We have all been suffering from restricted movement, limited travel, and confinement.  Have these governmental decisions been in fact illegal and unconstitutional?

A recent web article by a Tennessee lawyer[1] argues that this is indeed the case.  His position, in his own words, is as follows:  “No one in the federal government, state government, or local government has any authority to dictate to the general public that they must stay home or that they must suspend their business, or that they must refrain from traveling, or that they must not gather together in large groups, etc. . . . Government was not instituted to protect our health; it was instituted to protect our liberties.”[2]

I do not know if the author is a card-carrying Libertarian, but, if so, this would fit perfectly in the context of that political philosophy.  Some years ago, when I was teaching in a law school in Washington State, I was invited to the Tacoma Club by the Libertarian dean, who would have eliminated all licensing of professions—on the ground that government should always be restrained and should be focusing almost solely on protecting civil liberties.  I asked him about brain surgeons; his reply was that the poor ones would be forced out of business by the good ones.  He was blithely unaware, apparently, of the harm to be caused by the unlicensed brain surgeons.

To be sure, as the old adage has it, “the best government is the government that governs least.”  But there will always be a need for governments to offer positive assistance to the needy in the populace.  This is why most civilized states have some form of socialized medicine, and why it is most unfortunate that, in the case of the United States, the Democrats finally achieved “Obama care”—in the absence of a Republican, and therefore more economically responsible, program to provide needed medical assistance beyond the means of so many of the citizenry.

In Chinese mythology, there is the  獬豸  (xièzhì) unicorn who is mentioned as early as the Han Dynasty.  A scholar of the time described him as a “righteous beast, which rams the wrongful party when it hears an argument.”[3]  I believe that he would have given a severe butt to the author of the above-quoted article.[4]

Why?  American constitutional law has always permitted loss to individuals when not allowing this would produce immense suffering to others.  The classic example is the permissible destruction of property to create firebreaks in the face of raging forest fires (as in California).[5]  To be sure, the owners of the destroyed property must receive compensation, but the destruction per se is by no means constitutionally prohibited.

And what about seat-belt regulations for drivers of motor vehicles?  Legally-required helmets for motorcyclists?  Mandatory insurance for those who operate cars or motorcycles on public highways?  Standards of cleanliness for restaurants?   All of these regulations impose a burden on the few for the sake of the many—even when the only harm might be to the individual himself or herself.

Sir William Blackstone, in the first textbook of the English Common Law, argued that suicide should be criminalized.  The subject did not live in isolation; he owed a duty to his Sovereign:

The law of England wisely and religiously considers, that no man hath a power to destroy life, but by commission from God, the author of it: and, as the suicide is guilty of a double offence; one spiritual, in invading the prerogative of the Almighty, and rushing into his immediate presence uncalled for; the other temporal, against the king, who hath an interest in the preservation of all his subjects.[6]

The essential point here is that no individual is a Robinson Crusoe, living in isolation from others (and even Crusoe had his man Friday).  John Donne gave classic expression to the truth that we are all interlocked with others; we all owe a responsibility to those around us in society.  On hearing the bell toll announcing the death of someone, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

So we have no choice but to suffer in the wake of the Coronavirus—masks, confinement, limited travel, etc.  One would think that the biblical perspective that we are to serve as “our brother’s keeper” (Genesis 4:9) ought to encourage at least Christian believers to think theologically instead of in Libertarian terms.  After all, the Bible comes from God himself, whereas political philosophies are but the work of limited, finite, sinful human beings.

[1] Jeffrey A. Cobble [Cobble Law Firm, Greeneville, TN], “The Coronavirus Pandemic vs. the Limits of Government,” April 2, 2020.

[2] The quoted material appears in boldface in the original web article.

[3] Jeannie Thomas Parker, The Mythic Chinese Unicorn, http://chinese-unicorn.com/ch01/   This detailed treatment is unfortunately available only as a web edition.

[4] The Unicorn of Justice pictured here is one of the Chinese mythological figurines in the Montgomery collection.  Prof. Dr Montgomery holds a Diploma in Basic Chinese Language Studies (Alison, Ireland, in conjunction with Cambridge University).

[5] See in particular: Wildfire Policy: Law and Economics Perspectives, ed. Dean Lueck and Karen M. Bradshaw (London: Routledge, 2013).

[6]  Bl. Com. IV, xiv, 3.  See Montgomery, “Whose Life Anyway?  A Re-examination of Suicide and Assisted Suicide,” in his Christ Our Advocate (Bonn, Germany: Verlag fuer Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2002), pp. 169-95.

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This issue of the Global Journal will perhaps seem on the surface to appeal solely to readers of Lutheran persuasion. Not so!  Just as the struggle for biblical authority in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod a generation ago was repeated later in the Southern Baptist denomination, so every major church body today faces virtually identical doctrinal issues concerning the extent to which Scripture and its teachings can be accepted and seriously followed in an increasingly rationalistic age.

Whatever your denomination, you will want to read David Thompson’s discussion of apologetics from a Lutheran perspective: “A Confessional Lutheran Understanding of Christian Apologetics and Its Practice.”

If you are as sick as I am of receiving virus messages, you will have a tendency to trash this piece without even reading it.  I’m not sure that I would blame you, but I hope you won’t.  For, mirabile dictu. it actually contains some serious theology.

When I wrote my book, Human Rights and Human Dignity,[1] I of course mentioned in passing philosophers of animal liberation such as John Aspinall, who suggested that the world might be better off sans people.  One wonders if, at the moment, Aspinall and company are keeping track of their own viral state . . .

Even serious theological operations have been sending messages that boil down to (1) this is an unprecedented situation, (2) we can’t explain it but need to hang in there through courage and prayer, (3) we must maintain family values, (4) don’t forget to wash your hands continually, and  (5) the authorities are doing all they can.

Now, I may be wrong, but is there anything non-platitudinous here?  Anything that even low-IQ Christian believers would not have thought of on their own?

But then we also receive from these same organisations additional monetary appeals.  For example, one such group points out, that, as always, it is holding high Sola Gratia, whilst virtually all evangelicals think that their salvation is dependent, as least in part, on their personal faith-efforts.  So, send us another contribution!

We seem to hear Dr Newby Faustus  (Ph.D. from an English minor provincial university, a former Polytechnic, that requires no language or comprehensive examinations, but which accepted his thesis in camera on “Law-Gospel Teaching in the Book of Ecclesiasticus”).u  Here we overhear Faustus in conversation with one of the writers of this infinite stream of Coronavirus appeals.

