Pilgrim's Progress

The new interviews with NEWSWEEK, however, reveal a more intriguing figure than either his followers or his critics might assume. He is an evangelist still unequivocally committed to the Gospel, but increasingly thinks God's ways and means are veiled from human eyes and wrapped in mystery. "There are many things that I don't understand," he says. He does not believe that Christians need to take every verse of the Bible literally; "sincere Christians," he says, "can disagree about the details of Scripture and theology--absolutely." And he is an old man who loved the life he led and acknowledges that aging and facing the prospect of death are things he has only recently come to embrace. "I can't say that I like the fact that I can't do everything I once did," he says, "but more than ever, as I read my Bible and pray and spend time with my wife, I see each day as a gift from God, and we can't take that gift for granted."

Graham has always been torn between absolutism and moderation. Born four days before the Armistice in 1918 and raised by Presbyterian parents on a 300-acre dairy farm near Charlotte, N.C., he left home for Bob Jones's fundamentalist college in the fall of 1936, but soon dropped out, moving on to a Florida Bible college and ultimately to Wheaton in Illinois. Ordained as a Baptist preacher in 1939, he preached a conservative but not fundamentalist brand of Christianity with a style that took him to six different continents and into the company of 10 presidents. He was ubiquitous, opining on issues ranging from civ-il rights to Vietnam to nuclear arms. Given Graham's Southern roots, the Jim Crow question was especially fraught. Graham made occasional go-slow remarks that undercut the movement, but he also refused to hold segregated crusades and asked Martin Luther King Jr. to appear with him in New York in 1957. The two men once traveled together to Brazil, holding long talks. (Like many intimates, Graham called King "Mike.")

After years of vigor, infirmity came with little warning. Graham was perennially mindful of his health; his biographer William Martin once noted how much Graham amused his staff by "racing off to the Mayo Clinic at the slightest hint of illness." In 1999, when he turned 80, "All of a sudden it all changed, and I became physically very limited," Graham says. There were brain operations, a broken hip and a broken pelvis. He now suffers from prostate cancer and has shunts in his brain to fight hydrocephalus. Meanwhile, Ruth, a funny, devout and feisty woman, is also ailing. In 1979 she was fixing a swing for the grandchildren and fell from a tree--it was 14 feet to the ground, Graham says--breaking bones and inaugurating a long period of pain. (Ruth was, and is, a wonderful ballast to Graham. Barbara Bush, another formidable woman with a peripatetic husband, likes to tell this story: when Ruth was asked by an interviewer whether, as a Christian woman, she had ever considered divorce, Mrs. Graham replied, "Divorce? No. Murder? Yes.")

Graham spends hours now with his Bible, at once savoring and reconsidering old stories and old lessons. While he believes Scripture is the inspired, authoritative word of God, he does not read the Bible as though it were a collection of Associated Press bulletins straightforwardly reporting on events in the ancient Middle East. "I'm not a literalist in the sense that every single jot and tittle is from the Lord," Graham says. "This is a little difference in my thinking through the years." He has, then, moved from seeing every word of Scripture as literally accurate to believing that parts of the Bible are figurative--a journey that began in 1949, when a friend challenged his belief in inerrancy during a conference in southern California's San Bernardino Mountains. Troubled, Graham wandered into the woods one night, put his Bible on a stump and said, "Lord, I don't understand all that is in this book, I can't explain it all, but I accept it by faith as your divine word."

Now, more than half a century later, he is far from questioning the fundamentals of the faith. He is not saying Jesus is just another lifestyle choice, nor is he backtracking on essentials such as the Incarnation or the Atonement. But he is arguing that the Bible is open to interpretation, and fair-minded Christians may disagree or come to different conclusions about specific points. Like Saint Paul, he believes human beings on this side of paradise can grasp only so much. "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror," Paul wrote, "then we shall see face to face." Then believers shall see : not now, but then .

Debates over the exact meaning of the word "day" in Genesis (Graham says it is figurative; on the other hand, he thinks Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale) or whether the "Red Sea" is better translated as "sea of reeds"--which takes Moses' miracle out of the realm of Cecil B. DeMille--or the actual size of ancient armies in a given battle may seem picayune to some. For many conservative believers, however, questioning any word of the Bible can cast doubt on all Scripture. Graham's position, then, while hardly liberal, is more moderate than that of his strictest fellow Christians.