As I look back at over a decade of training clergy and Christian educators—including the years of lecturing both before and after my seven years as a full professor of New Testament and Greek—I see that I remained fairly conservative in outlook. For example, Wycliffe College in particular, and Christianity at large, held as a central doctrine the teaching that God sent his only begotten Son into the world to “save sinners”—that is, all of humanity—by dying on a cross at a specific time and place under a specific Roman official in the Roman province of Judea. In other words, certain events rooted firmly in history were at the core of this theological schema or plan. Quite apart from the huge question of what happened to the millions of humans who lived before this salvific action came into effect, not to mention those since then who never even heard the Gospel story, there was another increasingly nagging dilemma with which I had also begun to struggle. The whole story of salvation climaxes, it seems, in the “historical” events just noted. But the cause of the entire problem being dealt with at the Cross, the primal “Fall,” or the sin of Adam and Eve, is, and always has been, presented in purely mythical terms. Nobody today except the most fundamental of fundamentalists believes in a literal Adam and Eve, in talking serpents or the like. So we are asked to accept that a historical solution is in some utterly inexplicable way required for what is clearly a problem presented by means of mythology. The great “sin” of Adam’s disobedience never happened in time or space, anywhere on earth; it is purely mythological. Thus, when Paul says, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ will all be made to live,” he balances the equation. Just as Adam is mythic, so too is the risen Christ. The full truth one day struck me like a bolt of lightning: just as the story of the Fall is mythical, so too is the story of its undoing, or Redemption! None of this, however, changes the inner truth of what is being said in any way whatsoever. It simply means that one more of the five “fundamental truths” of fundamentalism cannot stand.
Over the years at the college, these and other issues began increasingly to trouble me. But it would be some years yet before I was able to see my way clearly out of this maze.
Canada celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 1967, and I spent the summer driving with my family to the Yukon Territory. The Bishop of the Yukon, Henry Marsh, had invited me to take over two churches for a couple of months and to hold some seminars for the handful of clergy in his vast diocese. That was a camping trip to remember, especially travelling up the as-yet-unpaved Alaska Highway. The rough terrain tore the little tires on the tent trailer to ribbons every few hundred kilometres. Taking one of these tires to a garage—they were very few and far between—I realized it looked as though a grizzly bear had slashed it. I asked the lone mechanic-cum-gas attendant, “Do you sell many of these?” and he replied, “We sell them like doughnuts.” But memorable as the Yukon was, the truly important step for me in 1967 was making my first foray into a world that was to change my life and my approach to spirituality forever.
Much as I enjoyed teaching at the college, the questions and friendship of students and staff, I was becoming more and more dissatisfied. The theological college atmosphere, far from being a fellowship of eager, kindred minds engaged in the quest for truth and a better understanding of how to engage and change for the better the world outside our doors, was in reality stifling and incredibly inward-looking. New thinking of any kind was discouraged. The daily morning and evening services in chapel struck me as increasingly boring, cold, and out of touch with the aspirations and needs of ordinary people. I have elsewhere described seminary life as “the Church busy talking to itself.” In all too many well-known schools of theology today, the same description still applies. Outside in the larger world at the time, major events were shaking the very foundations of our society. Inside, it was the old refrain: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, Amen.”
In theology, the “God is dead” ferment of the early 1960s had been followed by the Anglican Bishop of Woolich’s 1963 paperback shocker Honest to God. Everywhere in the Church and beyond, it was causing a furor. The bishop, John Robinson, whom I was later to come to know well, spending time with him not only in my home near the University of Toronto but also in Canterbury, where he was born and raised, focused on serious issues revolving around the New Morality and the need to change the traditional thinking about God. In Canada not long afterwards, broadcaster-author Pierre Berton wrote his soon-to-be-famous indictment of a sleeping Anglicanism, The Comfortable Pew. Readers’ opinion pages in traditional Church publications frothed with outrage for months. Internationally, the United States, torn by years of the civil rights uproar, the Kennedy assassinations and a host of other problems, was slowly but inevitably being drawn into the war in Vietnam.
In 1966 the college sent me to some scholarly meetings in New York, held at the stunningly opulent Riverside Church. Sitting for hours listening to deeply learned lectures on Biblical themes and then travelling back to my hotel on the graffiti-covered subway trains late each afternoon, the question I had been asking myself in Toronto grew to a roar in my ears: “What on earth has any of this to do with any of that [the secular world beyond]?” I realized that for me it was time for a truly seismic shift. The longing filled me to find a way or means to move beyond the world of purely academic pursuits to communicate spiritual truths in terms any modern layperson could readily understand. I felt drawn to mass media. The problem was where or how to begin.
One day after my return from New York, between classes, I was in my study praying about this dilemma (this was before my thinking about prayer had been transformed) when there came a knock at the door. It was an Armenian friend, a keen but unconventional, evangelical layman who fashioned fine jewellery for a living. He said that God seemed to be telling him to come and talk to me about a need for me to be somehow involved in media. He cited a series of brief meditations I had done at one time on CBC Radio. It was a nod by the corporation to the churches called Plain Talk and was something I had enjoyed.
I could scarcely believe his words because of their apparent synchronicity. I told him of my deep sense of being “called” to find a voice in the public forum and shared my growing bafflement over how to break in. He bluntly asked: “What are you doing about it?” I told him of my prayers and was priggishly surprised when he retorted: “Well, it’s time to stop praying right now. How many radio or television station managers or newspaper editors have you talked to or taken to lunch? You teach New Testament. You know how the story of the raising of Lazarus begins with a command to move the stone. That’s what you need to do. Move the stone, i.e., do for yourself what you’re busy pestering God to do!” It was clear that he had a valid point.
I knew of only one person who might be a possible contact, an Anglican layman and lawyer named John Graham whom I had once met when he was a delegate to synod meetings at the Adelaide Street head office. He was, I had been told, co-owner of a small radio station called CFGM in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto. I called him that afternoon and asked if I could see him about doing some sort of program on his station. To my complete surprise he said at once, “Let’s meet in your study tomorrow.” So we did. On arrival, he came right to the point: “Would you be interested in doing an open-line show one night a week, and if so, when would you like to begin?” I replied that I’d be keen to do so and that since it was then around the end of April, the fall sounded good to me. He said: “I was thinking about next week. How about next Thursday?” That was shock enough, but he followed up that with his idea for a title for the hour: “How about Harpur’s Heaven and Hell?” A vision of the bishop, Right Reverend Frederick Wilkinson, flashed through my mind as I blurted out: “The Bishop will be mortified. We can’t go with that.” But Graham was not a man to be easily put off once he knew what he wanted. And a prophecy he made at that moment eventually came true. He told me: “Some people, especially your colleagues and other prissy Anglicans, may not like the name, but I guarantee you that once heard, it will never be forgotten.” I little expected then that my first book in 1984 would go on to be a bestseller under that name, and that an hour-long interview series I hosted and that ran nationally for three years on VisionTV would bear the same title.
Daily radio had never really been on my radar screen—apart from CBC News occasionally and the programs featuring classical music. Life had simply been too full. But I immediately began tuning