FAUSTUS:  “Excellent series of e-mail messages to your constituency!  You never talk above their heads and you properly treat them like children who need single-syllable instruction during their first week in Sunday School.  You tell them nothing that they haven’t already heard more than once through the media and by way of e-mails from similar organisations.  You have succeeded in reinforcing the obvious—if not ad infinitum, surely ad nauseam.

“Particularly impressive is your total avoidance of the key questions an unbeliever would be desperately asking:  If there is a good God, WHY?  Why one person’s financial collapse and not his neighbours?  Why this individual’s survival but not that individual’s?  Why the death of medical personnel attempting to treat the critically ill?

“Especially helpful is your stress on your organisation’s solid theology—offered as a corrective to those benighted evangelicals who suppose that their “decisions” to accept God’s overwhelming sacrifice on the Cross has had anything at all to do with their becoming genuine member of Christ’s saving church.”

So much for Faustus.

But what can be said with a minimum of banality and triteness concerning the current crisis—together with theology’s place in the picture?

The Virus in Depth

The only possible ultimate explanation of any cosmic phenomenon would, by definition, have to come from a Divine Source.  No Source, no explanation.  A silent Source, likewise,  would mean zero explanation.  But the God who sent His Son Christ to save us has provided a written revelation, the Bible, declaring that the Creation was originally made perfect and was subsequently corrupted, physically and spiritually, by the perverse selfishness of God’s creatures, who used their God-given freewill for their own advantage.

Result:  A world in which evil/sin/dog-eat-dog selfishness runs rampant—and not in a predictable, rational fashion (the good living long and well, the nasty consistently being run over by freight trains), and where the spill-over effects of a fallen world often mean that there seems to be no one-on-one correlation at all between the causes and the effects of misery.

At the same time, the God of the Bible did not leave a fallen race in irrationality.  We retain the rational ability to analyse the causes of specific evils and to employ our mental faculties to correct them.  Thus, the history of human progress in all spheres of life, including, and perhaps especially in the areas of disease and medicine.  Pasteur’s triumphs in the 19^th century are a glowing triumph to the application of God-given rationality to hideous, almost-universally misunderstood contemporary epidemics.

So, now: from theology to plague.  Where did today’s  Coronavirus contagion arise?

COVID-19 is not the first Coronavirus to appear. The current version surfaced in the Wuhan region of China at the end of 2019.  A study published in March 2020 offered the sobering conclusion that if the totalitarian Chinese authorities had admitted the problem and begun containment measures just three weeks earlier than they did, the number of cases could have been reduced by 95% and its geographic spread (now present in more than seventy countries world-wide) could have been radically limited.[2]

The reputable journal Nature Medicine identifies the virus as a “natural” phenomenon in a fallen world, not as something artificial or explicable as some kind of bizarre conspiracy theory resulting from genetic engineering.  Two theories as to how the current plague began have been offered; one of these seems well worth mentioning here, though it is clearly in need of further research.

Specialists have focused on several characteristic features of the SARS-CoV-2 virus:  the genetic template for spike proteins, armatures on the outside of the virus that it uses to grab and penetrate the outer walls of human and animal cells.  If one considers the overall molecular structure of the SARS-CoV-2’s virus, its “backbone,” resembles, though is not identical to, that already found in known coronaviruses, especially varieties found in bats.

In previous coronavirus outbreaks, humans have contracted the virus after direct exposure to civets (SARS) and camels (MERS). As a consequence, some researchers have proposed bats as the most likely reservoir for SARS-CoV-2, since it is very similar to a bat coronavirus. True, there are no documented cases of direct bat-human transmission, but there is no reason to ignore the existence of an intermediate host between bats and humans.

Chinese Folklore 

In Chinese traditional folklore and religious symbolism the Bat could hardly be regarded more highly.  It is a major representation of Happiness and Bliss.  The bat-bliss connection, however, is not due to the inherent meaning of the words, but rather to mere sound-play.  Though the traditional characters for Bat and Happiness are entirely unrelated, their sounds are alike [fú], as can be seen in the Pinyin romanised transcription system.   Two bats facing each other in a decorative design will mean Double Bliss. Five bats around a circle signify long life, riches, health, love of virtue, and a natural death.  A red bat is a particularly beneficent sign, since the colour red has the capacity to drive away demons—and the pronunciation of the adjective red has the sound of the word “immense” [hóng].   A rebus consisting of a bat with a valuable coin speaks of Great Fortune.

Considering the number of Coronavirus deaths, it is interesting that in Chinese art and tradition the Bat is also a symbol of Longevity (!).  A 16^th-century Chinese classic, The Book of Plant Medicines, claimed that the Bat lived to a very great age, and that its blood, gallbladder, and wings have curative properties, improve the eyesight, and extend the lifespan.[3]

Conclusion: Good/bad Science, Good/bad Theology

General Douglas MacArthur had wanted to achieve a full-scale military defeat of Communist China. That might have been a gross tactical blunder, but had it successfully occurred rather than being deep-sixed politically, the Cultural Revolution with its human miseries would never have occurred; Tiananmen Square would be a historical non-event; and science might well have triumphed over the Coronavirus  Bat and all its works and all its ways.  And the Christian Gospel itself might have become the dominant religious force in today’s China.

But we are not prophets, nor the sons of prophets.

Our questions to ourselves can only be:  What should be the Christian’s task during times of crisis?

FIRST, we must substitute solid rationality for suspicion, ungrounded tradition, and wish-fulfillment when making religious and scientific judgments.

SECONDLY, we must not imagine that by expressing sermonic platitudes of sweetness-and-light, our hearers and readers will somehow be better off.

THIRDLY, we do not have the luxury of repeating mantras of the Reformation as if, like Chinese pictographs, they had the built-in power to achieve what a genuine, personal conviction of Christ’s work at the Cross—and that alone—can in fact achieve.

FOURTHLY, all of Holy Scripture is God-breathed, and “we know”—though there is no such promise to unbelievers—“that all things do work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his promise” (Romans 8: 28).

FINALLY (Fifth Bat?): there is absolutely no substitute for the Bible’s ending prayer, to be uttered without ceasing:  “Even so, come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22: 20).

[1] Now available, in revised edition, from New Reformation Press/1517: The Legacy Project.

[2] For reliable press reports, see the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the South China Morning Post, etc.  The  24-25 April number of Figaro Magazine features as its cover story, “Le grand déni chinois” [The Big Chinese Denial], arguing that the totalitarian, Marxist government of China has  “never told the truth” as to “the emergence, the extent, and the statistics of the pandemic.”  This lead article is followed by another titled (my translation): “Seventy Years of Lying/Deception/Falsehoods in Communist China.”

