That he might not get the opportunity to press his query seemed never to occur to him. “I know beyond the shadow of a doubt,” he said, “that if I died at this moment, I would go straight to the presence of God.” Moreover, “I look forward to dying, because I know that I’ll be relieved from all the bondage of this body. And all the temptations and all the pressures of this life will be gone. What a glorious future we have in Christ.” Throughout his career, Graham has talked of his readiness to die with a kind of wistful serenity that has led some to suggest that he nursed a fairly transparent death wish. His associates chuckle at that hypothesis, noting that his supposed romance with death does not deter him from rushing off to the Mayo Clinic at the slightest sign of illness, and Graham himself acknowledges that when death actually stares him in the face he experiences quite normal reactions. In 1987, while returning home from Europe, a small bomb went off in the baggage compartment of the plane, causing a momentary fear of crashing. “I wouldn’t say I was afraid,” he recalled, “because I’m ready to go at any time. I’d say I was nervous. I thought to myself, ‘Am I afraid to die?’ and then I thought again that it’s instinctive to want to live. I mean, that’s something God gave us and if we don’t have that sense of self-preservation we would all die. We might go out and commit suicide. But I am not afraid of death.” Still, he admitted, “I’m not looking forward to the dying process We’re all afraid of the unknown. We’re not quite certain of how it’s going to be. I’m not afraid of being dead. I’m afraid of the period of dying, catching fire or suffering before death. I hope I don’t have to go through that. But I may. I’m ready.”
Graham’s readiness to die stemmed in large measure from his firm conviction that good as this life has been to him, it cannot compare with an eternity in heaven, which he believed to be an actual physical place, though not necessarily in our particular solar system. “Some people have speculated that it’s the North Star,” he once volunteered, “but this is all speculative.” Next to basking in the presence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit throughout eternity, the greatest joy of all will come from being united with the great saints of all ages and reunited with one’s own family and friends. Among those Graham looked forward to visiting is Elvis Presley. “I never met him,” he said, “but I believe I will see him in heaven, because Elvis was very deeply religious, especially in the last two or three years [of his life].”
As a younger man, Graham was prone to blaming a roaring lion’s share of the world’s suffering on the active agency of Satan and his cohort of demons. With the passage of time and the accumulation of experience, he resorted to such dualistic explanations less often. “Suffering is simply a fact,” he wrote in 1983. Christians should remember that they are not exempted from suffering, and should keep in mind as well that “when one bears suffering faithfully, God is glorified and honored.” He admitted he had no answer to why some evangelists carry scars from being beaten and burned for Christ’s sake, while his life had been free from physical persecution, or why “some people appear to glide effortlessly through life while others seem constantly to be in the throes of pain and sorrow.” In 1962 he speculated that God may have used a French air disaster that killed 130 people, including a large delegation from Atlanta, Georgia, as a tool to move many others to be converted. In 1988 when a Pan Am crash in Scotland took the lives of dozens of students from Syracuse University, where he was holding a crusade, he avoided any suggestion that God was killing young people to boost conversion rates. Asked how he would minister to the parents of the dead young people, he said, in a voice filled with compassion, “I would put my arms around them and weep with them, and quote Scripture. I would try to tell them there is hope for those who put their trust in God.” As for trying to discern the will of God in human suffering, he resorted humbly to citing a charming image favored by Evangelical saint Corrie Ten Boom: “Picture a piece of embroidery placed between you and God, with the right side up toward God. Man sees the loose, frayed ends; but God sees the pattern.”
Just as Graham believed that some, though not all, evil could be laid at Satan’s hooves, so he maintained that Christians often enjoy the beneficent ministration of angels, whom he dubbed “God’s Secret Agents.” In Angels, a 1975 book that sold over two million copies, he asserted that while everything in the book was supported in Scripture, he also believed in angels “because I have sensed their presence in my life on special occasions.” Asserting that “some biblical scholars believe that angels can be numbered potentially in the millions,” he described them as ageless and immortal, free of sickness, and able “to move instantaneously and with unlimited speed from place to place,” though only some of them have wings. Nothing indicates they have to eat to stay alive, and the Bible gives no hint that they are concerned with sex, an attribute that “may indicate that angels enjoy relationships that are far more thrilling and exciting than sex.” The possibility that being sexless may be one of the drawbacks of angelhood—perhaps the short end of a trade for immortality or ubiquity—seems not to have occurred to him. He did, however, acknowledge that humans had some advantages over angels. No angel, for example, can pastor a church, serve as an evangelist, or counsel inquirers at a crusade. Still, because they possess detailed knowledge of earthly affairs, they can participate in many mundane activities. Graham thought it at least plausible, for example, that angels had piloted fighter planes for dead men during the battle for Britain in World War II, though he acknowledged that this was a hypothesis that “we cannot finally prove.”
