Carl Henry spent his youth in newspaper offices, not in church pews. The son of German immigrants, he grew up on Long Island, New York, and by his early twenties was already editor of a local newspaper, long before any sign of a theological calling.
In 1933, a young evangelist spoke to him about Christ as they drove around Long Island in his old Chevrolet. Henry knelt in the back seat of the car and gave his life to Jesus, a decision that led him to trade journalism for Wheaton College.
At Wheaton he met fellow student Helga Bender, whom he would marry in August 1940, and later earned a doctorate in theology from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary and a doctorate in philosophy from Boston University. In 1947 he published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, calling on American fundamentalism for social engagement without abandoning the historic faith.
The book became the manifesto of a new movement, called neo-evangelicalism. That same year, Henry helped found Fuller Theological Seminary, serving as its first dean in its opening year and training pastors willing to pursue intellectual rigor without losing biblical orthodoxy.
In 1956, at Billy Graham’s invitation, he became the founding editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, giving American evangelicalism a theological voice of national reach. In 1966, as editor, he chaired the Berlin Congress on World Evangelization, gathering Christian leaders from dozens of countries.
He left the magazine in 1968, after years of friction with more conservative board members and funders who pushed for a more politically right-leaning editorial tone and who ultimately cost Henry his position as editor-in-chief. Henry was never a consensus figure: separatist fundamentalists accused him of yielding to culture, while liberal theologians saw him as too rigid in his defense of biblical inerrancy.
He later studied for a year at Cambridge and taught at seminaries such as Eastern Baptist and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, completing between 1976 and 1983 the six volumes of God, Revelation and Authority, his broadest defense of the authority of Scripture. He died in 2003, at age 90, recognized as one of the chief architects of American evangelicalism.
