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Evidence for Faith: Deciding the God
Question
John Warwick Montgomery, ed.
Reviewed by Prof. Gary Colwell, Concordia
College, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Over the past fifty years many valuable books
have been written in the area of Christian Apologetics. Several authors' names
come to mind: C.S. Lewis, E.J. Carnell, B. Ramm, N. Geisler, C. Pinnock, J.
McDowell, W.L. Craig, among many others. John Warwick Montgomery stands with
them in a common mission. For nearly forty years he has persistently pointed
thinking people to the cross of Christ, in his debates with unbelievers and
through this apologetical writings. His recent work, Evidence for Faith,
carries on the mission admirably.
What makes this volume different from most
others in its genre is (a) its multiple authorship and (b) its broad range of
subject matter. the anthology contains no less than twenty essays written by
nine scholars covering such diverse subjects as the Evidence from Cosmology,
Biomedical Prescience, Messianic Prophecy, the Problem of Evil, and Legal
Reasoning and Revelational Truth-Claims. the authors are especially well
qualified in their disciplines, five of them having been trained in both
science and theology.
The thesis of Montgomery's essay, "A Juridical
Defense of Christianity", is that legal reasoning, when applied to
Christianity, " . . . results in a verdict for the Christian Faith". The
justification for using such reasoning lies ": . . . in the difficulty in
jettisoning it: legal standards of evidence develop as essential means of
resolving the most intractable disputes in society . . ." (320).
The author employs legal reasoning to answer
four key questions pertaining to the central truth claims of the Gospel. He
examines: the reliability of the historical records of Jesus the reliability of
the testimony concerning Jesus' life and divine claims about Himself the
resurrection as proof of his divine claims, and the divine stamp of approval
which Jesus placed upon the Bible.
There are valuable insights to be gleaned
throughout the essay, but perhaps especially interesting to the reader will be
Montgomery's application of a fourfold legal test for exposing perjury to the
question of the reliability of biblical testimony.
Everyone who believes in giving evidence for
faith should want to have a copy of this useful book.
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