THE THEOLOGY OF BILLY GRAHAM 5

obscurity. But his loyalty to our Lord, and tlie high standard of
consecration which he conceived to be Christ's due from every Chris-
tian, is a challenge and a spur. Miss Thompson tells the story delight-
fully, without hiding the inevitable element of human frailty and
failing ; she allows Mitchell to speak for himself, and the message of
his life and preaching, so clear to those who knew and heard him, is
given permanency by her book.
1954, with its Crusade on this side of the Atlantic, and its conferences
on the other, cannot fail to be important and in some ways decisive.
Such a book as Climbing on Track can help all concerned to that deeper
devotion and prayerfulness without which, whatever the results on
paper, this year will fail in its promise.

The Theology of Billy Graham

BY THE REv. PROFEssoR CARL F. H. HENRY, PH.D.

N OT everybody is a Theologian, but everybody has a Theology.

And, simply because these are the words with which many a
seminary professor reassures new ministerial students, they do not say
enough about an evangelist whose labours under God have given him a
conspicuous place in contemporary Christian effort. Billy Graham
has a theology-doubtless not fully systematized and carefully elabor-
ated in details as the professional theologian would prefer it, but
something considerably more than a vague and formless phantom
whose features seem never to achieve definiteness.
One might begin by saying that Graham's theology, in its main
thrust, is that of Moody and Sankey, or of R. A. Torrey, and doubtless
this is a fact, although it would not be the happiest of beginnings.
There is, beyond doubt, a common core of doctrinal conviction which
may be traced through almost all the prominent American evangelists,
whether one thinks of past generation figures like Moody, Torrey and
Billy Sunday, or contemporaries like Charles E. Fuller of world-wide
Revival Hour fame. They are evangelicals, and as such have stood
consciously over against the optimistic liberal tradition in theology.
Many of them, indeed, would be quite ready to confess that evangelism
is ideally the task of the local Church, but that the loss of the evangel
or good news by multitudes of pulpits or its retention simply in principle
without an urgent outreach to the lost, had created the necessity of
mass evangelism in our era.
But more must be said than that. Graham's convictions, as they
obviously do, place him solidly in the tradition of evangelical theolozy.
The burden of the true evangelist is the apostolic message: ~h~t
crucified for doomed sinners and risen. And it is to the btblical
theology, frankly and unashamedly, that Graham would trace h~ first
lines, and measure the content of his preaching by the prophetic and
apostolic message as an absolute norm.
6 THE CHURCHMAN
This may be seen conspicuously in the manner in which Graham
appeals to the Scriptures. Seldom does he preach a message which is
not populated rather generously with an emphatic declaration : " The
Bible says . . . . " And the force of his words falls equally much on
this preparatory phrase as on the quotation which follows. Karl
Barth somewhere ironically depicts the liberal ministry of a generation
ago taking elocution lessons in the effective use of the word " God ",
so that the expression would retain all its traditional urgency although
the pulpit had filled it with a quite modern content. When Graham
says : " The Bible says ' the wages of sin is death ' ", or " The Bible
says, 'He that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out'", his
hearers are in no doubt of the sense in which it is intended ; Scripture
is appealed to as the Word of God written. The mood in which Jesus
appealed to the Old Testament : " it stands written " (the perfect
tense in Greek suggesting action completed in the past, the force of
which continues into the present) is one which hovers over Graham's
sermons ; what the Scriptures say, God says to us. The theological
presupposition is the inspiredness of the writings. The emphasis on
God's self-revelation is not made an alternative to biblical revelation,
although Graham labours the point that a belief in the doctrines only
is an historical belief and not a saving faith; God wants the whole man,
and addresses the totality of His being in the offer of pardon. Bible
doctrine itself foredooms a merely doctrinal belief as fully as it requires
confidence in revealed truths about God and His purposes.
All of this has a curious relevance for the broader theological scene
to-day. Few even of the great pulpit masters of our day carefully
elaborate in public the basis of authority on which they predicate the
positive affirmation which they make. That is equally true of Billy
Graham; I am not aware that he brings any special message on the
inspiration of Scripture or the nature of revelation, or any of the more
technical theological themes. In the case of much of the preaching of
our day, however, it is sometimes very unclear how the authoritative
note can be justified where the pulpit wishes to invoke it in view of the
concessions which are made in other connections. In Graham's case
the question of authority does not arise in this way ; he appeals to
Scripture as the Word of God written, and to God as the ultimate
author of Scripture, in such a way as to raise no question about the
pulpit as a third and intervening reference.
The thrust of the evangelist, however, tends to be to draw all strands
toward the place of decision, of committment. And, like most evangel-
ists Graham will not allow argument to conceal the need for getting
into right relationship with God. He can carry on a competent
spiritual discussion; although he is no seminary graduate, Graham
