When Edward Carnell's father, the Reverend Herbert Carnell, retired in 1962 from a long career in the Baptist ministry, he and his wife moved from Michigan to southern California to live near three of their four children and their families. Herbert Carnell, however, was not the type to spend his retirement playing shuffleboard and working on his tan. In addition to fulfilling occasional preaching assignments, he began the ambitious project of writing an autobiographical memoir covering his entire life. The result: a 130-page typewritten unpublished manuscript that gives us an intimately personal view of Edward Carnell's paternal heritage. It also conveys at least a few facts about Edward's own childhood and, more significantly, lights up the background against which that childhood was lived: the Protestant fundamentalist subculture of the American Midwest in the 1920s and 1930s. One additional fact underscores the importance of this manuscript in our study of Herbert Carnell's son; the closing paragraph reads as follows: “I wish to thank my son, Edward John Carnell, Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at Fuller Theological Seminary for his many helpful suggestions in the preparation of this volume. We are all debtors in one way or another.”

In dealing with Herbert Carnell's memoir, we do well to remember that autobiography is never truth in any simple direct sense. Barrett John Mandel, in his illuminating article “The Autobiographer's Art,” observes that “life itself is too big, too formless, too pointless, always too ugly in some of its details, and usually too tedious even in the hands of a great man to be rendered in all its complex reality.”