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Billy Graham

Billy Graham (born November 7, 1918, Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.—died February 21, 2018, Montreat, North Carolina), American evangelist whose large-scale preaching missions, known as crusades, and friendship with numerous U.S. presidents brought him to international prominence. Conversion and early career The son of a prosperous dairy farmer, Billy Graham grew up in rural North Carolina. In 1934, while attending a revival meeting led by the evangelist Mordecai Ham, he underwent a religious experience and professed his “decision for Christ.” In 1936 he left his father’s dairy farm to attend Bob Jones College (now Bob Jones University), then located in Cleveland, Tennessee, but stayed for only a semester because of the extreme fundamentalism of the institution. He transferred to Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College), near Tampa, graduated in 1940, and was ordained a minister by the Southern Baptist Convention. Convinced that his education was deficient, however, Graham enrolled at Wheaton College in Illinois. While at Wheaton, he met and married (1943) Ruth Bell, daughter of L. Nelson Bell, a missionary to China. By the time Graham graduated from Wheaton in 1943, he had developed the preaching style for which he would become famous—a simple, direct message of sin and salvation that he delivered energetically and without condescension. “Sincerity,” he observed many years later, “is the biggest part of selling anything, including the Christian plan of salvation.” After a brief and undistinguished stint as pastor of Western Springs Baptist Church in the western suburbs of Chicago, Graham decided to become an itinerant evangelist. He joined the staff of a new organization called Youth for Christ in 1945 and in 1947 served as president of Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Evangelism Graham’s emergence as an evangelist came at a propitious moment for 20th-century Protestants. Protestantism in the United States was deeply divided as a result of controversies in the 1920s between fundamentalism and modernism (a movement that applied scholarly methods of textual and historical criticism to the study of the Bible). The public image of fundamentalists was damaged by the Scopes Trial of 1925, which concerned the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools in Tennessee; in his writings about the trial, the journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken successfully portrayed all fundamentalists as uneducated country bumpkins. In response to these controversies, most fundamentalists withdrew from the established Protestant denominations, which they regarded as hopelessly liberal, and retreated from the larger society, which they viewed as both corrupt and corrupting. Although Graham remained theologically conservative, he refused to be sectarian like other fundamentalists. Seeking to dissociate himself from the image of the stodgy fundamentalist preacher, he seized on the opportunity presented by new media technologies, especially radio and television, to spread the message of the gospel. In the late 1940s Graham’s fellow evangelist in Youth for Christ, Charles Templeton, challenged Graham to attend seminary with him so that both preachers could shore up their theological knowledge. Graham considered the possibility at length, but in 1949, while on a spiritual retreat in the San Bernardino Mountains of southern California, he decided to set aside his intellectual doubts about Christianity and simply “preach the gospel.” After his retreat, Graham began preaching in Los Angeles, where his crusade brought him national attention. He acquired this new fame in no small measure because newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, impressed with the young evangelist’s preaching and anticommunist rhetoric, instructed his papers to “puff Graham.” The huge circus tent in which Graham preached, as well as his own self-promotion, lured thousands of curious visitors—including Hollywood movie stars and gangsters—to what the press dubbed the “canvas cathedral” at the corner of Washington and Hill streets. From Los Angeles, Graham undertook evangelistic crusades around the country and the world, eventually earning international renown. Despite his successes, Graham faced criticism from both liberals and conservatives. In New York City in 1954 he was received warmly by students at Union Theological Seminary, a bastion of liberal Protestantism; nevertheless, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor at Union and one of the leading Protestant thinkers of the 20th century, had little patience for Graham’s simplistic preaching. On the other end of the theological spectrum, fundamentalists such as Bob Jones, Jr., Carl McIntire, and Jack Wyrtzen never forgave Graham for cooperating with the Ministerial Alliance, which included mainline Protestant clergy, in the planning and execution of Graham’s storied 16-week crusade at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1957. Such cooperation, however, was part of Graham’s deliberate strategy to distance himself from the starchy conservatism and separatism of American fundamentalists. His entire career, in fact, was marked by an irenic spirit. Graham, by his own account, enjoyed close relationships with several American presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush. (Although Graham met with Harry Truman in the Oval Office, the president was not impressed