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With his 1949 Los Angeles crusade fast approaching, Billy Graham was the one in need of revival. Outwardly his career seemed to be on the upswing. Two years earlier at age 29, Graham became the youngest university president in America when he succeeded fundamentalist patriarch William Bell Riley at Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis. Now after a number of successful smaller crusades, he readied for his biggest challenge yet—Los Angeles

Yet inwardly Graham's faith wavered. Reading Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth, he began to question the "old-time gospel" he embraced as a young man. At issue was nothing less than the reliability of Scripture. The Bible's seeming contradictions haunted Graham.

"I was not a searching sophomore, subject to characteristic skepticism," he said of the awkward timing of his doubts. "I was the president of a liberal arts college, Bible school, and seminary—an institution whose doctrinal statement was extremely strong and clear on this point."

While shaken by the neo-orthodoxy of Niebuhr and Barth, Graham was much more severely disturbed by the doubts of his evangelist friend, Charles Templeton. During the 1940s Templeton and Graham were Youth for Christ's dynamic duo. Though Graham routinely induced better results with his altar calls, Templeton was widely considered the more gifted preacher. Handsome, suave, intelligent, and charismatic, Templeton lacked only a formal education to validate these talents.

So in 1948 he decided to enroll at Princeton Theological Seminary and invited Graham to join him. Graham acknowledged his own lack of education—this university president had only a Wheaton College bachelor's degree—but he balked at Princeton's liberal reputation. He made a counteroffer: "Chuck, go to Oxford and I'll go with you."

But Templeton had his eyes set on Princeton alone. The following winter they met in New York City to discuss Templeton's first semester. Princeton clearly had a profound impact on Templeton.

"Billy, you're 50 years out of date," Templeton prodded. "People no longer accept the Bible as being inspired the way you do. Your faith is too simple. Your language is out of date. You're going to have to learn the new jargon if you're going to be successful in your ministry."

Templeton's training in theological liberalism exposed Graham's intellectual shortcomings. But Graham was not prepared to surrender just yet. "Chuck, look, I haven't a good enough mind to settle these questions," Graham said with characteristic humility. "The finest minds in the world have looked and come down on both sides of these questions. I don't have the time, the inclination, or the set of mind to pursue them. I have found that if I say, 'The Bible says' and 'God says,' I get results. I have decided I am not going to wrestle with these questions any longer."

Templeton's instinct for persuasion kicked in. "Bill, you cannot refuse to think," he chided. "To do that is to die intellectually. You cannot disobey Christ's great commandment to love God 'with all thy heart and all thy soul and all the mind!" Not to think is to deny God's creativity. It is to sin against your Creator. You can't stop thinking. That's intellectual suicide."

Despite his assertion to the contrary, doubt continued to haunt Graham. In August, Christian educator Henrietta Mears invited him to address an audience at her Forest Home retreat center, located east of Los Angeles. Graham's shaken faith gave him pause, but he nonetheless obliged.

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