[3] Vivien Sung, Bonheur, bonheurs; texte chinois de You Shan Tang (San Franciscso, CA: Seuil Chronicle Books, 2002), pp. 31-35.

*     *     *

Following on our previous Global Journal issue on evangelism to the Jew, 17/1 contains two seminal papers on Islam:  Dr Henry Hock Guan Teh’s “Islamic Legal Philosophy’s Incompatibility with Global Human Rights and a Brief Comparison with Christian Philosophical Theology”; and Hardy Housman’s “A Tablet from Heaven—or What?”  The present issue therefore offers an ideal opportunity for our readers to refine their understanding of the Islamic threat to Christian faith and western values.

My legal specialty is international human rights law and I have defended with success religious liberties—in particular, the rights of Christians to evangelise—before the European Court of Human Rights:  three consolidated cases against Greece (Larissis et al.) and Bessarabian Orthodox Church v Moldova.  The Bessarabian Church case was regarded by a former President of the Court as the most important religious liberties case to come before the ECHR at that time (2001).

I therefore keep a close eye on cases involving Article 9 rights as guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights.  Recently, a series of three lectures at Lincoln’s Inn (English barristers must be members of an Inn—a medieval guild) provided updates on the case-law of the ECHR.  The lectures were given by a former Judge of the Court, Egbert Myjer, a distinguished Dutch jurist.  (En passant, I cannot resist mentioning the irrelevant fact that, though called to the English bar at Middle Temple, I soon joined Lincoln’s Inn, owing to [1] its fine library, and [2] its superb wine cellar.)

In discussing recent cases under Article 9—the article protecting freedom of thought, conscience and religion—Judge Myjer focused on Osmanoglu and Kocabas v. Switzerland (Judgment of 10 January 2017).

In this case, Mr Osmanoglu, born in Turkey but brought up in Switzerland, returned as an adult to Turkey to deepen his knowledge of Islam.  Whilst there, he married, and then returned to Switzerland.  His pre-adolescent daughter was enrolled in a primary school requiring swimming lessons for all the children.  The pupils were not separated by sex for these lessons, and Mr Osmanoglu objected on religious grounds.  He lost at every level in the Swiss courts and, having “exhausted domestic remedies,” took his complaint to the European Court of Human Rights.

The Court conceded that he had a genuine religious complaint, even though the Qur’an demands the separation of the sexes only post-puberty under such conditions.  But it decided for the Swiss government—on the grounds of  “the margin of appreciation” and “proportionality”—that, in light of Article 9’s qualification that religious liberties can be limited where there are reasonable and legal grounds to do so for the public good.  In the instant case, it was asking too much that the country provide separate swimming facilities or modify its educational curricula in primary schools to satisfy the concerns of hyper-devout Muslims.

As I contemplated this case, I immediately thought of the current, 18-month incarceration of an American evangelist in Turkey.  In 2016, Pastor Andrew Brunson, an American citizen who has lived in Turkey for 23 years, was arrested and charged with complicity against the Turkish regime by way of alleged support for a Muslim cleric in the United States, one Fethuhhah Gülen, who wants to overthrow the current, radically Islamic and oppressive Turkish presidency of Recep Erdogan.  If convicted, Brunson could face a 35-year prison sentence or even life imprisonment for treason and terrorism.  Without success, Pastor Brunson has testified that he has no connections whatever with Gülen or his outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), has no political agenda whatever, and has been jailed simply for his Christian testimony.  The charge against Brunson includes the specific claim that Turkey is a traditionally Muslim country and to encourage people to become Christians is effectively a treasonable activity—this, in spite of Turkey’s ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights, guaranteeing religious freedom and right to change one’s religion!  (In discussing this matter with Judge Myjer, I was told that there are currently no less than 150 human rights cases pending against Turkey at the ECHR.)

Since no judgment has yet come down in the Brunson matter, domestic remedies have not been exhausted and the case cannot be taken to the ECHR.  Pastor Brunson must cool his heels in jail, and he was recently transferred to a jail with a particularly bad reputation for the ill treatment of prisoners.   Erdogan has obliquely suggested that the solution might be the U.S.’s willingness to extradite Gulen—as a kind of prisoner exchange.

Now what lesson can be derived from the two cases just described?  In Osmanoglu, a Muslim living in an open, Western society attempts to use the freedoms guaranteed in that society to obtain special privileges for his religion, to the disadvantage of non-Muslims.  In the Brunson matter, occurring in a Muslim country, even basic religious freedoms are curtailed with no regard for evidence or the rule of law.

The Muslim religion is two-faced.  It wants religious liberty for itself and, given the opportunity, curtails it for everyone else.  When Western thinkers endeavor to present Islam as just another example of fine religiosity, this truth deserves to be taken into account.  In point of fact, Islam and human rights are simply incompatible.

Further reading on the subject:  Montgomery, “A Non-Politically-Correct Remedy to Muslim Terrorist Immigration,” in his Defending the Gospel in Legal Style (Bonn, Germany: Verlag fuer Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2017).

John Warwick Montgomery

*    *    *

Evangelism to the Jew is a sensitive subject.  There are, sadly, evangelicals who appear to believe that Jews are saved qua Jews—in direct contradiction to the clear message of Jesus in  the New Testament that no one comes to the Father but through personal belief in Jesus himself.  And the maltreatment of Jews by institutional Christianity across the centuries has made contemporary witness exceedingly difficult.  The nation-state of Israel, whilst granting citizenship to virtually any one of proven Jewish ancestry by way of the Law of the Return denies the application of that law to “Messianic Jews”—those Jews who have accepted Jesus as their Savior.

The Global Journal editor has often maintained that the New Testament witness “to the Jew first” is particularly assisted by the argument that accepting Jesus as the Divine Messiah offers the Jew a double advantage:  (1) fulfillment soteriologically (Messiah has come, so salvation is an assured reality) and (2) fulfillment epistemologically (though, unlike the New Testament, the inerrancy of the Old Testament cannot be demonstrated through sufficiently early historical documents, the entire revelational authority of the Old Testament is established once one accepts Jesus’—i.e., the Incarnate God’s—full confidence in the Old Testament records).

This issue of the Global Journal features two scholarly articles on Jewish-Christian issues: Amy Downey’s “Maimonides Against the Trinity: Implications for Contemporary Dialogue with Jewish Religious Thought” and Alan Shore’s “Modern Jewish History and the Making of the Messianic Identity.”

Grab a Kosher corned beef sandwich at New York’s wondrous Second Avenue Deli—or your local equivalent—and enjoy!

