At 10:40 AM 3/11/00 -0600, Wendee Holtcamp wrote:
Isn't Charles Templeton the one who started the Templeton
>Foundation? Isn't that a spiritual organization? In that case he believes he
>is still following God perhaps, but is deluded by the father of lies?
Charles Templeton was an evangelist, a good friend of Billy Graham, with
whom he alternated as a preacher at Youth for Christ Rallies in the 40's.
Both of them were fundamentalists. But Templeton began to study the
intellectual side of the coin. He left the preaching circuit to go to
Seminary to try to solve the intellectual issues begging Graham to join
him. Graham refused and remained a preacher. Today Templeton is little
known except among afficionados of those who leave Christianity like me.
Templeton hosted a TV program "look up and LIve" from 1952-1955.Toward the
end of 1955,Templeton spoke at Yale and met with various students. One of
them was the atheist captain of the debate team. THe two of them debated
Christianity. Here is what the account says:"The two of them debated the
truth of Christianity alone in a borrowed office. At the end neither had
convinced the other. The student conceded, however, that Templeton had made
'a hell of a good case.'
"Templeton's first reaction was elation, but he realized that he too had a
concession to make--his arguments no longer convinced himself. 'In the heat
of discussion I believed them, but, alone, I knew that I had been
role-playing.'
. . ."Not long after his debate with the Yale student, Templteon quit the
television program and 'gave up the ministry.'
"About his irrevocable decision to leave the ministry Templeton states,
'There was no real choice. I could stay in the ministry, paper over my
doubts and daily live a lie, or I could make a break. I packed my few
possessions in a rented trailer and started on the road home to Toronto."
Charles Templeton,"Inside Evangelism" in Ed Babinski, Leaving the Fold,
(Prometheus Press, 1995), p.290-291
The next story in BAbinski's book is about Farrell Till, a man I have
debated on the inerrancy list. He is one tough debater and advocate for
atheism. He too was a preacher. He had been a missionary overseas,
memorized the Gospel of John, and stauchly defended the Bible. His story say:
"During this period of my life, however, something was happening. I had
begun to see that discrepancies and inconsistencies were in other books of
the Bible, besides the synoptic Gospels, ony now I was away from the
carefully orchestrated environment of Bible-college campuses where
professors could explain away the problems. In fact, I was able for the
first time to see that the 'explanations' I had accepted before were not
really explanations but merely unlikely conjecturs. I found myself on an
irreversible trajectory toward agnosticism.
...
"I thought at first that I could find logical explanations for the
apparent discrepancies int he Bible, because they were surely just
'apparent' discrepancies. The Bible was, after all, the verbally inspired
word of God, so if I had found problems in it, there had to be solutions
to them.
"The longer I studied the Bible critically, however, the more I realized
that I would never find solutions to the problems I had identified, because
there were no solutions. Teh Bible was not the verbally inspired, inerrant
word of God; it was just a collection of contradictory, discrepant books
that had been written by superstitious ethnocentrics who thought that the
hand of God was directing the destiny of the Hebrew people." FArrel Till,
"From Preacher to Skeptic," in Ed Babinski, Leaving the Fold, (Prometheus
Press, 1995), p.294.
Claiming, as some do, that the Bible must be believed as being God's word,
when the accounts it gives don't match reality would not have been enough
to salvage Farrell's belief system. Once again, this is why this area is so
important. I know you aren't saying this Wendee, but those who think that
this is an unimportant disputation, simply haven't looked around at those
who leave the faith because of the intellectual problems. And those like
the YOung-earthers, who give a make-believe science as the explanation only
make matters worse. That being said, I would still say that the only way
out is some form of concordism.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 11 2000 - 15:40:35 EST