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Carl F Henry

Thanks to Al Mohler's weblog I've just discovered that Carl F. Henry is dead. He is doubtless enjoying the presence of his Saviour after 90 long years, but I confess to feeling a sense of great loss to the church militant upon earth. As a young child with an early bedtime, I would occasionally wake before my parents had retired to bed, and needing to be reassured, would go and stand at the top of the stairs to hear their voices from the lounge below. In order to return to bed happy, I didn't need to see them or speak to them - simply to know that they were there was enough. Carl Henry may have been elderly and retired from public life, but I slept more soundly knowing he was there.

This is taken from Mohler's Blog for 9th December 2003:

"Everyone has a theology," wrote Carl F. H. Henry. "It may be a very shoddy one, and if it is shoddy, it will rise to haunt one in a crisis of life. It's my conviction that only a theology which has the living God at its center and that is rooted in Christ, the crucified and risen Redeemer, has the intellectual struts to engage the modern secular views effectively."

Carl Henry, who died in his sleep December 7, devoted his long and illustrious career as a theologian to building and defending the "intellectual struts" of evangelical theology. His death at age 90 closes an important chapter in the history of American evangelicalism--and raises anew the great questions with which he struggled. Among those questions was one he revisited time and time again: Will evangelicalism remain recognizably evangelical?

My feelings about his passing? Perhaps they are best summed up in the words of Calvin:

"Poo!"

I miss him already.