New Carl F. H. Henry Book

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bookslover

Puritan Board Doctor
I found this while cruising in my local Barnes & Noble store:

Architect of Evangelicalism: Essential Essays of Carl F. H. Henry, with a foreword by Mark Galli and an introduction by David S. Dockery (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019). 421 pages.

The book consists of 33 pieces Henry wrote for Christianity Today from 1956 ("The Christian-Pagan West") to 1989 ("The New Coalitions"). Henry (1913-2003) was the founding editor of that magazine.

Should be good reading.
 
Sad that the book's forward is written by an apostate. Henry would be disgusted.
 
He's the current Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today. How is he an apostate? I'm not familiar with him.
He was the editor. He retired. Even if he didn’t apostatize from the faith, being editor of Christianity Today doesn’t mean much, either. It would be like being the editor of The Gospel Coalition—it just means you’re part of Big Eva, is all. Galli did a lot of damage while he was at CT. Then, after he finished his demolition there, he retired and bid his farewell to Christ.
 
He's the current Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today. How is he an apostate? I'm not familiar with him.

He is a former Protestant minister who later converted to Roman Catholicism.

He was the editor. He retired. Even if he didn’t apostatize from the faith, being editor of Christianity Today doesn’t mean much, either. It would be like being the editor of The Gospel Coalition—it just means you’re part of Big Eva, is all. Galli did a lot of damage while he was at CT. Then, after he finished his demolition there, he retired and bid his farewell to Christ.

Considering Carl. F. H. Henry was the founding editor of Christianity Today it should come as no real shock that Mark Galli wrote the forward.

I listened to an interview with Galli shortly before his being confirmed a Catholic and his conversion story sounded like so many others where he wandered around unsettled for years. Here is a pretty thorough summary of his religious drift. I'm sure Marcus Grodi is chomping at the bit to get Galli on The Coming Home Network. I'm somewhat curious to see whether his wife remains in the Anglican Church or eventually follows him into the RCC.

The book though does look interesting. I unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) have too many books I need to get to before considering this one though. I'll add it to my "interest list".
 
He's the current Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today. How is he an apostate? I'm not familiar with him.

He used an otherwise good Anglican tradition as a halfway house to Roman Catholicism (which he admitted was his goal all along). He ignored Karl Barth's adultery while attacking Trump. Even before Galli poped, I still thought most of what he wrote was garbage (of course, it's Christianity Today, so there's that).
 
He used an otherwise good Anglican tradition as a halfway house to Roman Catholicism (which he admitted was his goal all along). He ignored Karl Barth's adultery while attacking Trump. Even before Galli poped, I still thought most of what he wrote was garbage (of course, it's Christianity Today, so there's that).

Yeah, I let my subscription to CT lapse back in the '90s. It was heading south even then.
 
He used an otherwise good Anglican tradition as a halfway house to Roman Catholicism (which he admitted was his goal all along). He ignored Karl Barth's adultery while attacking Trump. Even before Galli poped, I still thought most of what he wrote was garbage (of course, it's Christianity Today, so there's that).
The Barth stuff was particularly foul. Galli once wrote something that practically amounted to an assertion that Christians shouldn't expect any sort of transformation in their lives. But in fairness to him, in the interview he gave after crossing the Tiber, he refers to an antinomian phase, among other phases.
 
We've gone off on Galli. (The foreward by Galli was the first thing I noticed, admittedly.) We don't need to go off on Russell Moore lest the thread get even more sidetracked. But Moore is a big Henry fan but has nonetheless charged Henry with almost totally neglecting ecclesiology. So it's not surprising that some people involved with CT and evangelicalism in general aren't very committed to the institutional church or else tend to bounce around as Galli and others have. For all the good he did, arguably Henry was also among those planting the seeds for modern evangelicalism (TM) with his involvement in Fuller, the NAE, and CT. "Evangelicalism" was much sounder when a lot more things went through the denominations rather than people being fed largely by various parachurch ministries, no matter how sound they are.
 
We've gone off on Galli. (The foreward by Galli was the first thing I noticed, admittedly.) We don't need to go off on Russell Moore lest the thread get even more sidetracked. But Moore is a big Henry fan but has nonetheless charged Henry with almost totally neglecting ecclesiology. So it's not surprising that some people involved with CT and evangelicalism in general aren't very committed to the institutional church or else tend to bounce around as Galli and others have. For all the good he did, arguably Henry was also among those planting the seeds for modern evangelicalism (TM) with his involvement in Fuller, the NAE, and CT. "Evangelicalism" was much sounder when a lot more things went through the denominations rather than people being fed largely by various parachurch ministries, no matter how sound they are.

In Henry's defense, when he was a member of the founding faculty at Fuller (1947) and the founding editor of Christianity Today (1956), both those entities were much more conservative than they later became. And I don't think it was Henry who helped them to become more liberal. I think Henry left both of them because they were getting hijacked by the Left, not that he was helping them to do so.

As for his alleged neglect of ecclesiology, Henry considered himself more of a philosopher than a theologian. (I wish someone would put his book Christian Personal Ethics back in print. It was published in 1957, the same year John Murray's book on the same subject came out.) Besides, as a Baptist, he might have thought that ecclesiology was a pretty uncomplicated subject. LOL
 
In Henry's defense, when he was a member of the founding faculty at Fuller (1947) and the founding editor of Christianity Today (1956), both those entities were much more conservative than they later became. And I don't think it was Henry who helped them to become more liberal. I think Henry left both of them because they were getting hijacked by the Left, not that he was helping them to do so.

As for his alleged neglect of ecclesiology, Henry considered himself more of a philosopher than a theologian. (I wish someone would put his book Christian Personal Ethics back in print. It was published in 1957, the same year John Murray's book on the same subject came out.) Besides, as a Baptist, he might have thought that ecclesiology was a pretty uncomplicated subject. LOL
My point was that it led to the phenomenon of people looking to parachurch ministries for leadership and teaching. It led to nonsense like Billy Graham being considered "America's Pastor." That would be nonsense even if he would have remained a fundamentalist.

The neglect of ecclesiology may have been in part due to many of the denominations being a mixture of liberal and conservative, and thus the need to resort to various parachurch ministries in an effort to evangelize and deliver solid teaching. The "New Evangelical" project in which Henry was a leader was an explicit rejection of the kind of separatism seen with the OPC, for example. Henry's disciples (Mohler is one of them) did eventually succeed in retaking the SBC, although its direction, much like the PCA's, is in doubt today.
 
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