Re: [asa] RE: TE and apologetics

>>> John Walley <john_walley@yahoo.com> 9/17/2009 1:53 PM >>> writes:

Not so. BG was very outspoken on TE and a real conundrum for evangelicals who didn't know how to deal with him other than just trying to ignore hin. Below is just one of his many powerful quotes on it:

"I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today and the scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we've tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren't meant to say, I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man. ... whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man's relationship to God."Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man, 1997. p. 72-74

***

Ted comments:

Yes, a famous quotation. The final part of this quotation is remarkably like something that Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote in 1922, responding to William Jennings Bryan. Here is the passage I have in mind:

"So long as God is the Creative Power, what difference does it make whether out of the dust by sudden fiat or out of the dust by gradual process God brought man into being. Here man is and what he is he is. Were it decided that God had dropped him from the sky, he still would be the man he is. If it is decided that God brought him up by slow gradations out of lower forms of life, he still is the man he is."

From EVOLUTION AND MR. BRYAN, a pamphlet reprinting an op-ed piece he wrote for the NY Times. Fosdick was of course far more liberal, theologically, than Billy Graham. He didn't believe in the virgin birth, the incarnation, or the bodily resurrection. He did believe in sin and redemption, however, though redemption came by following the godly example of Jesus and not by his shed blood. The 9 word sentence, "Here man is and what he is he is," is classic Fosdickian, if that's even a word. Fosdick was an immensely practical theologian, greatly admired in his day and with an enormous popular following -- he had one of the first national radio programs, "National Vespers," which my father's family heard regularly. The late Martin Luther King, Jr., regarded Fosdick as the greatest preacher he'd ever heard. I'm really struck, now that I read it again here on the list, how closely Graham sounded like Fosdick, in this particular instance. Perhaps there's something deeper here!
 , about why both men have been so popular with Americans.

Ted

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Received on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:58:20 -0400