Unbelievers have often said that Jesus could not have survived death on the cross.  Let’s see if that’s so or not—and why the right answer to the question is of utmost importance.

Objections to a Physical Resurrection

Typical of those objecting to Jesus’ physical resurrection was a German theologian, Karl Venturini, who, early in the 19^th century, said that Jesus had not really died on the cross, but had “swooned.”  According to this “swoon theory,” the disciples thought that Jesus had been resurrected, but, really, he had just fainted and later woke up.

What do you think?  My view is that if you can believe that, you shouldn’t have any problem believing in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, since such a “swoon” would have been more miraculous than the resurrection!

Why?  Here are just a few reasons:  (1) The Roman soldiers crucifying Jesus knew their business: they had conducted many, many crucifixions in that cruel time of history.  (2) According to the accounts, the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear after taking the body down from the cross–to make sure that he was dead–and out came blood and water (lymph), showing that he was no longer living.  (3) Would the disciples not have known the difference between a gloriously risen Christ and someone who had been subjected to torture for hours and nailed to a cross?  (4) What would have happened to Jesus afterwards?  Would he have hid himself away somewhere?  Gone into retirement?  In fact, Jesus was the last person to lie about himself or deceive others about himself.  (By the way, you might like to read the most careful medical study of Jesus’ death, as published some years ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association, where the authors conclude that “Jesus was dead when taken down from the cross” [JAMA, Vol. 255, pp. 1455-63 (1986)].)

Let the Historical Records Make the Decision

Venturini is a very good (or very bad!) example of what happens when people do not pay attention to the firsthand, historical reports of Jesus’ life, ministry, and death.  All we know about Jesus comes from the New Testament records, and if a person ignores them, he or she no longer does history.  One substitutes speculation for history and the results are of no value whatsoever.

Suppose we were to do the same thing with other historical figures.  A fine biblical theologian of the 19^th century, Richard Whately—who had a great sense of humor—wrote a book titled, Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte.  Skeptics had said that you couldn’t believe the New Testament accounts of Jesus because everyone has prejudices—either they loved Jesus or they hated him.  Whately used their own argument to show (as a joke) that Napoleon had never existed—since everyone writing about him either loved him or hated him!  This shows that if you use bad reasoning about Jesus, you’ll mess up history in general!

But How Good Are the Gospel Records?

Suppose we compare the New Testament books with other writings of the ancient world.  What do we find?

In the case of the New Testament, the existing manuscripts are far closer in time to their authors than in the case of any other books of the Greco-Roman world.  Two among numerous examples:  Caesar’s Gallic Wars and Tacitus’ Annals:  1,000 years between their composition and our first complete copies.  When I was at university, I spent a semester studying the Latin poetry of Catullus.  We have that poetry in only three manuscripts, and they are 1,600 years later than the original writings!  But for the New Testament, we have thousands of manuscripts, including ones that go back to less than a century after the events described.  Two virtually complete texts of the Gospels exist from as early as the 4^th century (Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus).  There is a fragment of the Gospel of John that must be dated before John’s death–around A.D. 95.  Because the biblical books were regarded as sacred, they were copied with the greatest of care and we can be sure that what we have today is substantially what the Apostolic writers or their associates actually wrote.

When some years ago I successfully debated a philosophy professor on the subject at the University of British Columbia, I showed that if you throw out the New Testament, you must at the same time discard virtually your entire knowledge of the classical world.  My opponent then said (but no one believed him):  “All right.  I shall throw out my knowledge of the classical world.”  A classics professor in the audience jumped up and cried, “Good Lord!  Not that.”

And How Reliable Are the Gospel Witnesses?

Of course, good documents could convey bad testimony.  How good are the witnesses to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ?

As a lawyer, I am to assume that witnesses, just like the person or persons on trial, are innocent until proven guilty.  Therefore, the “burden of proof”—the responsibility for proving that the testimony is unreliable and the witnesses are not to be trusted–must fall on the critic.  Can critics of the life of Christ show that the witnesses—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, etc.—should not be trusted?

Absolutely not.

One technique employed by lawyers to see if a witness is reliable or not is to look first at the witness and then at what he or she says.  The witness and what the witness says are considered from the standpoint of their basic nature and in terms of what might have influenced them.

If we do this with the Gospel writers, what do we find?  In terms of character, they had no criminal records or psychological problems, and so cannot be dismissed as unreliable.  They were clearly not influenced by their Jewish society to present Jesus as the Son of God (since the Jewish leadership did not believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah).

As for their writings, they have, as translator J. B. Phillips nicely put it, “the ring of truth.”  A New Testament Gospel does not always present the same information as another Gospel, yet they do not contradict, but instead complement, each other.  A lawyer just loves to have two opposing witnesses say exactly the same thing:  he knows that they have “colluded” with each other and cannot be trusted.

Not so with the New Testament materials.

And archeology backs up what the Gospel witnesses declare.  For example, we have an inscription dated about A.D. 30 that confirms what the Gospels say about Pontius Pilate—that he was prefect (governor) of Judaea at the time of Jesus’ trial and death.

I am also a certified International Fraud Examiner.  Fraud examination generally tries to determine whether the three standard characteristics of alleged fraud are present:  opportunity, motive, and low moral character.

The Gospel writers and the authors of the other New Testament books did not display those marks of fraud.  They had no motive to lie about Jesus—quite the opposite–since the religious leadership of the country was dead set against the idea that Jesus was the God of the Old Testament, come to earth as Messiah and King of the Jews.  Indeed, most of them died for their beliefs in Jesus’ divinity.

They had been taught by Jesus that lying was of the devil (John 8: 44-45), so they would not have lied even in his behalf.

And, had they attempted to do so, they would not have been able to get away with it anyway, since hostile witnesses were present throughout Jesus’ ministry—the Jewish religious leaders—and they would have blown the whistle had the Gospel witnesses given false testimony concerning him.  If they were willing to crucify Jesus, they certainly would have had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to show that the New Testament writers were presenting false testimony.  They did not do so—because they could not.

The Miracles Issue

But what is the real source of arguments against the resurrection of Jesus?  How can the critics ignore his appearances to a host of people–and not just believers–over a forty day period before he publicly ascended to heaven?  How can anyone deny this, when we know that over 500 people saw the risen Christ (I Corinthians 15)?  The answer is that many people simply refuse to believe that miracles ever happen.

How, logically, could anyone maintain that miracles never occur?  You would have to look under every rock in the universe—past, present, and future—to make sure there wasn’t a miracle going on there!  No one can do that.

