Edward John Carnell

Carnell's personal life was not without difficulties as he suffered from depression and insomnia, and received psychiatric treatment including electro-convulsive therapy. His treatment included doses of barbiturates, and he died in 1967 from a drug overdose. The cause of his death has been the subject of much conjecture as the coronial finding was unable to determine whether the dose was accidental or not.

Carnell died on April 14, 1967 at the Claremont Hotel in Oakland, California. The Alameda County Coroner determined that he had a significant amount of barbiturates in his system, but there was no determination whether or not the death was an accident or suicide. Carnell was survived by his wife and two children.

In 1954 Carnell was appointed the President of Fuller Seminary. As some of the Neo-Evangelicals, like Carl F. H. Henry and Harold Ockenga, had been instrumental in establishing the seminary, Carnell's rising profile as an apologist, theologian, and now seminary professor, catapulted him into the spotlight.

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. Carnell's manuscript won the five thousand dollar prize, which in 1948 was a considerable sum of money. 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 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. A new organization known as the National Association of Evangelicals was formed with the agenda of reforming society. Some of the emerging leaders of this movement, which came to be dubbed "Neo-Evangelical" included Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Ockenga and Billy Graham. These men were convinced that a two-pronged approach to societal transformation was possible. 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. The other approach involved itinerant evangelistic preachers proclaiming the message at the grass roots level of society.

Edward John Carnell (28 June 1919 – 25 April 1967) was a prominent Christian theologian and apologist, was an ordained Baptist pastor, and served as President of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He was the author of nine major books, several of which attempted to develop a fresh outlook in Christian apologetics. He also wrote essays that were published in several other books, and was a contributor of articles to periodicals such as The Christian Century and Christianity Today.

Carnell was born in Antigo, Wisconsin on June 28, 1919, and was the third of four children born to Herbert Carnell and Fannie Carstens. He was married to Shirley Rowe, a school teacher from Wisconsin.

In 1915 a multi-volume work called The Fundamentals was published, which comprised a variety of tracts that reasserted traditional Christian teachings and challenged modern skeptical thinking and Liberal Christian ideas. It is from these volumes that the subsequent label of fundamentalist was coined in the 1920s and in the wake of the famous Scopes trial on the teaching of evolution.

A further element of controversy for Christians at that time arose in the wake of the theory of evolution as propounded in 1859 by Charles Darwin. The Genesis narratives of the creation and Noah's Flood were brought into doubt, and the science versus religion debates accelerated.