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CURRENTLY IN CULTURE
On the passing of Charles Templeton

John Harris

The recent passing of former evangelist Charles Templeton merits some reflection. During the 1950s, he emerged as a towering leader in the church. Like Saul, Israel’s first king, his natural gifts appeared to make him “a head taller” than the rest of humanity: a charismatic personal presence, intelligence, a resonant baritone voice and a pleasing dramatic flair which could summon humour, piety or any other emotion from a crowd on demand. His gifts propelled him into the spotlight as one of the two most successful evangelists of that era (along with Billy Graham), regularly preaching to crusades with ever increasing record attendances. He received a flood of often positive media publicity, hosted his own CBS television show and served in key church leadership and seminary positions.

However, in spite of his success, hidden doubts began to germinate in his mind about the validity of the Old Testament, the deity of Christ and why an all loving, all powerful God would allow children to suffer hideous deformities. In his “anti-spiritual” biography, Farewell To God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith, he describes his struggle like this: “How does a man who, each night, tells ten to twenty thousand people how to find faith confess that he is struggling with his own?” Finally, in 1957, he renounced his Christian faith and resigned from all his ministries. He moved back to his native Canada and worked in key Canadian media positions, including editor-in-chief of Maclean’s magazine and director of news and public affairs for CTV television.

As for what replaced his Christian beliefs, Templeton provided somewhat contradictory answers. At the beginning of Farewell to God, he insisted he was now an agnostic, taking the position that whether or not God exists cannot be known, as “there is no hard evidence” (p. 18). Later, he appeared to take the more dogmatic stance of atheism, emphatically stating, “I believe that there is no supreme being . . . no God in the biblical sense” (p. 232). Wherever Templeton’s beliefs fit on the agnostic–atheist continuum, he was clear that we must dispense with the “primitive” thought patterns of biblical Christianity and realize that life and the universe have “no meaning, no purpose, no benign end” and that “we and our world are no more than the product of an endless evolutionary process” (p. 217).

We should at least compliment Templeton for his intellectual honesty. His thoughtful questions display a serious search for the meaning of life. His challenges to faith are thus deserving of more respect than the “tabloid truth” that underlies much of the current secular media’s criticism of evangelicals, consisting mostly of gawking sensationalism, blatant double standards, witty personal attacks, innuendo and a hopelessly twisted confusion of ideology and facts. (Unfortunately, evangelicals are sometimes guilty of similar embarrassments, substituting our Lord’s command to love God with our minds with bumper-sticker apologetics and sugar-coated theology that reduce our stature in the public square and permanently stunt our congregations’ spiritual growth.)

Intellectual honesty aside, the logical consequences of Templeton’s worldview shift are tragic. In the short space of this article, we can perhaps point out just one of his reasoning’s many flaws. The post-Christian Templeton continued to profess a high regard for the moral teachings of Jesus. He insisted that “selfishness is the root of all evil and that caring is the greatest good”, adding, “The greatest motivating force in life is love” (p. 233). Yet, no one has successfully demonstrated how the moral duty to care for our fellow humans can possibly be justified if we were all coughed up by the universe through the impersonal forces of time, matter and chance. For example, if his daughter wraps her arms around his neck and whispers, “I love you, Daddy!”, a man like Templeton is forced to a soul-destroying contradiction between his ethics and his worldview. On the one hand, in his heart, he values the life of this sweet girl. Yet, on the other hand, when he listens to his mind, he is forced to conclude that his daughter is a product of blind fate, an accidental coming together of random atoms in motion, and that his love for her is just a product of his biological instincts and historical conditioning. He can articulate no solid reasons why his daughter’s life is worth more than the life of a whale or the life of a beetle or even a rock. He will not, except for a blind leap of faith, be able to justify why the instincts of love he feels for her are any higher in value than the instincts of murder a sociopath may feel for his daughter. In other words, no ethics can ever be derived from nature.

In sharp contrast is the Christian worldview. As a Christian, Templeton could enjoy his daughter’s kisses with no intellectual ambiguity because she has a special moral status as a human being made in the image of God. She has more value than a beetle because God, her ultimate Father, desires to have an eternal relationship with her. If she will submit to God’s plan of healing, she will eventually, somewhere beyond the space-time continuum of our groaning, tilted planet, be transformed into a creature of dazzling beauty.

The time for earthly reflection on eternal truths has now passed for Charles Templeton, as he gently left the earth on June 6, 2001 after a lengthy illness. Intriguingly, some of his inner personal conflicts unexpectedly surfaced in one of his last interviews, recorded in Lee Strobel’s book The Case For Faith. Strobel asked him to assess Jesus. Afflicted with Alzheimer’s yet still alert, Templeton began by praising Jesus as a great moral genius, the most important thing in his life and “the most important human being who has ever existed”. “And if I may put it this way,” Templeton added as his voice began to crack, “I . . . miss . . . him!” With that, tears flooded his eyes, he raised his left hand to shield his face, and his shoulders bobbed as he wept.

Reading Strobel’s moving account, I was reminded of an observation by Pascal in the 17th century: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.” I pray that before his death, Templeton’s dark, God-shaped vacuum was filled by the “true light that gives light to every man”.

John Harris is a teacher and educational software programmer and a member of Central Heights MB Church in Abbotsford, B.C.

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Last modified November 5, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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