The Forgotten Apologist – Edward John Carnell (1919-1967) Part One

Who Was E. J. Carnell and Why Does He Matter?

My guess is that most readers of the Riddlebog will not know the name of Edward John Carnell. Carnell was one of the most innovative apologists of his time but dared to walk the razor’s edge between a scholarly defense of the Christian faith and the fundamentalism of his youth which he felt compelled to defend. He possessed a brilliant mind, was an excellent lecturer, as well as a prolific writer–with a number of significant books published by his early thirties.

But in the end, Carnell found that the razor’s edge he walked was exceedingly sharp and he was unable to keep his balance–feeling the deep cuts which the razor inflicted. His efforts pleased neither the evangelicals nor the fundamentalists. His attempt to gain intellectual credence for evangelicalism among progressive theologians and critical scholars failed to impress either group, and his efforts only brought harsh criticism from several of his friends who felt he conceded too much to modernism.

Carnell was a troubled soul, and the damage done by years of herculean effort without seeing any positive results, all the while coming under constant criticism from allies during the tail-end of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, eventually brought about a severe emotional crisis which led to his early death at the age of 47 under questionable circumstances. Carnell found himself caught between his desire to see a more intellectually defensible form of Christianity and the feud between fundamentalism and those theological progressives who were too willing to give up the essentials of the faith in exchange for social relevance. The conflict eventually broke him.

This essay will focus upon Carnell’s efforts to formulate an apologetic which builds upon Gordon Clark and Cornelius Van Til’s presuppositionalism, but which is tweaked for application to the controversies facing the new evangelicalism. Carnell’s work in this regard is still worth our consideration. In part one, we will consider Carnell’s life and work, and how this set the stage for the formulation of his unique apologetic methodology.

Carnell – The Leading Evangelical Apologist

John Frame opined that of all the evangelical apologists of the late twentieth century (the golden age of American Evangelicalism), E. J. Carnell “has used the greatest richness of data in defending the faith.”[1] Carnell was among the most innovative and provocative of evangelical apologists and deserves careful consideration. Carnell proposed a synthesis of presuppositional apologetics with more innovative approaches to defend the faith, with the goal of offering an academically robust apologetic for Christian faith, yet one grounded in Protestant orthodoxy. His apologetic method is very helpful in places and many have borrowed ideas from Carnell without attribution. Some have pointed to Francis Schaeffer as one who seems to have appropriated a significant number of Carnell’s insights.

Now largely forgotten, Carnell was a significant figure in the rise of a distinctive American Evangelicalism, which sought to distance itself from the limits and stigma of fundamentalism. Along with Carl Henry, Harold Lindsell, and Harold Ockenga, Carnell worked to put evangelicalism on a solid academic and intellectual footing, yet remaining independent from close denominational or confessional ties. This approach failed in the end–given the current state and anti-intellectualism of much of American evangelicalism. But at the time, evangelicals worried that American fundamentalism was too often characterized by anti-intellectualism, legalism, poor doctrine, and was far too pessimistic about the possibility of using culture and technology as a means of advancing the evangelical cause.[2] A new course was needed.

Although Carnell’s influence was wide-ranging among evangelicals during the late 1940's until he died in 1967, he was primarily known as an apologist and produced several ground-breaking works in the field. Carnell’s most significant work was An Introduction to Christian Apologetics, published by Eerdmans in 1948. Carnell submitted the manuscript while completing his doctoral work and won the Evangelical Book Award, bringing him a nice stipend and his book much acclaim.

Some of Carnell’s apologetic works have been reprinted and can be found on Amazon, although used copies of his books are relatively easy to find. His best known apologetic effort was the aforementioned Introduction to Christian Apologetics.[3] Other important works include A Philosophy of the Christian Religion, and Christian Commitment.[4] Secondary treatments of Carnell’s apologetic have also been published,[5] and one full-length evaluation of Carnell’s apologetic method was written in 1979.[6]

Context is Everything for Understanding Carnell

Carnell’s educational history is important in order to understand both his work as an apologist and his role in the development of evangelicalism. Carnell earned his B.A. at Wheaton, the intellectual bastion of the emerging evangelical movement. While there, he had extensive contact with Gordon Clark, before going on to Westminster Theological Seminary (WTS), where he earned a B.D. and a Th.M while studying under Cornelius Van Til and John Murray. From there he went on to Harvard Divinity School, earning a Th.D (writing his dissertation on Reinhold Niebuhr), and then to Boston University, where he earned a Ph.D under the noted philosopher Edgar Sheffield Brightman. His dissertation under Brightman’s tutelage was on Søren Kierkegaard. Carnell went on to become a professor at Gordon-Conwell, later moving west to the fledgling Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena where he served as President for a time.

An important biography of Carnell and his place in evangelicalism documents his long-standing bout with depression and insomnia and seeks to answer the unresolved questions surrounding his early death from an overdose of barbiturates at the age of 47. In the months before he died, friends and associates noted his gaunt appearance. Carnell had experienced a mental breakdown and fellow faculty and students noticed the change in his speech and classroom lectures. Carnell underwent shock treatments and may have suffered a stroke the week before his death. It remains a mystery whether his death was accidental or intentional.[6]

Carnell’s comments about his educational experience are documented by Nelson and do much to explain the route Carnell chose to defend the faith. While Carnell clearly enjoyed the academic excellence of WTS, he was also quite unhappy by what he considered to be its spiritual deadness.