As a young man, Graham had been deeply impressed with dispensationalist premillennialism and its detailed scenarios of the course human history was taking. With exposure to alternative theological views, and the repeated experience of seeing the precise predictions of dispensationalist teachers go unfulfilled, he modified his personal eschatological beliefs and toned down his public statements about the Second Coming even further. “I used to be able to preach to an audience and sort of outline exactly what the events would be that would precede the Second Coming of Christ,” he mused. “I don’t do that anymore. I still hold some views on it, but I don’t make them public. I think there is something to dispensationalist teaching, but I just can’t accept the way some dispensationalists apply biblical prophecy to current newspaper headlines. I don’t believe, for example, that the Common Market is the organization of the beast, as some of them say.” Though no longer willing to predict the timing of the rapture—“I don’t think anyone knows when Christ is coming back, and Jesus warned us not to speculate about dates. It could be tonight. It could be a million years from now. I don’t know”—he had lost none of his confidence that Jesus is indeed coming again, probably sooner rather than later, and that the broad outlines of premillennial teaching are reasonably trustworthy. He clearly believes that a time will come when “a counterfeit world system or ruler will establish a false Utopia for an extremely short time. The economic and political problems of the world will seem to be solved. But after a brief rule the whole thing will come apart. . . . This massive upheaval will be the world’s last war—the battle of Armageddon.” This climactic battle will be followed by Christ’s millennial reign, during which “political confusion will be turned to order and harmony, social injustices will be abolished, and moral corruption will be replaced by integrity. For the first time in history the whole world will know what it is like to live in a society governed by God’s principles. And Satan’s influence will not be present to hinder world progress toward peace, unity, equality, and justice. Man’s dream for global harmony will be realized!”
Like other premillennialists, Graham saw such phenomena as the AIDS plague, continuing and apparently irresolvable conflict in the Middle East, the decline in private and public morality, the increase in lawlessness, the proliferation of wars, and the rise of religious cults as other signs that the end is near. He did not follow the lead of some who insisted the rapture would come in less than forty years after the establishment of the
nation of Israel in 1948 but expressed his belief that “there is a special place for Israel in God’s plan. I think it is significant that they are a nation and are in the land that God promised them. I think it is one of the signs that we are told to look for in connection with the coming again of the Lord.” On several occasions he has even ventured that his own worldwide ministry, in person and on radio and television, may be part of the universal evangelization process premillennialists believe will occur just prior to the Second Coming. “With all the media we have,” he told an international gathering of evangelists in 1986, “we can reach the world quickly and bring back the King. I believe we could be living in the last period of history. I hear the Four Horsemen. They are on the way!”
One notable change in Graham’s theology, pressed on him by external developments, was his greater acceptance of charismatic phenomena. “I believe God has used the charismatic movement throughout the world to wake up a lot of communities,” he observed. “It fits in with the temperaments of many cultures. I think it has been raised up by the Lord. But I have never spoken in tongues. I know many godly people who have, but who never talk about it except privately, and it has brought great change in their lives.” Did he yearn for such gifts himself? “I have asked God to give me all he wants me to have, but I have never been given tongues. Oral Roberts once told me that if I ever spoke in tongues, not to tell anybody. I believe it is one of the gifts of the Spirit, but our Lord never mentioned it. Paul dealt with it in only one book, and that was with a troublesome church [at Corinth]. It was a carnal church, and the gift of tongues was giving a lot of trouble. At certain periods of history, I think it has been a gift of the Holy Spirit, but it is easily counterfeited and we have a tremendous amount of false speaking in tongues today. I have never asked for that gift. Paul said it was the least of all the gifts. The greatest of all the gifts is love.”
