Carl F. H. Henry is often called the most influential American evangelical theologian during the second half of the twentieth century. Though this might well be a fair assessment, scholars also acknowledge that Henry was an interdisciplinary polymath. He earned two terminal doctorates in the fields of philosophy and theology, he was an experienced journalist, and he published both scholarly and popular works in the fields of theology, philosophy, ethics, apologetics, political theology, New Testament, and missiology. Many of Henry’s writings reflected his wide-ranging interests, most notably God, Revelation, and Authority, his six-volume magnum opus published between 1976 and 1983.
This paper argues that Henry is best described as a cultural apologist rather than as a traditional theologian. The field of cultural apologetics is still emerging, and at present it is as much a posture as it is a formal discipline. Cultural apologetics could be described as a missionary approach to post-Christian culture that seeks to critique intellectual currents and cultural artifacts, demonstrate the positive influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition historically upon Western culture, establish the ongoing plausibility of biblical truth claims, and thus provoke interest in the gospel.
Cultural apologetics does not reject traditional apologetic models, but rather incorporates one or more of those approaches as components within a more holistic defense of Christianity. A growing number of universities and seminaries offer courses and even emphases in cultural apologetics. A growing number of scholars identify with cultural apologetics, notably Paul Gould, Joshua Chatraw, and Holly Ordway. Perhaps most important, the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, named for the late pastor-apologist Tim Keller and affiliated with The Gospel Coalition, has cultivated an interdisciplinary team of fellows who are engaged in the work.
Though the term “cultural apologetics” is new, this posture helpfully describes Henry’s interdisciplinary scholarly agenda. While Henry’s interest in cultural apologetics was evident in his earliest books, notably Remaking the Modern Mind (1946), it was arguably the throughline through all of his writings from the mid-1970s until his retirement in the mid-1990s. A test case for this thesis is Henry’s defense of Nicene Christology. Though he wrote on Christology off and on throughout his career, by the 1980s his work was framed in response to skeptical claims about the historical Jesus that were gaining traction in American culture, fostering a more prescriptive approach to religious pluralism, and creating space for what Henry called neo-Paganism to grow in its influence. His exposition of Christology in the final volume of God, Revelation, and Authority (1983) engaged with the claims of scholars who soon identified with the Jesus Seminar (est. 1985). His final book, the largely forgotten The Identity of Jesus of Nazareth (1992), was a semi-scholarly defense of Nicene Christology that offered a direct response to the Jesus Seminar. Henry’s theological work on the person of Christ was therefore part of his desire to offer a cultural apologetic in an increasingly post-Christian society.