The warmth and enthusiasm of Wheaton was so noticeably absent at Westminster that we felt really isolated. What we seemed to be searching for was the theological rigor of Calvinism joined to the spiritual exaltation of Fundamentalism. Eastern [Baptist] was theologically superficial; Westminster was theologically dead. With such a choice, we settled for the corpse.[7]

Nelson recounts Carnell’s subsequent loneliness and intellectual struggles at Westminster which set the tone for the rest of his academic and professional life and reveals the rationale for his efforts to rethink apologetic methodology and its application. The unhappiness troubling Carnell during his time at Westminster can be seen when he compares his two most significant apologetic mentors, Gordon Clark and Cornelius Van Til. A close friend recalls Carnell lamenting . . .

You'd ask Clark a question, he’d think for a minute, then give you a one sentence answer. And you'd say to yourself, `That's no answer.’ But you'd go home and think about it – and after a while you'd come around to the view that it was a pretty good answer after all. Which is exactly the process Clark intended you should get involved in. You’d ask Van Til a question, he’d talk for half an hour, and you'd be sorry you asked the question.[8]

When the Clark-Van Til debates took place in the mid-forties, Carnell sided with Clark, which resulted in a permanent rift with Van Til and WTS. During his tenure and time as president at Fuller, Carnell did his best to ensure that the seminary maintained the academic excellence of WTS, but preserved the piety and non-confessional emphases of a broader inter-denominational evangelicalism.

Why Carnell Felt A New Approach to Apologetics Was Needed

It was while Carnell was at the Harvard Divinity School that he realized the presuppositional apologetic he learned from his mentors was found wanting. Carnell admitted to a group of fellow evangelical students that, “he had come to Harvard with a sack full of arguments in defense of the faith only to find to his dismay when he reached into it one day that the sack was empty.[9]. Yet, years later, reflecting upon his time at Harvard, he told an audience,

The more I exposed myself to the competing ideologies, the more convinced I became that the Christian worldview can be accepted with the consent of all our faculties. A conviction grew in my mind as I cast myself on the perils of graduate study that any fair-minded individual who is open before facts, if he pursued a course carefully and with patience, would arrive at a biblical, theistic position.[10]

Nelson takes this to mean,

What was missing in Carnell’s sack of apologetic tools at this time was not a confident Christian faith, but an apologetical stance. He had been thoroughly immersed for three years in the Calvinism of Cornelius Van Til at Westminster but grew to believe that Van Til, in his unwillingness to acknowledge that the unbeliever is capable of arriving at any valid truth, was eliminating every point of contact between the believer and the unbeliever, thus undercutting the task of apologetics and leaving the faith without a defense . . . . While Carnell did not turn his back on the law of contradiction, the formal basis of Clark’s system of deductive rationalism, he became convinced that Clark, like Van Til, was severely limited in his apologetic usefulness. The law of contradiction was the means by which one could ferret out the inconsistencies and illogicalities of opposing systems, and that, according to Clark, is the main task of apologetics; but Carnell was looking for something more positive.[11]

Nelson continues . . .

In Clark’s view there is no evidence that can certify the God of Calvinistic orthodoxy, for if such evidence existed it would be more foundational than God himself and therefore undermine his status as a first principle. However logical, this point of view struck Carnell as unnecessarily constricted, doing justice to neither the full dimensions of human life nor the breadth of Holy Scripture.[12]

Nelson has quite likely correctly diagnosed Carnell on this point. As Carnell would later write, “apologetics is that branch of systematic theology which shows why Christianity is true. The duty to defend the faith is included in faith . . . . Since apologetics is an art and not a science, there is no official way to go about defending the Christian faith. The defense must answer to the spirit of the times.”[13] Carnell wanted to avoid the formulaic “one apologetic method fits in all circumstances” mentality and sought a method which allowed him to bring all facts and human experience to bear in the apologetic task.

In Part Two, we will take up the specifics of Carnell’s apologetic methodology

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[1] John Frame, “Class Notes,” WSC, 1984, 58.

[2] This is recounted in George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1987).

[2] E. J. Carnell, Introduction to Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1948).

[3] E. J. Carnell, A Philosophy of the Christian Religion, William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1952; and Christian Commitment: An Apologetic, MacMillan, New York, 1957. Both were reprinted by Baker Books, but appear to be out of print.

[4] See, for example, Gordon Lewis, Testing Christianity's Truth Claims (Chicago: Moody Press, 1976), 176-284; Brian K. Morley, Mapping Apologetics (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015), 148-168.

[5] John Sims, Edward John Carnell: Defender of the Faith (Washington D. C.: University Press of America, 1979).

[6] Rudolph Nelson, The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind: The Case of Edward Carnell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Nelson is convinced that Carnell’s inability to cope with the inerrancy crisis precipitated his early death.

[7] Cited in Nelson, The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind, 46.

[8] Nelson, The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind, 45.

[9] Nelson, The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind, 63.

[10] Nelson, The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind, 63.

[11] Nelson, The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind, 63-64.

[12] Nelson, The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind, 64.

[13] E. J. Carnell, Christian Commitment, vii.