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Carl Henry was ever the evangelist—though few think of the great theologian in this way. And sometimes he would go to extraordinary lengths to proclaim the message of the Bible. One of my most vivid memories of him is from an address he gave to several thousand Southern Baptist pastors. He was describing the bankruptcy of philosophical naturalism, which has no place for the handiwork of a personal God. His text was Ecclesiastes 12:5—the meaningless shuttle of a purposeless life, as almond trees blossom, mourners go about the streets, and "the grasshopper drags itself along."

As Henry described all this in his high, wispy voice, suddenly I was astonished to see this lanky preacher-theologian leave the pulpit and begin to walk back and forth across the platform, slightly jumping as he imitated a grasshopper dragging itself through a field. This was as close as I ever saw Henry come to a charismatic display, but those who heard that message will never forget it.

Nor will the evangelical world soon forget him. Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry was born on January 22, 1913, in New York City, the son of German immigrant parents. He died on December 7, 2003, in Watertown, Wisconsin, with Helga, his beloved wife of 63 years, at his side. In the 90 years that intervened between these two events, Henry cut a wide and deep swath across the landscape of American Christianity and the world evangelical movement. Indeed, along with his Wheaton College classmate, Billy Graham, and distinguished Boston pastor Harold John Ockenga, Henry practically invented what later became known as evangelicalism.

Although his father was a Lutheran and his mother a Roman Catholic, Henry was baptized and confirmed as an Episcopalian. But none of this really took, and Henry became a teenage dropout from church in the Central Islip community on Long Island where he grew up. He could type 85 words per minute, and, during the Depression, he found work as a reporter and eventually editor of a major weekly near his home.

All of this changed in 1933 when Henry, a 20-year-old, received Jesus Christ as his Savior and Lord. He later said of this event: "Into the darkness of my young life, he put bright stars that still shine and sparkle. After that encounter, I walked the world with God as my Friend." He was dipped in baptism at a local Baptist church and soon was off to pursue studies at Wheaton.

At Wheaton, Henry met not only Graham but also Harold Lindsell, Kenneth Taylor, Sam Moffett, Richard Halverson, and other students destined to become luminaries in the dawning evangelical renaissance. Most important, he met Helga Bender, the beautiful daughter of Baptist missionaries to the African Cameroons. To help support himself, Henry taught typing; Helga was a student in one of his classes. He was enchanted with her hazel eyes, which sparkled, he wrote at the time, "like the light of heaven." They were married in 1940 and eventually had two children: a daughter, Carol, an expert musicologist, and a son, Paul, a United States congressman from 1984 until his death in 1993.

The most important intellectual influence on Henry was Gordon Clark, a Presbyterian theologian, who emphasized propositional truth and the rationality of belief in God. Henry went on to earn two doctorates, one in theology from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in a Chicago suburb (where he also taught for several years), and one in philosophy from Boston University. Yet Clark remained the main influence on Henry's developing thought. From the beginning, Henry set out to think through afresh the historic Christian understanding of the God who intelligibly makes known his Word and his will. Theology, he believed, should not be done in a vacuum but in serious interaction with competing and opposing theological perspectives. "Evangelical theology," he wrote, "is heretical if it is only creative, and unworthy if it is only repetitious." Henry's theological work culminated in a massive six-volume study, God, Revelation, and Authority, published from 1976 to 1983. This was his magnum opus, and it remains the most sustained theological epistemology produced by any evangelical theologian of the 20th century.

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March 2004, Vol. 48, No. 3