If we want to be scientific, we need to check out the evidence for or against any miracle claim.  Of course, there will be “miracles” for which the evidence is so poor or non-existent that we shall reject the supposed event.  But if the evidence is good, we have no choice but to go with it.   We don’t know the universe so well that we can say that this or that event is impossible. 

However, isn’t a resurrection so strange that we would need to have an infinite amount of evidence in favor of it?  Hardly.  A celebrated 18^th-century pastor to lawyers in England (Thomas Sherlock) pointed out that a resurrection is simply someone dead now and alive later.  We have plenty of information about the reverse:  people alive now, and dead later.  But the evidence needed in both instances is exactly the same:  being able to distinguish dead people from live people!  Those living at the time of Christ were just as able to do this as we are.  If they (or we) couldn’t tell the difference between the live ones and the dead ones, we would be burying the wrong people!

Go into a funeral parlor and offer someone present a Macdonald’s fish burger.  If he eats it, he is alive.  After the resurrection, Jesus ate with his disciples (Luke 24).

Can’t We Just Substitute a “Spiritual” Resurrection?

But why not avoid all this by believing in a “spiritual” resurrection of Jesus, not a physical, bodily one?  Wouldn’t that keep us from having to defend a real miracle?  Maybe, but at much too high a cost.

There is no evidence for a “spiritual” resurrection. Remember: after Easter morning, Jesus eats with the disciples.  And doubting Thomas touches the nail prints in the resurrected Jesus’ hands and thrusts his hand into the wound in his side made by the soldiers who crucified him (John 20).  And if Jesus had risen only “spiritually,” there would be no assurance that believers in him would (as he promised) be raised physically at the Last Judgment.

In this regard, a wee philosophical point is worth mentioning.  Evidence is possible for a physical event—but what evidence could ever exist for something purely “spiritual”?  The people who go for naked spirituality are talking about things that no one could ever show to be true.  Look at all the cults and isms that maintain (mutually contradictory) “spiritual truths.”  Christianity must not fall into that pit.  Christian faith begins with a physical virgin birth, attests to physical—historical—fulfillments of prophecies and actual miracles, and sees its Lord physically ascend into heaven with the promise of returning in the same manner at the end of time (Acts 1:11).  Let’s not change Christianity from fact to some kind of unprovable mysticism.

A Final Word About the Importance of All This

But why is all this important?  Answer:  because salvation depends on it.  Jesus himself said:  “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6).  And the Apostle Paul, writing under divine inspiration, told us specifically the nature of the saving gospel (1 Corinthians 15):

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand.  By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,  and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.  After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also.

Thus, the physical resurrection of our Lord is essential to eternal life.  It is the foundation of our life after death with Christ and a central pillar of Christian faith.  To deny it is to deny the truth of Christianity—and to cut us off personally from the wondrous gift that that resurrection provides to everyone who believes in the One whom God raised from the dead for our salvation.

John Warwick Montgomery

*    *    *

In today’s secular world, demon possession is generally regarded as nothing but medieval superstition. Modern western man has forgotten C. S. Lewis’s sage account of the devilish strategy (The Screwtape Letters, 7): “Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course, this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When human beings disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us we cannot make them materialists and sceptics.”

The present issue of the Global Journal features selections from a learned symposium on the subject recently made available for our republication by the kind permission of The Journal of Mind and Behavior (editor: Dr Raymond Russ, University of Maine). The main article by Mark Crooks is followed by commentaries by Craig Keener and your Editor. The Montgomery inclusion is perhaps justified by my books Principalities and Powers: The World of the Occult and Demon Possession: Christian Medical Association Essays.

Just before Easter (2019), I attended a seminar sponsored by the Paris bar on the subject—I translate—“Transhumanism: the Human Being Raised to a New Level.”

The speakers included impressive scientific experts in the realms of cerebral stimulation, exoskeletal research, and genetic manipulation.

You may well ask why generally conservative lawyers would be flirting with such a subject.  The answer, aside from the legal implications of the topic (more on that later), is probably—at least in part—that these days everyone wants to be on the cutting edge of futuristic ideas.  “Of making many books”—and mod seminars—“there is no end.”

One would have thought that the impending Easter celebration might have suggested at least a word about fallen human nature (the first Adam) and the new creation instituted by the incarnation and the conquest of death by the Second Adam, the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.

Ah, no.  Instead, we were presented with theories of human transformation.  The evolutionary process, based on natural selection, is just too slow.  Humans must take control, thereby moving beyond humanity as is to a hyper-humanity—a stage beyond mankind as we have known it (him? her?).  By the application of the scientific wonders of our time, illness can be a thing of the past; perhaps death itself can be conquered.

A half-century ago, secular humanist Julian Huxley put it this way:

Up till now human life has generally been, as Hobbes described it, “nasty, brutish and short”; the great majority of human beings (if they have not already died young) have been afflicted with misery in one form or another—poverty, disease, ill-health, over-work, cruelty, or oppression. They have attempted to lighten their misery by means of their hopes and their ideals. The trouble has been that the hopes have generally been unjustified, the ideals have generally failed to correspond with reality.

The zestful but scientific exploration of possibilities and of the techniques for realizing them will make our hopes rational, and will set our ideals within the framework of reality, by showing how much of them are indeed realizable. Already, we can justifiably hold the belief that these lands of possibility exist, and that the present limitations and miserable frustrations of our existence could be in large measure surmounted. We are already justified in the conviction that human life as we know it in history is a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance; and that it could be transcended by a state of existence based on the illumination of knowledge and comprehension, just as our modern control of physical nature based on science transcends the tentative fumblings of our ancestors, that were rooted in superstition and professional secrecy. . . .

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself —not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity.[1]

In fairness, at least two of the invited speakers at the Bar conference expressed concern as to the possible negative effects of messing with humanity as such.  There were reminders of Hitlerian experimentation on death-camp inmates to justify the Third Reich’s conviction that Aryans were superior to, for example, Jews and other minorities.

Far more, however, should have been said about the horrors of all eugenic philosophies—for example, the sad history in the Commonwealth of Virginia where interracial marriage was prohibited by law to ensure “racial purity.”  It would also have been enlightening if the established historical connection had been pointed out between Darwinian evolutionary theory and eugenic racism.

But what about genetic engineering?  From an ethical standpoint, how should it be evaluated?  Here are a series of propositions that, in this author’s view, should govern this difficult area.

