[An excerpt from The Making of a Model by R. Larry Scott, now available through Amazon in both paperback and eBook format].
The year was 1949, and two young evangelists were about to launch a crusade in Los Angeles, California. It was an endeavor that would have a historic and deeply personal impact on them and the church.
Charles Templeton, who had been preaching on alternating nights with his best friend Billy Graham, was in the throes of a spiritual crisis.
In an interview related to his book, The Case For Faith, Lee Strobel tells of a conversation he had with Templeton not long before Charles’ death in 2001.
“Was there one thing in particular that caused you to lose your faith in God?” I asked at the outset.
He thought for a moment, “It was a photograph in Life magazine,” he said finally.
“Really?” I said. “A photograph? How so?”
He narrowed his eyes a bit and looked off to the side, as if he were viewing the photo afresh and reliving the moment. “It was a picture of a black woman in Northern Africa,” he explained. “They were experiencing a devastating drought. And she was holding her dead baby in her arms and looking up to heaven with the most forlorn expression. I looked at it and I thought, ‘Is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring Creator when all this woman needed was rain?’”
It was a question that would have a devastating impact on Templeton’s faith in the Bible, and he made no secret of his feelings. As Graham recounts in his autobiography, Just As I Am, Templeton challenged him. “Billy,” he said, “you’re fifty years out of date. People no longer accept the Bible as being inspired the way you do. Your faith is too simple” (138). Billy Graham, who had enormous respect for his friend, could not dismiss Templeton’s argument out of hand. “If I was not exactly doubtful,” he recalled, “I was certainly disturbed” (p.138).
Things finally came to a head for Graham during a quiet walk in the San Bernardino mountains.
“Dropping to my knees there in the woods, I opened the Bible at random on a tree stump in front of me. I could not read it in the shadowy moonlight, so I had no idea what text lay before me. … [I]t was an altar where I could only stutter into prayer.
“The exact wording of my prayer is beyond recall, but it must have echoed my thoughts: ‘O God! There are many things in this book I do not understand. There are many problems with it for which I have no solution.’ … I was trying to be on the level with God, but something remained unspoken. At last the Holy Spirit freed me to say it. ‘Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by faith! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.’”
Templeton soon withdrew from the ministry, moved to Canada, and became a writer and commentator. His final published work, Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith, tells the story. For Graham, however, the Los Angeles crusade launched a ministry that was to enable hundreds of thousands of people to discover a new relationship with the God Templeton had rejected.
For more thoughts like these, follow my work in The Making of a Model, now available through Amazon.
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