Edward John Carnell (28 June 1919[1][2] – 25 April 1967[3]) was a prominent Christian theologian and apologist, was an ordained Baptist pastor, and served as President of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.
During his candidacy at Harvard, Carnell also enrolled as a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Boston University under the tutelage of Edgar S. Brightman.
[4] During the period of his doctoral studies, Carnell composed a work in Christian apologetics that he submitted to William Eerdmans in a competition for the Evangelical Book Award.
It was hailed in Evangelical circles as a masterly new work in apologetics, and established a reputation for Carnell as a brilliant young and rising theologian.
In the book he sought to show that Christian faith was systematically logical, factual and rationally satisfying as it best fitted the facts as an explanation for the human condition.
In many respects his apologetic approach represented an attempt at combining the deductive rationalist and presuppositionalist methods of Clark and Van Til, with a test for truth he called "systematic consistency".
Two further apologetic works Christian Commitment and The Kingdom of Love and the Pride of Life delved into subjective issues of introspective meaning.
Towards the end of that century a major division occurred in Protestant thought in Europe, England, and America that transcended denominational affiliations.
The tensions between these two camps arose over developments in Enlightenment based philosophy where theistic or supernatural explanations of reality were brought into question.
This new historical consciousness was presaged in the seventeenth century controversies of Deism where Biblical miracles, and especially Christ's resurrection, were called into doubt.
The Genesis narratives of the creation and Noah's Flood were brought into doubt, and the science versus religion debates accelerated.
However, as the gospel message of the Liberals was perceived to be largely about social reform and not about personal repentance from sin, the suspicions between the two camps widened.
[4] In the early 1940s a number of those who had grown up in a fundamentalist ethos began to question the eccentricities of the subculture, and particularly its disengagement from both the academy and mainstream culture.
One approach was to reengage the academy bringing a distinctly Christian worldview to bear on disciplines such as history, philosophy, science, literature, art and law.
[9] Carnell's personal life was not without difficulties as he suffered from depression and insomnia, and received psychiatric treatment including electro-convulsive therapy.