• No genetic manipulation is ever justified if it entails the destruction of embryos or fetuses, since they are actual, not just potential, human beings. The end never (pace Lenin and Joseph Fletcher) justifies the means.[2]
• If no human life is destroyed by genetic modifications, and where there is adequate evidence based on responsible animal experimentation, etc. of the absence of negative side effects, there is no reason to condemn the human application of the methodology per se.[3]
• If the conditions just set out are fulfilled, and genetic manipulation is likely to cure or mollify an identifiable negative medical condition unable to be corrected by less intrusive means, it should be encouraged.
• If the conditions set forth above are fulfilled, there should be no a priori objection to genetic manipulation the purpose of which is to improve the lot of a human being (for example, if IQ could be raised). But the creation of “designer babies”—such as apparently produced a few years ago by Chinese doctor He Jiankui employing the new germinal technique (CRISPR-Cas9) to alter existing DNA by way of “genetic scissors”—and any and all efforts to implement racial preferences genetically must be unqualifiedly condemned.
• Serious sanctions must be incorporated into domestic and international law to deter practices that would, with no medical benefit, genetically modify the human being and his/her progeny. (The European Commission’s Directive 2001/18/EC and the even more restrictive French legislation on genetically modified foods is surely a step in the right direction, but a great deal more needs to be done to protect the human being from irresponsible experimentation.  In Canada, it is illegal for researchers to alter the human genome in any way that could be inherited; if convicted, the defendant faces up to ten years in prison.)

These principles are grounded in a biblical view of man—that the human being, as created by God Almighty, must not turned into something else.  There is nothing the matter with reducing the effects of original sin insofar as a fallen race is capable of doing so; but there is everything wrong with thinking that we are our own gods and can do a better job than the Creator through fashioning a new humanity.

We must never forget the miseries imposed on the modern world by the atheistic, humanistic Marxist belief in a “Soviet New Man” to appear as soon as the proletarian ownership of the means of production in society brings about the end of capitalism and the magical appearance of a classless society.

The work of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein has always been described as the creation of a monster—for good reason.

If we are really dissatisfied with humanity as is (and there is generally good reason to be dissatisfied, especially when we look into the mirror), the answer is indeed a “new creation.”  But that is not available in the laboratory.  “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (II Corinthians 5:17).

John Warwick Montgomery

*    *    *

This first issue of the “sweet 16^th” volume of the Global Journal commences with a moving poem from our Associate Editor, Dr Roland Ehlke.  Then Gary R. Habermas and Benjamin C. F Shaw offer an important review article discussing “Jewish Scholars on Jesus’ Resurrection.”  Finally, consistent with the Global Journal’s interest in connecting theology and law, Lindsay Wilson of Ridley College  poses the question:  “Taking God to Court: Was Job Wise in His Use of the Legal Metaphor?”

*    *    *

[1] Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), pp. 13-17.

[2] I have written much on this subject.  See, for example, my book, Slaughter of the Innocents, relevant material in my Christ Our Advocate and Christ As Centre and Circumference, and my public debate with Joseph Fletcher (Situation Ethics—available as a transcript and in audio format).

[3] Cf. Patra S, Andrew AA. Human, Social, and Environmental Impacts of Human Genetic Engineering. J Biomedical Sci. 2015, 4:2. doi:10.4172/2254-609X.100014.

These brief remarks will not be dealing with two areas: (1) the historicity of the Tower of Babel account in Genesis[1]—since much has already been written confirming the historical value of the Biblical narrative and the unwarranted dismissal of it as primitive mythology like the legend of Icarus[2]; and (2) the strong case for human language as arising just once, in a single location[3]—and the nature of that language (French, of course).

Our concern here is, rather, with the theological meaning of the Babel incident and the implications of that story for understanding the significance of language in society.

So, what does the Babel event say theologically?  It underscores a biblical teaching of absolutely paramount importance:  that a fallen human race, individually and collectively, cannot attain heaven through its own efforts.  Salvation cannot be gained by climbing up to heaven; the only way to reach heaven is by God’s grace, not by human works—physical, intellectual, cultural, or of any other kind whatsoever.  Babel points directly to Jesus’ affirmation:  “No one hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.”[4]

Christianity is distinguished from all the other religions in the world by not being a religio at all (a set of rules by which one can satisfy God or the Ultimate), but rather by its realistic declaration that a fallen world is lost forever unless a loving God does the entire work of salvation—as he did by providing the unparalleled gift of the sacrifice of his own Son to be accepted by grace through faith, apart from the works of the law.[5]

A secondary teaching of the Babel passage has to do with language—its crucial impact on human communication and a properly functioning society.

As a result of trying to attain heaven through their own efforts, the builders of the Tower lost a single, common language, and in consequence lost their ability to communicate with each other—and so to engage in meaningful societal activity.

In Europe at the moment, the European Union is in disarray.  After years of standoffishness, the United Kingdom finally voted in a referendum to leave the Union.  BREXIT is costing the UK an arm-and-a-leg and its negative effects have only begun to manifest themselves.  Meanwhile, populism has raised its ugly head in many European countries (not just in Eastern Europe—Hungary and Poland—but in the older, more stable nations of Europe (Italy).  The populist is invariably a nationalist with grave suspicions about anyone different from oneself.  (“I trust not anyone but me and thee, and I am not so sure about thee.”)

Why has a “United States of Europe”—as envisioned by the founders of the European Union—never come about and seems today to be an utterly unrealistic dream?   Answer: in contrast to the United States of America, where immigrants (even German Lutherans!) sooner or later had no choice but to assimilate to an English-language environment, Europe has remained divided linguistically.  Language carries values, or, at minimum, the way in which values are seen, appreciated, and interpreted.  As the Italian aphorism felicitously puts it, Traduttore traditore:  every translation is a betrayal—since it never conveys both the full significance of the original statement or its aesthetic, emotional overtones.  Literal translations achieve the former but very seldom the latter; “free” translations offer the latter without the former. A sobering illustration is Firtzgerald’s English translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, said to be “better than the original”!

But what about a successful country such as Switzerland with three official languages (German, French, and Italian)?  Ah, but the fact is that Switzerland is a “Confederation,” not a Federal State, and the different linguistic regions are far different from each other.  These linguistic enclaves share a long, common history that has cemented them together, but they are as different as Germany is from France or France from Italy.

A more common illustration of the linguistic effect on nationhood is Belgium, where, in general, the Flemish speakers cannot stand their French-speaking compatriots, and vice versa.

In Canada, “linguistic unity” is a myth.  The Québécois did not ratify the Canadian Charter of Rights, for that would have required them to post bilingual signs.  In the far larger, English-speaking Canadian provinces, official signage is in both English and French—even though, when I taught for three years in Ontario, I never met a native English-language Canadian who spoke fluent or even decent French.  The two parts of the country exist along side each other, but hardly in an intimate relationship.  When President de Gaulle of France uttered his famous line, “Vive le Québec libre!,” the Québécois were enthralled, and the rest of Canada absolutely appalled.

