Billy Graham on Natural / general revelation

Can be sufficient, for those without gospel access, to move a person toward saving faith apart from explicit knowledge of Christ

THE POSITION

His recorded words move over time, so the cell is contested rather than settled. In a 1978 McCall's interview he spoke of "other ways of recognizing the existence of God—through nature, for instance." Days later his office issued a clarification in his name: all have some light in creation and conscience, God will give whoever follows it further light "and bring him to a knowledge of the truth that is in Jesus Christ," and "non-Christians are lost." That is not the inclusivist stance. In a May 1997 interview with Robert Schuller on Hour of Power he went further: people who "may not even know the name of Jesus" but turn to "the only light that they have" are, he thinks, saved. Asked in 2006 about adherents of other religions, he said "Those are decisions only the Lord will make." The 2006 answer concerns adherents of other religions, not those without access to the gospel, and declines to answer, so the stance follows the 1997 words, the latest that answer this question; no retraction of them was found. The 1997 transcript is Evangelical Times's, a critical Reformed paper, and the wording that circulates online differs from it; this transcript is the one quoted.

NOBODY ELSE HOLDS THIS

ABOUT THIS FIGURE

Evangelist of the citywide crusades from 1947 to 2005, ordained a Southern Baptist minister, founder, with L. Nelson Bell, of Christianity Today (1956) and convener of the 1974 Lausanne Congress. He is generally reckoned to have preached in person to more people than anyone before him and was the public face of postwar evangelicalism. This entry rests on sermon texts dated 1951 to 2005 that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association republishes on the Decision magazine website, his recorded Billy Graham Minutes, his daily devotions, interviews he gave to Time, Christianity Today, Newsweek and Robert Schuller, and the My Answer column that ran under his name. By the standard account the column was written with staff, so cells that rest on it say so.