with him.) Despite claiming to be apolitical, Graham became politically close to Richard Nixon, whom he had befriended when Nixon was Eisenhower’s vice president. During the 1960 presidential campaign, in which Nixon was the Republican nominee, Graham met in Montreaux, Switzerland, with Norman Vincent Peale and other Protestant leaders to devise a strategy to derail the campaign of John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, in order to secure Nixon’s election and prevent a Roman Catholic from becoming president. Although Graham later mended relations with Kennedy, Nixon remained his favourite politician; indeed, Graham all but endorsed Nixon’s reelection effort in 1972 against George McGovern. As Nixon’s presidency unraveled amid charges of criminal misconduct in the Watergate scandal, Graham reviewed transcripts of Oval Office tape recordings subpoenaed by Watergate investigators and professed to be physically sickened by his friend’s use of foul language. Legacy of Billy Graham Graham’s popular appeal was the result of his extraordinary charisma, his forceful preaching, and his simple, homespun message: anyone who repents of sins and accepts Jesus Christ will be saved. Behind that message, however, stood a sophisticated organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, incorporated in 1950, which performed extensive advance work in the form of favourable media coverage, cooperation with political leaders, and coordination with local churches and provided a follow-up program for new converts. The organization also distributed a radio program, Hour of Decision, a syndicated newspaper column, “My Answer,” and a magazine, Decision. Although Graham pioneered the use of television for religious purposes, he always shied away from the label “televangelist.” During the 1980s, when other television preachers were embroiled in sensational scandals, Graham remained above the fray, and throughout a career that spanned more than half a century few people questioned his integrity. In 1996 Graham and his wife received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest civilian award bestowed by the United States, and in 2001 he was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). Graham concluded his public career with a crusade in Queens, New York, in June 2005. Graham claimed to have preached in person to more people than anyone else in history, an assertion that few would challenge. His evangelical crusades around the world, his television appearances and radio broadcasts, his friendships with presidents, and his unofficial role as spokesman for America’s evangelicals made him one of the most recognized religious figures of the 20th century.

The Hill We All Must Die On

The doctrine of penal substitution is under attack today — and that’s an understatement. From voices outside of evangelical theology to those within, the historic Reformation view of the cross is claimed to be a “modern” invention from the cultural West. Others criticize the doctrine as sanctioning violence, privileging divine retributive justice over God’s love, condoning a form of divine child abuse, reducing Scripture’s polychrome presentation of the cross to a lifeless monochrome, being too “legal” in orientation, and so on. All of these charges are not new. All of them have been argued since the end of the 16th century, and all of them are false. Yet such charges reflect the corrosive effects of false ideas on theology and a failure to account for how the Bible, on its own terms, interprets the cross. Given the limitations of this article, I cannot fully respond to these charges. Instead, I will briefly state four truths that unpack the biblical-theological rationale of penal substitution. In so doing, my goal is to explain why penal substitution should be embraced as God’s good news for sinners. Four Questions to Get Right It is only in viewing Christ as our penal substitute that we truly understand the depth of God’s holy love for us, the horrendous nature of our sin before God, and the glory of our substitute — Jesus Christ our Lord — whose obedient life and penal death achieved our right standing before God and the full forgiveness of our sins. Let us now turn to these truths that are crucial to affirm and that lead us to glory in our Lord Jesus Christ as our penal substitute. 1. Who Is God? First, we must get right who God is as our triune Creator-Covenant Lord. Mark it well: debates over the nature of the atonement are first and foremost doctrine of God debates. If our view of God is sub-biblical, we will never get the cross right. From the opening verses of Scripture, God is presented as eternal, a se (life from himself), holy love, righteous, and good — the triune God who is complete in himself and who needs nothing from us (Genesis 1–2; Psalm 50:12–14; Isaiah 6:1–3; Acts 17:24–25; Revelation 4:8–11). One crucial implication of this description is that God, in his very nature, is the moral standard of the universe. This is why we must not think of God’s law as something external to him that he may relax at will. Instead, the triune God of Scripture is the law; his will and nature determine what is right and wrong. This view of God is often forgotten in today’s discussion of the atonement. Following the “New Perspective on Paul,” some argue that God’s justice/righteousness is only “God’s covenant faithfulness,” that is, God remaining true to his promises. No doubt this is true. However, what this view fails to see is that “righteousness-justice-holiness” is first tied to God’s nature as God. That is why, in light of sin, God, who is the law, cannot overlook our sin. God’s holy justice demands that he not only punish all sin, but also, if he graciously chooses to justify the ungodly (Romans 4:5), he must do so by fully satisfying his own righteous, holy moral demand. Thus, given our sin and God’s gracious choice to redeem us, the question that emerges across redemptive history is this: How will God demonstrate his holy justice and covenant love and remain true to himself? The answer is only found in the Father’s gift of his Son, Jesus’s obedient life and substitutionary death, that results in our justification before God in Christ (Romans 3:21–26). 