is a college graduate, and this leaves a certain stamp upon his ministry,
although he is by temperament less creative than eclectic. His series
of syndicated articles in the Chicago Tribune and other papers often is
flabby in content, although this may be due in part to the customary
newspaper preference that controversy be avoided. Christianity is
nothing at all if it does not enter into violent controversy with the
modern man and his prejudices. But there are also unnecessary
controversies, and these Graham, through his intensely full evangelistic
 THE THEOLOGY OF BILLY GRAHAM 7
experience, has learned skilfully to avoid. Once, when he came to
Boston for a major campaign, one of the local newspapermen sought to
enlist Graham in a criticism of the personalistic philosopher, E. S.
Brightman. During the press conference, a reporter asked : "What
do you think of Brightman's Doctrine of a finite God? " Graham later
confided to his associates that he knew precious little about the Boston
University Professor's metaphysics. But he handed the question
competently nevertheless, replying : "Dr. Brightman's critics are
able to take care of him ; I'm more concerned to preach the Gospel ".
More than once, in fact, Graham has turned the closing minutes of a
press conference into an appeal for spiritual decision.
At the centre of Graham's preaching, as the ground of the sinner's
acceptance with God, stands the work of Christ. This appears not as
an appendix to Graham's messages, but as the presupposition of the
whole : the life and death and resurrection of Christ appears, in the
mercy of God, as the staggering yet lone reference point of hope, for
doomed sinners. The love of God is the setting for this emphasis.
Graham has a message on the love of God in which, for ten solid
minutes, he burns the theme " God loves you" into the hearts of his
hearers. But the emphasis on divine love is not one-sided and senti-
mental. Both love and righteousness are anchored with equal ultimacy
in the nature of God. Probably nothing makes this as clear as the
emphatic manner in which the American evangelist preaches Christ's
substitutionary atonement alongside the love of God, and preaches it
in its Reformation dimensions as propitiating the wrath of the holy
Lord. Graham takes no cheap fickle view of sin. While he lashes out
at contemporary sins, and finds abundant timely illustrations in the
newspaper headlines and news magazines for up-to-the minute intro-
ductions to his messages, he finds the root of these sins in man's sinful
nature, and knows no way to God other than the way of the Cross, of
the expiatory sacrifice of Christ, annulling the guilt and penalty of sin.
Graham's preaching of the Cross, simply because of his lack of
formal theological training, is not always as theologically definite as
this. But when he is specific it is in these terms. I recall hearing him
in a large Los Angeles rally on a Sunday afternoon in a wrestling arena
converted for the occasion. We had attended the same Christian
college, Wheaton in Illinois, about the same time, and he invited me to
come along for breakfast. The following morning when I arrived
Graham, unusual for him, was not ready, and asked me up to the room.
While he finished shaving, I thought I would voice some provocative
reactions. " I suppose you know," I began, " that many an old time
liberal would have said almost all that you said about the Cross
yesterday ? " Graham fixed his eyes on me and with a note of demand
asked: "What do you mean?" We chatted for a while abou~ the
way in which American liberals frequently preached the new bi.r1;h:
the integration of personality and deliverance from inner frustration
achieved when one surrenders his life to Christ as Lord. In such a
message one found no emphasis on the representative death of Christ,
the new birth was proclaimed apart from a unique activity ~f the Holy
Spirit as the third Person of the Godhead, and now and then ~t was even
stressed that submission to Christ takes place not on the mtellectual
8 THE CHURCHMAN
level but on the volitional and emotional level. Put in those
dimensions, there could be no doubt of Graham's higher ground. But
at Los Angeles, he had so emphasized the new birth, and minimized
the ground of man's acceptance by God, that my observation promised
a rather lively conversation.
Graham's reaction was revealing. He told me of an elderly lady
who had come up to him at the end of one of his earliest meetings, and
held his arm firmly like some divine ambassador and said: "Preach
the Cross, Billy". "Yesterday when I came down from the plat-
form", he continued, "I sensed that something was wrong, that
something was missing. And I thought of that old lady and her words
to me, ' Preach the Cross, Billy '. Then he asked me a question.
" Do you know what makes my meetings better than they are ? " he
enquired. And with characteristic humility he replied : " The
personal workers. Those 200 people who came forward will be helped
clearly by men and women who have Bibles in their hands, and who
know that no other way leads home but the way of the Cross ". And
by "The way of the Cross" Graham meant the Lamb slain for
sinners.
But Graham preaches no plan of salvation which can comfort man
in sin. It is man's sin which has nailed Christ to the tree and it is to
free us from the tyranny of sin that He became our Saviour. Christ is
not Christ if He cannot break the power of cancelled sin. While He
lives on high, and intercedes for men, He works out His redemptive
purpose in the lives of believers by the indwelling Spirit. Graham has
therefore a " deeper life " message for Christians. He does not regard
