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 floodas told in Genesis”, etc.

Do you notice something interesting? His downfall 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 cancer 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”.

Sad? You bet! But remember where it started – right at the beginning, in Genesis….where it usually does! By the way, where do you stand on the first chapters of Genesis? Are they fables to you? – or literal truth?