Charles Templeton and the Danger of Assumed Immunity

In the late 1940s, Charles Templeton was the most electrifying young evangelist in North America. He preached to stadiums of thousands, served as vice president of Youth for Christ International, and was widely considered more gifted than his close friend and traveling companion, Billy Graham. Templeton had tasted every spiritual privilege — anointed preaching, miraculous conversions, the fellowship of devoted believers.

Yet Templeton gradually convinced himself that his intellectual sophistication placed him beyond the simple warnings of Scripture. He enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he began entertaining doubts not as honest struggles but as marks of superiority. By 1957, he had left ministry entirely. By the end of his life, he described himself as an agnostic, telling a journalist with tears in his eyes that he missed Jesus but could no longer believe.

Paul's warning to the Corinthians could have been written with Templeton's story in hand. The Israelites drank from the spiritual Rock, walked under the miraculous cloud, crossed the parted sea — and still fell in the wilderness. "So if you think you are standing firm," Paul writes, "be careful that you don't fall" (1 Corinthians 10:12). Spiritual privilege is never spiritual immunity. The same God who provided manna also let a generation perish when they presumed upon His grace. No amount of past experience exempts us from present faithfulness. The way of escape God promises requires that we first admit we need one.