Joe <[email protected]> wrote:
Evangelist rejects God!
“It’s simply not possible any longer to believe the
Biblical account of creation.”
When I first saw this headline, I couldn’t believe
what I was seeing. I read the article, then reread
it! I wanted to cry over the story! How could this
be so?!! As the years pass, many names and events
become forgotten and are replaced with those that
occupy headlines today. The name of Charles Templeton
is one that is unknown to many of my generation. A
sad story accompanies that name – a story I had never
heard until I read this article.
Charles Templeton was a man widely known in the 40s &
50s among Christians. He was an evangelist who was
even better known than Billy Graham. He spoke to
thousands, both in the USA and abroad, leading
hundreds of people to the Lord. Templeton’s ministry
was prominent, and in 1946, he was listed among those
“best used of God” by the National Association of
Evangelicals.
He was also the pastor of a rapidly growing church in
Toronto, which he had started with only his family and
a few friends. Templeton had also become one of three
vice-presidents of Youth For Christ Int’l., a new
organization in 1945. Newspapers and magazines
carried reports of his meetings informing readers that
he was winning 150 converts a night.
However, his popularity and success as an evangelist
apparently just veiled the doubts that began to arise
within him. The more he read, the more he found he
was beginning to question the essentials of the
Christian faith. His doubts began with the book of
Genesis. In his desire to pursue a more liberal
approach to his questions, he began studying at
Princeton Theological Seminary. In so doing, he said
to Billy Graham: ‘But, Billy, it’s simply not
possible any longer to believe, for instance, the
biblical account of creation. The world wasn’t created
over a period of days a few thousand years ago; it has
evolved over millions of years. It’s not a matter of
speculation; it’s demonstrable fact.’
The next several years of “ministry” continued his
spiritual decline. He finally gave it up altogether
in 1957. Since leaving the ministry, Templeton took
a prominent place in journalism and other media in
Toronto. His slippery slide into unbelief began when
he concluded that it was intellectual suicide to
accept as truth the literal teachings of the Bible.
Instead, he listened to physicists who say “it took
billions of years for the universe, our galaxy, our
solar system, and our world to evolve to its present
form”; to anthropologists who say that “our earlier
ancestors did not suddenly appear fully formed, but
were anthropoid creatures who lived on the earth
millions of years ago”; to geneticists who say “it is
nonsense to believe that the reason for all the crime,
poverty, suffering, and general wickedness in the
world is sin”; and to geologists who say “there is no
evidence at all of a worldwide flood as told in
Genesis”, etc.
Do you notice something interesting? His strong doubt
started when he began to doubt the Scriptures in
Genesis chapter 1, right at the beginning – the
creation account! And the slide is documented by
Templeton himself in his autobiography entitled:
FAREWELL TO GOD – My reasons for rejecting the
Christian faith, which was released in 1996.
Templeton refers to Bible stories as ‘fables’. The
growth of his unbelief spread to the very doctrine of
salvation itself. He states that the ‘entire
resurrection story is not credible’. He ridicules
Christians who reject “science” when it opposes
biblical teachings, and especially those who believe
that the only deliverance from the curse of sin and
eventual banishment to an eternal hell is to be “born
again”.