Recently, the Macron government in France, faced with increasing Muslim extremism, suggested that it might be well to increase Arabic instruction in the public schools.  (Increae?  Nobody had heard of any Arabic teaching in the French public sector.)  This proposal, of course, demonstrated incredible naïveté.

One of France’s great strengths is its constitutionally-mandated support of French as the national language.  This forces immigrants to a decent level of integration.  The teaching of French in the public schools is very rigorous and impressive (teachers repeating the mantra, “The accents are as important as the letters”).

The French Academy has been ridiculed for refusing to accept many new foreign expressions in its official dictionary (one should say “courriel,” not “e-mail” but everybody says “mél” anyway).  However, should a fine national language be denatured through the assimilation of American slang?

I am in process of obtaining French citizenship, the vast amount of paperwork having finally been accepted (including official copies of the birth certificates of my deceased parents!).  The final stage is an oral examination of my ability to speak French.

Maybe the U.S. could learn something form all this?  With no national language, California spends considerable amounts of tax dollars translating official documents into Spanish (driver’s license manuals, etc., etc.).

The biblical point here is that we do not give enough credit to the Scriptural treatment of language—its essentiality for society to function.  In the New Testament, Jesus is described as the Word—the Logos—thereby connecting language to the very character and revelation of God himself.

Maybe if we took language more seriously, we would be more mature in our political expectations.  Maybe we would also be more effective in our proclamation and defense of the gospel in a secular world where people simply do not understand the language of the traditional theologian—or of the TV evangelist, for that matter.  We are to preach the gospel to every creature, and that certainly means that we need to respect language more and use it far more effectively in our circles and beyond them.

John Warwick Montgomery

*    *    *

The late J. Barton Payne wrote a classic article—I have cited it more than once—with the disturbing title, “Hermeneutics As a Cloak for the Denial of Scripture” (Evangelical Theological Society Bulletin, 3, No. 4 [Fall,1960], pp. 93-100). This issue of the Global Journal is entirely devoted to a very recent and influential instance of this phenomenon as exemplified in the hermeneutic approach of Michael R. Licona.  Lydia McGrew offers a detailed analysis of Licona’s latest book, with trenchant criticism of its methodology.

[1] Genesis 11:1-9.

[2] See, for example,  Bodie Hodge, Tower of Babel (2013).

[3] Cf. Wayne Jackson, “The Tower of Babel: Legend or History?” Access date: September 21, 2018. https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/140-tower-of-babel-legend-or-history

[4] John 3:13.

[5] Romans 3:28; Galatians 2:16

The lead article in this issue deals with a messy theological situation at, of all places, the Moody Bible Institute.  I have been a fan of Moody (Church and Institute) ever since becoming a Christian as an undergraduate at Cornell University.  Evangelist Dwight Moody was the Billy Graham of his time (or, rather, Billy Graham was the Dwight Moody of our time).  I presented one of my “Defending the Biblical Gospel” seminars at Moody Church, and its just-retired, long-time senior pastor was Erwin Lutzer, my graduate student at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and later recipient of an honorary doctorate at the Simon Greenleaf School of Law when I was its Dean.  In short, theological trouble at Moody really disturbs me—and should be a deep concern to evangelicalism in general.

The issue is—ignoring the politics—whether to tolerate postmodern philosophies of truth that are uncomfortable with “truth as correspondence.” Why a discomfort by evangelicals drinking at the founts of postmodernism?  Because if the truth of Scripture entails comparing biblical statements with the facts of the world, then any apparent discrepancies must be resolved or inerrancy goes down the drain.  Substituting a non-correspondence view of truth, in postmodern fashion, eliminates the awkward business of factually defending what the Bible asserts and presumably (if one jettisons all common sense) allows a “true” Scripture to contain factual errors.

In Alice in Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty pontificates: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” responds Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”  Of course you can, but you will need to pay extra for doing so.  And where truth is concerned, the additional payment to achieve effective communication and a satisfactory view of the world is far too excessive for theology—or society in general—to tolerate.  Think of George Orwell’s kakotopian novel, 1984, where the totalitarian Party controls everything by making truth whatever the rulers wish to promote.  Truth as correspondence is an underlying assumption of all attempts to understand the external world as it really is and what can be found in it.

Examples:

It is the case that an elephant is sleeping in the bedroom.  False—why?  We check, even under the bed and in the closets, and find no elephant.

It is the case that light has the properties of both wave and particle.  True—why?  Because solid physical experiments show this to be the nature of light.

The Genesis flood was an actual event.  True, for Jesus, seen to be God incarnate by fulfilled prophecies and his resurrection from the dead, held it to be so (Mt 24, Lk 17).

I [Jesus] am the truth (Jn 14).  “Personal—existential—truth,” not correspondence?  Hardly.  Unless what the New Testament account says corresponds to what Jesus in fact said—and unless there was historically a Jesus who said it, any “relationship with him” is utterly chimerical, like believing in the Tooth Fairy.

And consider the following little computer program.  I prepared it on a Tandy Color Computer 3, but this simple Basic program can be compiled and run on most computers—such as the Apple 2 or the Apple gs—with few if any modifications:

If you compile and run this program, proposition B will turn out to be true and proposition C, false.  Why?  Because B is a correct mathematical assertion, corresponding to reality, whilst C is not.

Ah, you say, “But mathematics is a purely formal system, and we are concerned with theological truth.’  Obvious response:  It makes no difference whatsoever the sphere of the truth.  Pigs is pigs.  Truth is truth—whether is has to do with mathematics, geology, the location of the nearest MacDonald’s, or God’s revelation to us.  (See this author’s Tractatus Logico-Theologicus, sec. 3.28 for a detailed discussion of the correspondence theory, followed by a refutation of postmodernist epistemology.)