Graham’s assessment of divine healing follows a similar pattern. He professed not to doubt that miraculous healing can occur but warned that one must exercise “spiritual discernment” to avoid being duped by the “many frauds and charlatans” involved in faith healing. He also conceded the possibility that some Christians might have a genuine gift of prophecy but warned that it should be heeded only when “it does not involve new revelation” that contradicts “the written Word of God” He was even less tolerant of the popular charismatic teaching that God wants Christians to be wealthy, particularly those Christians who are willing to make generous contributions to the television preachers who espouse this teaching. Though the doctrine is taught by some of the most popular television ministers—Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Kenneth Copeland, and, before his fall, Jim Bakker—Graham abandoned his usual conciliatory attitude when discussing this teaching. “I don’t like it at all,” he snapped. “I think it is contrary to Scripture. God promised wealth to certain people, like Abraham and other great men of the Old Testament. But in the New Testament, we are told to deny ourselves.” He then rolled into a monologue that revealed something of his own struggle with the ease and prosperity of his own life. “In our culture,” he said, “it is hard to deny yourself. When we came up here, we thought we were denying ourselves, with this twelve-dollar-an-acre property and two log cabins. But we added on as the children came, and today it’s a big, fine house. Ruth and I talk quite often about what standard we should live by. When I go to places like India and Bangladesh and Africa, it bothers me no end that I have three good meals a day. We have never been tempted along the lines of money so much, but we do have money. We have too much. What do you do? I guess it’s individual conscience in our culture. But I think that teaching is heresy. I just don’t agree with it at all.”
Those who acknowledge that Billy Graham was no theological sophisticate recognize that his fame did not rest on his ability to spin theological webs or split fine hairs of doctrine, and even members of his own team, who heard him preach hundreds, even thousands, of times, do not regard him as a remarkably gifted pulpiteer. Without being prodded, his closest associates and most ardent admirers volunteer rather readily that “Billy’s sermons are quite ordinary, even sub-ordinary,” or that “he’d be the first one to tell you there are lots better preachers.” Over the years Graham’s preaching changed somewhat in both content and delivery. Though he still preached regularly on John 3:16 and Belshazzar and the Second Coming, his later sermons were much shorter and less densely packed than in earlier years. He also used a much calmer and quieter style, a change fostered not only by age but by the demands of television. He could still summon the old fire on occasion, but as early as the 1970s, his preaching became much more avuncular, befitting his passage from young firebrand to senior statesman. The later preaching still followed the pattern of attacking the complacency of his audience by confronting them with their fears and discontents, but the focus had shifted noticeably. The flames of hell and nuclear holocaust that caused audiences to sweat in terror from the 1940s well into the 1960s gradually gave way to the chillier discomforts of loneliness, emptiness, guilt, and the fear of death, and to such high-profile threats to society as drugs and AIDS. Graham freely acknowledged his use of fear as a motivator for conversion, but the anger that critics had professed to see in his early preaching seemed mostly absent. Certainly, Graham hoped it was gone. “We need to preach with compassion,” he told a group of aspiring evangelists. “People should sense that you love them, that you are interested in them. Even when you preach about hell, you need to convey that both the author [God] and the messenger speak from a broken heart.”
It would be gratifying to report that Graham’s use of jokes and humor had taken on a finer and subtler tone as well, but such was not the case. Most of the jokes in his relatively small stockpile were the very same ones he had been using for thirty years, and age had not sharpened their effect. Aides said they had often advised him to refresh his store of anecdotes or, perhaps even better, to quit trying to be a humorist, but their pleas were outweighed by the unfailing willingness of his audiences to laugh at even the hoariest of his pocketful of chestnuts. They also failed in efforts to get him to purge his sermons of worn-out illustrations and resigned themselves to finding them a source of some amusement. In the spring of 1986, he quoted the popular song, “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” and said, “There’s a movie out, And God Created Woman, starring Brigitte Bardot,” as if they were parts of current popular culture rather than artifacts of earlier decades. In the same crusade, in a less anachronistic but even more glaring example of obliviousness, he told a long story that he claimed had happened just a few weeks earlier. With no apparent sense that the account might have a familiar ring to it, he told, in full detail, the story of a newly released prisoner who eagerly returned home, to be welcomed by a plethora of yellow ribbons tied around an old oak tree. A few people applauded as if hearing the story for the first time, but others indicated by quizzical expressions that at least the broad outlines of the story seemed vaguely familiar. When a team member was asked the next morning if he thought that story might serve well as a theme for a movie, or perhaps a popular song, he broke into laughter and said, “Oh, you caught a mild version. Sometimes he has rags and dish towels and sheets hanging from telephone poles and skyscrapers.”
