God's Billy Pulpit

(5 of 8)
Even as Graham's preaching grew more confident, his concern about his intellectual preparation lingered. But when his friend and fellow YFC revivalist Charles Templeton urged him to come to Princeton Theological Seminary and lay a deeper academic foundation for his preaching, Graham balked. When they met on their travels, they fell into deep debates, with Templeton now armed with philosophy, anthropology and a willingness to read the Bible as metaphor. Graham found he couldn't muster the logical responses.

As Martin tells it, this led to a spiritual and intellectual turning point. "Chuck, look, I haven't a good enough mind to settle these questions," Graham finally declared. "The finest minds in the world have looked and come down on both sides." Graham concluded that "I don't have the time, the inclination or the set of mind to pursue them. I found that if I say 'The Bible says' and 'God says,' I get results. I have decided I'm not going to wrestle with these questions any longer."

Templeton charged him with committing intellectual suicide. But Graham came to believe doubt was a dangerous distraction from his calling. He decided the Bible was the one true Word in its entirety and never wavered. Looking back today, Graham says, "I had one great failure, and that was intellectual. I should have gone on to school. But I would talk to people about that, and they'd say, Oh no, go on with what you're doing, and let others do that. I do regret I didn't do enough reading, enough study, both formal and informal."

That does not mean he makes any apologies for his belief in the Bible as the literal Word of God, a conviction that confounds his critics. "I would never seek to solve the ethical problems of the 20th century by quoting a passage of Holy Scripture, and I read the Bible every day," says liberal Episcopal Bishop John Spong of Newark, New Jersey, who used to deliver newspapers to the Graham farm as a boy in North Carolina. "I wouldn't invest a book that was written between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 150 with that kind of moral authority." Graham, for his part, wouldn't think of doing otherwise.

His Biblical purity, however, did not protect him from conservative attacks. Over the years, strict Fundamentalists came to see Graham as a traitor for his willingness to work with everyone -- Catholics, Anglicans, even liberal modernists -- to bring the unchurched into the tent. "Fundamentalist is a grand and wonderful word," Graham says now, "but it got off track and into so many extreme positions." Their hostility pained him far more than the sneers of liberals. "I felt," Graham admits, "like my own brothers had turned against me."