the Christian life only as a promise to be realized in the next world.
Nor does he hesitate to find a connection between sin in the believer's
life and an indifference to the evangelistic and missionary task.
But the burden of Graham's message reaches to the lost. And some
of his critics have complained that, in view of the vast spiritual ignor-
ance prevalent in our times, he does not lay down a sufficient back-
ground of definite teaching in his campaigns. To some extent this has
been met by an effective programme of follow-up work. But when
so, there is little question that the dogmatic content of his messages is
not as fulsome as, for example, those of Torrey. The widow of the late
Billy Sunday once mentioned when we were contrasting evangelistic
methods that Mr. Sunday often spent the first week of a campaign
either speaking to Christians or giving definite doctrinal instruction
before the first invitation was extended in a meeting.
Two observations, I think, need to be made. One is that there is
much preaching to-day which seeks to exalt Christ's Cross and Resur-
rection but which becomes progressively vague as the specific impli-
cations are delineated. Men bring the death and resurrection of Christ
to a new pulpit centrality, without returning to, and even while by-
passing, a propitiatory atonement and a bodily resurrection ; by
contrast with the prevailing tide of preaching, Graham is proportion-
ately as definite as were his predecessors in an era more doctrinally
alert. That is not to suggest that the doctrinal quantum should be
determined from the history of dogma, but merely to state an im-
pression.
 THE THEOLOGY OF BILLY GRAHAM 9
The other observation has to do with the world and life setting of the
evangelistic message to-day. The eschatalogical note is a prominent
element in Graham's preaching. He senses that the mood of cultural
doom hovering over our generation works a secret inner conviction of
spiritual urgency, a sense of end-time, which gathers together and
multiplies man's awareness of misappropriated light and spurned grace.
The modern man lives closer to the line of spiritual decision as an immi-
nent necessity than did the past generation. The task of the evangelist
is to meet him where he is and lead him promptly to Christ as Saviour.
This necessity gains urgency not only from man's greatly troubled
conscience, but as Graham sees it, from the imminence of the personal
and visible return of Christ. The American evangelist is no date-setter,
although after his vast rally in the Pasadena Rose Bowl, where almost
50,000 persons attended his one-night visit, the Los Angeles Times gave
rise to a widespread report that there remained probably not more than
two or three years before the final judgment. But a transcript of
Graham's remarks showed otherwise. There is little doubt that Graham
believes we may be on the very threshold of final doom ; he does not
speak of thousands and tens of thousands of years which remain for the
accomplishment of the Christian mission. While he refuses to say th:is
is it, that we are in the final few years of the age of grace, he preaches on
that assumption : the opportunity of grace is shortened with every
passing hour, the final and irreversible judgment of God is nearer than
ever. And he does not hesitate to point out the striking similarities
in our time of confusion and self-indulgence and spiritual vacuum with
the biblical picture of the end-time.
All this suggests a cultural relevance about Graham's preaching
which is obvious from the type of introductions he employs in his
messages. He sees the inescapable doom of western culture, or any
culture which does not become explicit about the problem of sin and
redemption and its solution. The sombre headlines in the daily news-
papers are to him simply so many footnotes on this downward drift.
Nothing can allay this movement but the grace of God in Jesus Christ.
Not that Jesus Christ would work out a solution to our problems as we
pose them ; much of our difficulty is that from the prospective of sin
we project artificial or inadequate remedies, although the sad predica-
ment in which we are is reflected by our inability even to rise to these
diluted solutions. When Graham visited Pasadena, somewhat of a
cultural centre in America, with more Cadillacs per capita than any
other city in the States, and the home of the California Institute of
Technology, one of the local daily papers carried a front page statement
by the evangelist on science and theology. He did not dismiss science by
any means, but he left no doubt that ignorance of the supernatural is as
inexcusable in mid-century as ignorance of the natural, and that the
concentration of modern genius in the natural sphere is one of the
major ingredients of our world of lost values and purposes. But he
pleaded for no vague re-orientation to the supernatural. California is
already plagued with an assortment of wierd religious cults. Graham
called for a return to the God of Hebrew-Christian revelation, self-
revealed in Christ, and the restoration of His Word written as a light to
the stumbling feet of the contemporary man. If he speaks of the
10 THE CHURCHMAN
latest statistiCs of the mounting modern divorce rate, and the threat
to the stability of the home, or the latest murder scandal, or the
frustrations of the peace-table in seeking escape from the threat of
military aggression, he does so not as a commentator on current events,
but in order to adduce those events as a commentary on the biblical
view of man.
The cultural relevance of Graham's preaching-although it is hardly
what one would call a carefully worked philosophical analysis of the
religious outlook in the twentieth century world-comes to its sharpest
