to which the whole truth is entitled in an academic environment."
It was to be a lesson which emboldened Carl F. H. Henry many times in future years when he stood before secular throngs in classrooms, lecture halls, and television appearances.
Perhaps the most acute crisis faced by Henry was a vocational one. It surrounded his coming to and going from Christianity Today magazine.
Admitting that he had no reluctance accepting the invi-
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tation to go to Washington, D.C., in 1956 to become founding editor of the journal, Henry says his theological and journalistic backgrounds made such a choice natural.
The crunch came when the board asked him to stay permanently. The rub was whether to return to Fuller, which was ideal for pursuing book-writing and the academic realm, or to settle for the more journalistically oriented Christianity Today editorship.
Though, by its third year, Christianity Today was off to a good start and had already eclipsed the liberal Christian Century in circulation, Henry saw the editorship slot as "an endless job always without adequate editorial personnel."
"It was like going through a funeral," Carl lamented as he relived the decision as we talked in the late afternoon sunlight on the sun deck of his suburban Washington home. "I felt like Carl Henry in some sense died after my second year at Christianity Today and a commitment was made to stay. I had once thought that to go back into journalism was a possible betrayal of my calling; but now I took a decisive turn from academic priorities."
But the bottom line was knowing it was God's will to take the job for what, as far as Henry knew, might be the rest of his career.
Having written a letter accepting the post, Henry drove the mile to the post office, one hand on the steering wheel, the other tightly holding the hand of his wife, Helga, who sat close beside him. They said nothing. The letter fluttered into the mail slot. The course of the Henrys' lives was changed — and undoubtedly so was the course of evangelical Christianity in this country, if not the world.
CHRISTIANITY TODAY
Ten years later, Christianity Today was firmly established as a flagship magazine of thinking people's evangelical Christianity. Henry had a paid circulation of
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160,000 for the biweekly. But he also faced what seemed to be nearly unbearably heavy responsibilities for the editorial staff.
About a year later Henry was "dreaming of academic alternatives," to use the erudite but usual lucid language he chooses to describe things.
But what shocked him in 1967 was receiving letters from Christian leaders in three overseas countries saying they were sorry to hear that Henry was leaving Christianity Today and that the board was searching for a replacement.
This, of course, was a total surprise to Henry. So he wrote back, assuring them there was nothing to it.
But what happened in August 1967 came as such a shock to Henry, who stands six-foot-two and weighed 218 pounds at the time, that he lost over thirty pounds in the following months. Through a routine physical checkup at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, medics asked about the sharp loss of weight.
"I was disappointed by some Christian friends," I told the doctor, "and lost faith in them. That is all I want to say about it."
The it Henry was reluctant then — and now — to speak about was the way the executive committee, in private meetings, decided to replace Henry with a new editor. A letter from the chairman told Henry he would be released from the job after one more year.
"It was written as if I were seeking to be free," Henry said, adding that, "the other board members, when informed of the matter, were as shocked as I was."
In fact, as Henry tells it, when the full board met at the end of the year, a majority agreed — and in the presence of the executive committee — that if Carl would consent, it would be happy to have him continue as editor for life.
Though Henry prefers not to speak publicly about the executive committee's reasons for wanting him ousted, it is known in evangelical inner circles that some felt that he
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was too soft on ecumenical church groups and not aggressive enough in support of the conservative right.
To Henry, however, the damage had been done. Not only was he hesitant to make a life-time commitment to the editorship, a condition not part of his previous commitment to Christianity Today, he also felt he could never again recover a healthy relationship with the executive committee.
The day he got the letter from the board chairman, who also was chairman of the executive committee, Henry recalled a heartfelt talk he had had with Helga one night as the two walked, hand in hand, through the moonlit streets of Wheaton. They were in love, talking about life together. "There may well be two or three dark times in my life, Helga, and I'll have to lean heavily on you then," Carl had said.
When he told Helga the news at the dinner table that summer night in 1967, Carl prefaced it by saying there would be two ways to look at it:
One, they had previously talked about a return sometime to a campus and teaching career. "Now, God has providentially opened that door to the kind of vocation we have always loved. It has come about two or three years earlier than we had thought."
The other way of looking at the news was terse. Henry explained: "I have lost my job as editor of Christianity Today."
Neither Carl nor Helga wept. But they were perplexed.
"Helga has a strong trust in God's power and has helped me to multiply my ministry," Carl said later. "Through her own literary and academic gifts and her insights she provides rich shared topics of conversation."
Mrs. Henry, a faithful letter writer, has world mission interests and is a godly woman of prayer and faith.
After prayer, Henry decided to turn down inquiries about joining faculties at both religious and secular col-
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leges. Instead, Carl and Helga took a year out to go to Cambridge University in England to pursue scholarly study and writing.
Though Henry was clearly told he was to have no future voice in the editorial policy of Christianity Today, he was asked to be an editor-at-large and to write a periodic column called "Footnotes." He continued this until it was terminated just before the departure of his successor, Harold Lindsell, Christianity Today's editor from 1968 to early 1978.
Looking back at the vocational crisis a decade later, Henry summed up: "We were more disenchanted and disillusioned than we were crushed. I knew God had a purpose — He could vindicate. For the moment it seemed difficult to see how this could be a door to an equally useful ministry."
Carl shared the news about Christianity Today first with his children Paul and Carol, very openly and with confidence. "We knew they stood with us in prayer. The spiritual shock that I endured was nothing in the way of a psychic disturbance. I never became bitter. It never in any way weakened my faith in God. The disappointment was wholly with men in certain evangelical associations."
And paraphrasing a thought from Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, Henry added: "Men acting in groups sometimes engage in actions they would not pursue in personal dealings with their neighbor."
