June 29, 1998
CONTRADICTIONS CHALLENGE FAITH
MCRAE'S WORLD
By EARL MCRAE -- Ottawa Sun
If, as Billy Graham says, we are to believe in God on faith alone, I think God and Billy would accept hot and honest debate as to His existence.
Which brings me to Charles Templeton.
Charles Templeton, the well-known Canadian author and broadcaster, who back in the 1940s and '50s was an associate of Billy Graham's and, for a time, the world's most popular and compelling Christian evangelist, even topping Graham.
Until 1957 when Templeton decided what he and Graham were preaching and teaching was converting the naive through biblical sham; that the Good Book was based on primitive fears and myths and not to be taken literally as Billy takes it.
That said, Charles Templeton, today, doesn't deny there is a "God." He's not, he says, an atheist, arrogantly dismissing the existence of God outright. He is, he says, an agnostic. The difference being, "I cannot know." In other words, there might be, but it can never be known for sure.
Templeton, however, is certain that what the Bible and Billy Graham tell us about God and His all-powerful, omniscient morality is contradictory nonsense; and neither does Jesus escape Templeton's attacks in the former evangelist's 1996 book Farewell To God.
Templeton writes about Graham: "He has given up the life of unrestricted thought. I occasionally watch Billy in his televised campaigns. Forty years after our working together he is saying the same things, using the same phrases, following the same pattern. When he gives the invitation to come forward, the sequence, even the words, are the same. I turn off the set and am sometimes overtaken by sadness.
"I think Billy is what he has to be. I disagree with him at almost every point in his views on God and Christianity and think that much of what he says in the pulpit is puerile, archaic nonsense. But, there is no feigning in Billy Graham: He believes what he believes with an invincible innocence. He is the only mass-evangelist I would trust. And I miss him."
Templeton points out the biblical contradictions on how God created heaven and earth, and what he says is the patent, common-sense-defying silliness of Adam and Eve, Moses and the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, Noah and his ark, on and on.
If God, as Billy teaches and Christians believe, is a God of compassion and love, how does Graham explain God's own sudden conversion in that the God in the Old Testament was one mean, wrathful, judgmental, racist deity?
It was Jesus who came along and said, hey, God is a Good Guy, not a narrow-minded, vindictive, punishing God; and if that is so, is the Old Testament a great, big dupe? The God in the Old Testament to be simply written off, dismissed?
If Jesus was right, if God did have a change of character, good for God because the Yahweh (God) who -- in His pressure campaign to get the Pharaoh to release the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, slaughtered all the first-born children in Egypt -- was, I'd say, an unconscionable, prejudiced, cruel, homicidal maniac.
Templeton blasts the "temerity" of the Christian belief that its God is the only God that matters out of the many "gods" believed in and worshipped by different world religions, referring to the apostle Paul who said: "There is no other name under heaven, given among men, by which you may be saved; for there is salvation in no other."
And, for all his humanity-encompassing "Godliness" -- the God who "so loved the world," -- Jesus, says Templeton, was parochial and racially biased. His 12 apostles were all Jews, his message was directed to only Jews, and Templeton quotes Jesus: "Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans; but go rather to the lost sheep of the House of Israel and preach as you go saying: 'The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' "
Honest confusions seeking clarities that surely God, Jesus, and Billy Graham accept and appreciate as coming not necessarily from infidels, but merely the perplexed. Such as the man on my voice mail yesterday: "If God and God alone in all his power and wisdom created the universe -- who then created Satan? And, why?"