focus when he relates the struggle between Communism and the West
to the urgency of spiritual decision to-day. Few persons who have
attended a Graham campaign quickly forget the picture he gives of
Communism sweeping over the modern world in judgment, before
God's judgment hands falls upon that movement also-as in the Old
Testament times Jehovah permitted the Assyrian tyrant to humiliate
Israel before he destroyed Assyria, because of the vast light which His
people possessed and yet disregarded. The voice of the Old Testament
prophets rings forth again in the warning of impending catastrophe, in
the solicitation to immediate and thoroughgoing repentance in the
offer of divine pardon to sincere and contrite hearts who lodge their
trust in the God who offers, and has provided redemption in Christ.
This is always one of the points in a Graham Campaign in which
immense conviction hangs over the congregation.
British readers may recall that at General Eisenhower's inauguration
to the presidency, at his personal request, a Bible was opened to the
familiar passage in Chronicles : " If my people, which are called by
my name will humble themselves and pray. . . . " It is a favourite
Graham text and there have been rumours that it was Graham who
suggested the verse chosen for the occasion. I have not verified these,
for if they are accurate, I suspect Graham would hesitate to admit this.
But it is known that he visited the president-elect, at the latter's
request, shortly before the installation verse was chosen. And no
symbol could have given more dramatic expression to Graham's
convictions in regard to national doom and repentance than these
inspired and sobering words as an Inauguration Day text.
What remains yet to be said is that the secret of the Graham ministry
on its human side is his transparent sincerity in the passion to win lost
men to Christ; and on the divine side, t}J.e blessing of the Holy Spirit,
which falls with singular power and dynamism during the personal
invitation to response which follows the messages. On the human side
itself, Graham points to nothing in himself as a key to his ministry,
but insists that whatever its successes it is the sovereign grace of God ;
the success of his ministry will continue as long as God wills and it will
be shared and surpassed by others as God wills. It is true that he gives
himself to faithful prayer and study of the Word, although he leads no
hermit life; golf is a favourite sport, and he enjoys watching a good
football game. The latter interests help create in America a favourable
press for an evangelist, although that does not account for Graham's
fondness for athletic events. But it is the divine factor, the gripping
impact of the Holy Spirit especially during the evangelistic appeal,
which is perhaps the most astonishing feature of the meetings. Graham
 THE THEOLOGY OF BILLY GRAHAM 11
presses the invitation, confident that there will be a response, aware
that hungry hearts are waiting for the call to Christ, sensing that some
would be disappointed and perhaps turned away from Christ were it
not given. Neither the reserve of the people-a factor with which he
will have to cope with in Britain much more than in America-nor the
obstacles of a physical and structural nature to an effective response,
such as awkward meeting places, deter him in this regard : the message
exists for the sake of the appeal. In the Rose Bowl in California, a vast
outdoor sports bowl, any evangelist would know in advance that, when
the invitation was given, it would be at least three or four minutes
before anyone could find his way from the stands to the platform. But
the night of Graham's visit the newspaper estimated that 1,000 persons
had answered the invitation by making their way to the cinder track
and acknowledging a deep spiritual need of one kind or another.
Graham's theological sympathies are of a moderate Calvinistic
framework, though not a Calvinism which erases the urgency of personal
decision, and perhaps too mildly Calvinistic for some observers. But
he is foremost an evangelist and not a theologian, and it is by his
evangelism that he, like Moody and Torrey, will be remembered in
Britain. The Isles need his message; given a sympathetic hearing it
will turn impressive numbers to Christ, create a fuller interest in the
Churches, encourage the clergy to restore the task of evangelism and
missions to the proper priority, and perhaps quicken the prayer meeting
movement to a return to those spiritual elements with which Moody
launched it a half a century ago.

The Impact of Mau Mau

on the Church in l(enya
BY THE PROVOST OF NAIROBI

T HAT Christianity is on trial in Kenya to-day is undeniable. We

are passing through a phase of which we trust history will record
that the Christian Church has proved the truth of Samuel Rutherford's
saying that " the ship He saileth in is scatheless anywhere ".
I have been asked to try to give an assessment of the impact of the
Mau Mau uprising on Christianity in Kenya with special reference,
naturally, to the Anglican Church. Although it is really too close to
the events themselves to be able to judge fairly, and I myself do not
feel qualified to assess a situation in which I am not personally as
deeply involved as some, yet I would like to try to give an interim
report because I believe that what is happening in Kenya to-day is of
significance for the whole Church, particularly the younger Churches.
The thoughts and prayers of Christians of all kinds have turned to this
Colony, and if we can do anything to prepare the Churches of other
lands for the impact of persecution, should it come, we shall feel greatly
rewarded. " The holy Church throughout all the world " as a wide