One might easily assume that such oddities reflect a habit of reusing old sermons without feeling any impulse to update them, but that is apparently not the case. Weeks before every crusade, Graham began to fret about what he would preach and to hound staff members to help him come up with new material, and one of his secretary’s primary tasks in the final days before the opening service was to type new sermon manuscripts on a large-print typewriter. Wisely, Graham made no attempt to deny that he reused much old material. Waving his hand at a row of black notebooks in the small office in his home, he said, “Those are sermons I have preached in the last fifteen years. The old ones are down at the office. Some of those are better than the ones I’ve preached more recently. What I’ll do is take and rework those
.” Reworking tried-and-true sermons—a perfectly honorable practice among preachers—consists largely in sparking them up with new factual data, new references to current events, and new illustrations. And well before a crusade began, aides prepared briefing documents that he could draw on to illustrate his sermons as well as answer questions from the press. Associate Evangelist John Wesley White for a long time was Graham’s primary sermon illustrator. White, who held a doctorate from Oxford, viewed his work modestly. “I’m often cast as an intellectual,” he said, “which I’m not. I’m not reading heavy philosophical literature. I’m reading Time, Newsweek, USA Today, the Toronto Star, and that kind of thing. I contribute substantiating quotes, convincing statistics, colorful little—I hesitate to say this—National Inquirer ham-and-eggsy things. I’d like to think they’re true.” Ed Plowman observed that “like a lot of public speakers, Billy tends to pull usable quotes from various sources, and sometimes these are taken out of context. More and more these days, he speaks from a text, and John Akers and others go over it with him to make sure of the wording and the accuracy, particularly on historical and political matters. When he departs from the text, he sometimes gets into trouble.”
Graham’s reliance on the work of others, and the concomitant superficial acquaintance with the material he cited, betrayed itself in mispronunciations, as when he spoke of “the great Jewish scholar, Maiodes,” or “the famous writer, Eli Weasel,” and in such superfluities as identifying Dostoevski as “the greatest novelist in the Soviet Union,” then adding, “He was. He’s dead now.” Some of Graham’s illustrative imports were jarringly imprecise, as when he said, “A famous man committed suicide the other day,” or “A psychologist in Chicago said the other day . . .” or “A sociologist at Oxford said last year . . .” or “That’s like the girl at Harvard who was searching for something and didn’t know what it was—and it was written up in Time magazine.” At other times the ostensible precision was itself rather astonishing. Without citing supporting documentation, he might announce that “over four hundred people in Los Angeles claim to be Jesus Christ” or reveal that “84 percent of the modern novel is illicit, illegal, or immoral.” At a service in Columbia, he repeated his familiar claim that sexual chastity is virtually impossible without supernatural assistance, then noted that this is especially the case for a man, whose sex drive “is six times greater than in a woman.” At that revelation, a young woman handling press relations for the crusade dropped her head on the table and mumbled in despair, “Where did he get that? How could anybody measure that? Ohhhhhh.” Other team members apparently suffered a similar reaction. At breakfast the next morning, when John Wesley White was asked if he would comment on something Graham had said the evening before, he did not require further elaboration. “That did not come from me,” he quickly interjected. “Kathleen [his wife] and I were sitting right behind a row of girls and in front of them was a bunch of Army recruits. I don’t think they had had a dosage of saltpeter that day. There was a fascinating reaction on their faces when Billy said that. I had gone through that sermon and given him a lot of material, and Kathleen turned to me and said, ‘Did you give him that?’ I said, ‘No, I did not!’ I believe if you asked T.W., he would say right quickly, ‘Didn’t get it from me.’ You would have some trouble getting anyone to own up to that one.”
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