2. Who Is Man? Second, we must get right who humans are as God’s image-sons created to be in covenant relationship with God. Specifically, we must grasp who Adam is, not only as a historic person, but also as the covenant representative/head of the human race (Romans 5:12–21; 1 Corinthians 15:21–22). Why is this significant? Because in creation, our triune Creator-Covenant God sets the conditions of the covenant and rightly demands from Adam (and all of us) total trust, love, and obedience — a truth reflected in God’s first command. But the flip side is also true: If there is covenant disobedience, given who God is, there is also his holy judgment against our sin that results in the penalty of physical and spiritual death (Genesis 2:15–17; cf. Romans 6:23). 3. How Can God Justify Sinners? Third, we must get right the serious problem of our sin before God. Sadly, Adam did not love God with full covenant devotion. Instead, he disobeyed God, thus bringing sin, death, and God’s curse into the world. In the Bible’s storyline, Adam’s sin changes everything! From Genesis 3 forward, “in Adam,” the entire human race becomes guilty, corrupted, condemned, and under the judicial sentence of death (Genesis 3; Romans 5:12–21; Ephesians 2:1–3). If God is going to redeem, which he has graciously promised to do (Genesis 3:15), how is he going to do it? Remember, given who God is in all of his moral perfection, and given that he is the standard of holy justice who will not deny himself, how will God declare sinners justified before him apart from the full satisfaction of his moral demand? God must punish sin and execute perfect justice because he is holy, just, and good. He cannot overlook our sin nor relax the demands of his justice, and in truth, thankfully so! But to justify us, our sin must be fully atoned. How, then, can God punish our sin, satisfy his own righteous demand, and justify sinners? Add to this point: To undo, reverse, and pay for Adam’s sin, we need someone who will come from the human race and identify with us (Genesis 3:15), render our required covenantal obedience, and pay the penalty for our sin. We need someone who will become our covenant representative and substitute, and by his obedient life and penal death secure our justification before God. And wonder of wonders, Scripture gloriously announces that there is one man — and only one — who can do this for us, namely our Lord Jesus Christ (Hebrews 2:5–18). 4. Who Is Jesus? Fourth, we must get right who Jesus is, what he does for us, and that he alone can redeem, reconcile, and justify us before God. Who is the Jesus of the Bible? In short, he is God the Son incarnate, the second person of the triune Godhead. He is no abused child or some third-party individual who stands independent of God. We cannot think of his atoning work apart from thinking of the entire triune God accomplishing our salvation. Furthermore, as the eternal Son, eternally loved of his Father and the Spirit, in God’s plan, he voluntarily took on the role of becoming our Redeemer. And in his incarnation, he identified with us in order to represent us before God (Hebrews 5:1). In his obedient human life, Jesus, as the Mediator of the new covenant, obeyed for us as our legal covenant representative. In his obedient death, Jesus, as the divine Son, satisfied his own righteous demand against us by bearing the penalty of our sin as our substitute (Romans 5:18–19; Philippians 2:6–11; Hebrews 5:1–10). And in doing all of this, the Father’s love was revealed in Jesus’s penal substitution because of who Jesus is as the Son incarnate, the Last Adam, and the only Mediator of God’s people (Romans 5:8–11). Don’t Get Bored with the Gospel The truth of the matter is this: penal substitution is not a view to be replaced by something “better” or dismissed as a relic of the past. There is no greater news than this: Christ Jesus, as the divine Son incarnate, perfectly meets our need before God by his obedient life and substitutionary death. In Christ the triune love of God is gloriously revealed because in Christ we receive the gift of righteousness which is now ours by faith in him. In union with his people, Christ, as our new covenant head, obeys in our place, dies our death, and satisfies divine justice, which is evidenced in his glorious resurrection. As a result, by faith alone, in Christ alone, his righteousness is ours — now and forever (Romans 8:1; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 3:13). By faith-union in Christ, we stand complete: justified before God by the forgiveness of our sins and clothed in his righteousness (Romans 4:1–8; 5:1–2). Following the Bible’s teaching on this matter, may we learn anew to say with Paul, “For I decided to know nothing . . . except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15). Article by Stephen Wellum