Turning to how the dark strands of life's tapestry can be woven into a brighter pattern of God's handiwork, Henry recounted how he has walked the streets with other men who have lost their jobs as college presidents and other professional positions, counseling them.
LEAN HEAVILY ON BIBLICAL ASSURANCE
Said Henry: "I have urged them to lean heavily on the biblical assurance that nothing touches the life of one of God's committed servants. Out of it God will bring what
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glorifies Him and is good for His servant, and through his servant what best serves his fellow man.
"That conviction gives a balance, a perspective, and even an inexplicable secret joy in the midst of disappointment and disenchantment.
"Looking back today, I would have to say that the outlines for the second and third and even the fourth volumes of God, Revelation & Authority took shape at Cambridge. I sank myself deeply into theological literature in a way I could not have done alone with the magazine responsibility. The beginnings of the four-volume tome got under way then, and that has been my central interest since."
Henry returned from Britain to serve a stint as a professor at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and, more recently, as lecturer-at-large for World Vision International, the humanitarian Christian relief organization headquartered in Monrovia, California.
But, cautioned Henry, when I asked him if he might have had even greater effectiveness had he stayed in mass media from the start, "One cannot decide what he ought to do from the standpoint of latter years but only in good conscience and in seeking the will of God along the way. And that I tried to do."
The question for a Christian, summed up Henry as we sensed from the delicious aroma wafting from Helga's kitchen that dinner would soon be served, is not how to have the greatest influence or leadership but how to obey God.
"I never aspired to leadership," Henry averred. "Leadership is God's gift and God provides it. And when He does it is in the arenas that He gives, and He determines the seasons for which it is given.
"What God asks is obedience, not prominence or even success."
Where does the theologian-author, who knows and un-
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derstands the Bible at a depth matched by few, turn for spiritual help and sustenance? "It's a triple track," Henry replied:
"(1) personal and family devotions; (2) a Friday night prayer cell, made up of young and professional people, who meet in different neighborhood homes, frequently ours; (3) Bible investigative work carried out for my own research and writing."
Elaborating on the need for personal prayer, Henry spoke not with the intellectualism of a theological giant but with the simple faith of a humble believer:
"A good season of prayer on one's knees in which one pours out his heart to God is always to me a thoroughly cleansing and refreshing experience. One sees the whole of life in relationship to the rule of God in his life and the Lordship of Christ. In a time of sustained personal prayer there is the deepest and most profound tie to the ultimately real world."
It is in these times of praying alone — "Gethsemane prayer," Carl calls it — when one isn't ashamed to shed tears, that he has felt the guidance of the Lord in life's toughest decisions.
ANXIETIES, NOT DOUBTS
Doubts? These, Carl says, he's never had, at least regarding his own assurance of salvation and commitment to Christ. But anxieties? "These I've always had," he added, hastening to explain that he is, in a sense, talking about professional anxiety.
There is, he says as a theologian, a kind of intellectual doubt one assumes in theological probing to examine the strengths and weaknesses of alternative commitments.
"It is the desire, therefore, to bear witness to the truth with integrity, in love, and to avoid a polemical harshness that repels," he elucidated. "Yet, I find God turns those
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anxieties, if one resolves them in prayer and trust, into a winsome personal dynamic."
Professional anxiety, for Henry, is akin to the way he experiences doubt. He frequently speaks to groups whose philosophical suppositions are very alien to evangelicalism. Then, his concern is that what he says will be formed in such a way that the truth and relevance of the Christian perspective is set forth clearly and convincingly.
"I am concerned for truth and fidelity in presenting my message to a particular audience. Since the comprehension level of the audiences I speak to varies greatly, part of my anxiety is that I not miss the level of that audience."
Emotionally, Henry glides along pretty much on an even keel. If anything tends to upset him, it's when he feels overcommitted and staggered by deadlines and multiple tasks. His mail is heavy, uncontrolled, and unpredictable. When he is swamped by an overload, he tends to feel paralyzed intellectually and tightened up so that he doesn't do his best work.
And, the tendency to overcommit may have been a factor in the stabbing migraine headaches Carl suffered for years.
Dispensing a prescription which has helped him and at long last has eliminated the migraines and which is applicable to all, Henry declared:
"The problem is not long range. Every day is a gift of God. Life is a gift. Life in Christ is a gift, and God doesn't expect us to do more than one thing at a time.
"So set your priorities. Arrange them in terms of what needs to be done. God always gives us enough time to do the things He really wants us to do. Some commitments could be done as well or better by others with an evangelical commitment. We are not all that indispensable to each and every project in the church of Christ."
As Carl Henry sees it, the places of privilege in Christ's
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kingdom are not reserved for those who aspire to sit on top of the world.
So it is not a question of sitting on top of the world all the time, even if one could. Or at any time. Rather, Christ belongs at the top of the world. He is the king of the cosmos.
"It is well to remember our finitude and our sinfulness," advise Henry, "even in the midst of our present regeneration. All we have and are and can hope to be issues from the sovereignty and the righteousness and holiness and grace of our Redeemer.
"The Christian is promised no exemption from pain, sorrow, or disappointment. We are not called upon by the Gospel to live with a cultivated smile."
Eschewing all phony piety, Henry exhorts the true follower of Christ to show confidence in God and to trust in the midst of vicissitudes.
"I've known the sorrow of bereavement, the driving, unrelenting pain of migraines. I've known the uncertainties of surgery," Henry said as he concluded the final interview in his living room the next morning.
"And I know the time will soon come when I must lay down my pen and go to that world where the Word of God no longer needs human witnesses.
"In all these experiences, the dynamic presence and power of the Risen Lord is fully adequate."
To Carl F. H. Henry, and to hosts of those who would also follow the Christ he serves, these are the marks of an authentic faith.
