c. 2003 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Carl F.H. Henry, the first editor of Christianity Today magazine and one of conservative Christianity’s most influential authors and theologians, died Sunday (Dec. 7) in Watertown, Wis. He was 90.
Often called the “thinking man’s Billy Graham,” Henry was the author of more than 25 books. Over the past few decades he had taught at several colleges and seminaries, such as Fuller Theological Seminary in California. First and foremost, he was a proponent of biblical scholarship.
“Critical investigation should not be banned,” the Associated Press quoted the Southern Baptist theologian as saying in 1986. “But the critics would do well by first criticizing their own presuppositions.”
David Neff, editor of Christianity Today, said Henry’s contributions to evangelicalism were far-reaching.
“At mid-century, Carl Henry gave enormous gifts of time and talent to America’s neo-evangelical movement,” Neff told Religion News Service.
“Whereas Billy Graham was the movement’s goodwill ambassador and welcoming spirit, Carl Henry was one of its most brilliant minds. Without his rigorous thought and his determined will, evangelicalism’s premiere institutions would have been clearly second-rate.”
Today, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has a Carl F.H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement and Union University has the Carl F.H. Henry Center for Christian Leadership.
A native of New York City, Henry was 20 when _ while working at a Long Island weekly _ he decided to train full time for Christian service. Being an evangelical then “was very different from what you have today,” he later said. At the time, the old Federal Council of Churches, the forerunner to the National Council of Churches, was on the left of social issues, and as Henry later said, “they presumed to speak for all the churches.”
During the 1940s, Henry, along with evangelist Billy Graham and other conservative Protestant leaders, trumped the use of the term “neo-evangelical” as a substitute for “fundamentalist,” which Henry saw as “associated with a pugnacious temperament” and the tendency to “reduce the essentials of biblical Christianity to fine points.”
In 1956, Henry found an outlet for religious expression as editor of the new publication, Christianity Today, which was envisioned as the evangelical alternative to the Protestant intellectual weekly, Christian Century.
Henry later explained that the idea for Christianity Today came on Christmas Day, 1954, during a conversation between evangelist Billy Graham and Graham’s father-in-law, Dr. Nelson Bell, a medical missionary expelled from China during the country’s Maoist revolution. The two then sought funds from industrialist J. Howard Pew, who sustained the magazine for a number of years.
By the time Henry was recruited as editor in 1956, he had been at Fuller Seminary for nine years. Bell became executive editor and chief adviser to both Pew and Graham. The first issue hit stands in October of that year and under Henry’s watch, it distinguished itself as a serious journal of theological scholarship.
American church historian Martin Marty said Henry sought through the magazine to give a voice “to the former fundamentalists who no longer wanted to be seen as hard-line and wanted to be more open to the culture, to other versions of the Christian faith.”
At the helm of Christianity Today, Henry interviewed some of America’s most influential citizens. During the 1968 presidential campaign, for instance, he spoke with Richard Nixon, whom he would call “remarkably imprecise about spiritual realities and enduring ethical concerns.”
For more than 10 years, Henry served as editor, until Pew terminated his position. “My relationship to the magazine was not only summarily ended without consultation or reason, but in the absence of a resignation and without agreement on public announcement,” Henry wrote a colleague at the time.
Ultimately, though, Henry concluded that the “well-being of Christianity Today is more important than my immediate future,” and he soon left the publication.
In 1985 his name was restored to the masthead at the top of a list of past editors and Graham’s name was listed as “founder.”
By that period, Christianity Today had become a huge publishing empire, including 11 magazines with 2.5 million readers, although Henry was no longer on staff.
From 1973 on, Henry became lecturer-at-large for World Vision International, based in Monrovia, Calif.
Henry often saw the post-World War II rise of evangelicalism to have peaked in 1976 when Americans elected a “born-again” Southern Baptist, Jimmy Carter, as president.
But Henry soon bemoaned what he saw as an “emerging religious pluralism” with numerous “new age” gods at the helm. The culprit, he said, was secular humanism, about which the Los Angeles Times once quoted him as saying, “has sacrificed the metaphysical realities that make sense of moral absolutes.” America, Henry said, had become a modern-day Rome, a land of “paganism” that was intolerant of any religion that claimed to be the only correct one.
Henry’s criticism of the American landscape also included some evangelical leaders. During the late 1980s, as Oral Roberts landed in controversy for announcing that he needed to raise $4.5 million in a month’s time or he would die, Henry weighed in.
“His appeal discredits a ministry whose overall message has been that sufficient faith can work miracles,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying in 1987. Roberts’ situation was, he said, “a sad spectacle” which Henry worried would give secularist critics more reason to shun conservative Christianity.
As the 20th century drew to a close, Henry was wary of the new spiritual wave that swept America. Amid the commercial success of pop religion literature, Henry called the boom a “spiritual veneer.”
“Much of this effusion is doctrinally indefinite and religiously confusing,” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1997, and added: “We don’t see much rebellion against the worldly things that occupy us.”
In later years, Henry stayed active. In June 2000, Henry joined more than 80 Christian leaders of numerous denominations who signed the “Chicago Declaration on Religious Freedom: Sharing Jesus Christ in a Pluralistic Society.” The document’s preamble stated that evangelistic attempts did not undermine a peaceful, pluralistic society, and that such efforts were constitutionally protected.
From 1973 until the time of his death, he donated more than 10,000 books from his personal collection to the Rolfing Library at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill.
To the end, Henry was best known as Christianity Today’s first editor and ultimately, it was in the newsroom where Henry fused his two great passions: journalism and Christianity. As he said in 1986, “I still have the stars in my eyes that I had 50 years ago as a young newspaperman who came to Christ.”
Henry is survived by his wife of 63 years, Helga Bender Henry and a daughter, Carol Bates. His son, Rep. Paul Henry, R-Mich., died in 1993.
DEA END SINGH
