Scriptures selfattesting authority question doctrine truthfulness Scriptures

Pondering Pascal’s Wager 175
in 1949 is a good example. In 1948, Graham’s friend Charles Templeton
was having doubts about the integrity of the Scriptures. He left his
pastorate in Toronto and entered Princeton Seminary. Billy commended
Templeton and said that if he had chosen Oxford, he would have gone
with him. Billy “hankered for post graduate study.” 4 And doubts were
brewing in his own mind, though he felt he and Templeton were moving
in different directions—Templeton toward bolstering his doubts,
Graham toward resolving them.
Billy’s doubts were not in a vacuum. He had seen God’s mighty hand
through Scripture. He knew that “when he took the Bible as God’s
Word and used it, his preaching had power. Already he had seen men
and women weighted by cares and morally bankrupt made alive and
radiant.” 5 In subsequent years he would say, “When I preach the Bible
straight—no questions, no doubts, no hesitations—then God gives me
a power that’s beyond me. When I say, ‘The Bible says,’ God gives me
this incredible power. It’s something I don’t completely understand. . . .
When I pick up the Bible, I feel as though I have a rapier in my hands.” 6
But in 1949, the battle raged in his soul. In the words of his biographer,
John Pollock,
He must soon decide once and for all either to spend his life studying
whether or not God had spoken, or to spend it as God’s ambassador,
bringing a message which he might not fully comprehend in
all details until after death. Must an intellectually honest man know
everything about the Bible’s origins before he could use it? Were
theological professors the only ones qualified to speak of religion,
or might a simple American, or an ignorant jungle villager, or even
a child, lead another to Christ? 7
The crisis came to a head in August 1949 at Forest Home retreat
center near San Bernardino, California:
Billy was deeply disturbed. . . . After supper, instead of attending
evening service, he retired to his log cabin and read again the Bible
passage concerning its authority. . . . He meditated on the attitude
4
John Pollock, Billy Graham: The Authorized Biography (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1966), 50.
5
Ibid., 51.
6
http://​www​.ccel​.us​/billy​.ch3.html; accessed March 5, 2015.
7
Pollock, Billy Graham, 52.