Billy Graham on Authority of Scripture

Scripture alone is the final, only infallible authority

THE POSITION

In a 1951 message he makes the Bible the test of doctrine in both directions: nothing may be taken from it and nothing added to it, and every doctrine is to be found there. His own account of the 1949 Forest Home crisis, published in 2006, has him resolve to "trust the Bible as the Word of God" by faith while admitting questions he could not answer, and a Billy Graham Minute has him say all of Scripture is inspired, "every bit of it." Nothing read places tradition or a teaching office beside it. In a 2006 Newsweek interview he said he was "not a literalist in the sense that every single jot and tittle is from the Lord," which loosens how he spoke about the text but names no other authority.

22 OTHERS HOLD 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.