The late Prof. Dr Robert Preus offered a list of proof texts to show that the correspondence approach to truth is assumed throughout Holy Scripture.  He is eminently worth quoting here (from his essay in my Crisis in Lutheran Theology [3^rd ed., 3 vols.; New Reformation Press/1517 Legacy, 2018], Vol. 2):

It has been conjectured that the Bible does not operate with a correspondence  theory  of truth, and  therefore  it  would  be  quite meaningless  to claim that Scripture reveals truth in the sense of statements. This desperate position seems to lie behind the allegation ( Abba ) that “there is no biblical warrant for making inerrancy a corollary of inspiration.” We should not waste much time answering such a conjecture. The purpose of declarative statements is to make words correspond to fact (except in the case of deliberate lies). Without the correspondence theory of truth there can be no such thing as informative language or factual meaning. The eighth commandment entirely breaks down unless predicated upon the c:orrespondence theory of truth. So much for the logical impossibility of the above theory. As a matter of fact Scripture is replete with evidence that it operates throughout with the correspondence idea of truth (cf. Eph. 4:25; John 8:44-46; I Ki. 8:26; Gen. 42:16, 20; Zech. 8:16; Deu.t. 18:22; John  5:31 ff .; Ps. 119:163;  I  Ki.  22:16, 22 ff.; Dan. 2:9; Prov. 14:25; I Tim. 1:15; Acts 24: 8, 11).  It is utterly irrelevant when Brunner counters that Scripture teaches a Wahrheit als Begegnung (which is the title of one of his books). This is only  to confuse truth ( which pertains to statements) with certitude.  So too  is  it irrelevant  to point out that aletheia and emeth often  refer  to  something  more  deep  than mere correspondence to fact, that they  refer  to  God  and  His  faithfulness. God  is true  (faithful)  simply because  future  events  ( fulfillment)  corrresponds to His word of promise, and His word is true for the same reason.

Of course, divine truth goes beyond mere correspondence.  Any truth with a personal dimension (marriage, for example) transcends correspondence (“I love her,” “she loves me”). However:  if there is no underlying correspondence with reality, the relationship—the love—is just a fantasm, not something real and true, to say nothing of potentially or actually salvatory.

So read carefully this issue’s lead article—and why not the Editor’s discussions of postmodernism as well? How sad that administrators at Moody did not recognize the implications of denying or downplaying truth-as-correspondence the instant the problem arose.  Dwight Moody, though hardly a philosopher or theological school administrator, would have seen the crux of the issue instantly.  Maybe this is one of the reasons he was so successful an evangelist.

John Warwick Montgomery

When I take the TGV—the super-fast train from Strasbourg to Paris—on legal business, I always buy a copy of the weekly Officiel des spéctacles to see what is going on in the City of Light.  On my latest trip, as I examined the list of films playing, what did I find?  Amazingly, tucked away among the listings was “Jésus: L’enquête” (The Case for Christ)—described as the story of an atheist converted to Christianity.

Of course I could not resist.  The film was not playing at the major theatres to which I ordinarily go; in fact, it was listed as playing in only three cinemas.  I picked the one that was most centrally located, near the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées.  As it turned out, I constituted 50% of the audience (2 persons total in attendance).

The film is biographical: the conversion of American journalist Lee Strobel.  What are the pluses and what are the minuses?

The Positive

Technically, “The Case for Christ” could hardly be bettered.  The acting, the photography, the direction are all at the level of the best of Hollywood standards.  The French subtitling was impeccable (though voice-dubbing would have been more effective).  The producers were smart enough to enlist in a cameo role a known (though now long-in-the-tooth) Hollywood star, Faye Dunaway, in an obvious effort to capture an audience of non-religious film buffs.

There is much valuable apologetics material included in the film.  Brief interviews occur with actors representing defenders of the faith such as Gary Habermas and William Lane Craig.  (Habermas is a personal friend, and I was Craig’s first apologetics professor—though I am never mentioned in the credits or otherwise.)  The important Journal of the American Medical Association article confirming the death of Christ from crucifixion, over against “swoon theories”—an article I introduced into the apologetics arena years ago—plays a significant role.

The Negative

The film is obviously the product of Baptists, and they cannot resist pushing their doctrinal orientation.  Thus Strobel’s wife goes through a full-scale, down-by-the riverside immersion baptism, and Strobel’s post-conversion professorship at a Baptist institution is emphasized in the credits at the end of the film.  Of course, we cannot object to Baptist money, and the film obviously cost someone an arm and a leg; but wouldn’t it be nice if classical denominations, such as the Lutherans, spent money doing the same thing, only better?  Problem is that the Lutherans are far more concerned with the internal life of their churches than with evangelism to a secular public—and have little interest in apologetics (doubts are apparently supposed to evaporate through preaching and liturgy).

The main problem with the film is that it is Strobel-Strobel-Strobel rather than Jesus-Jesus-Jesus.   Strobel’s real problem is not so much in the area of evidence as in the psychological sphere.  He has a bad relationship with his father—and a psychologist whom he interviews points out that the great atheists such as Freud (who held that God is a projection of the father image) have all had bad relations with their fathers.  Strobel’s central concern is with his marriage:  he believes that his wife’s conversion somehow substitutes Jesus as husband for Strobel himself.

The contrast with the conversion of St Paul is striking.  The account of that archetypical occurrence in the Book of Acts is thoroughly Christ-centered.  Saul/Paul himself is a minor figure in the drama:  “Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him.  And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’  And he said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting’” (Acts 9:3-5).

It couldn’t hurt our Baptist converts and filmmakers to read a little Luther.  We suggest as a start—even though Baptists are not prone to the use of Creeds or Catechisms–the Reformer’s explanation of the Third Article of the Apostles’ Creed, from Luther’s Small Catechism:

I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Ghost has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith; even as He calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian Church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith; in which Christian Church He forgives daily and richly all sins to me and all believers, and at the last day will raise up me and all the dead, and will give to me and to all believers in Christ everlasting life. This is most certainly true.

Conclusion

Should you see The Case for Christ?  In our time of pagan film production, very definitely.  Should you take unbelievers to see it?  Absolutely.  There is enough good apologetics material there to assist the non-Christian to a conviction of the factuality of our Lord’s historical existence, resurrection, and divine claims.

But be sure to refocus from Lee Strobel, his family, his accomplishments and those of his children, together with his Baptist connections—to Jesus Christ.  Every conversion should be Christ-centered and should be presented as such.  Anything else creates the tremendous danger that we will be substituting our human experiences for the work of the Holy Spirit, the sole source of a genuine passage from death to life.

*    *    *    *    *

Readers of the Global Journal will certainly be acquainted with Francis Collins, who, unlike many scientists today, has made clear that his scholarship operates from a Christian perspective.  But that commitment does not exempt him from responsible criticism, and the present issue features a serious critique of Collins’ position by Dr Hendrik van der Breggen, of Providence University College, Manitoba, Canada (http://apologiabyhendrikvanderbreggen.blogspot.ca/).   Vol.  15, No. 1 of the Global Journal also contains a trenchant analysis by Dr Andrew Hollingsworth of the semantic theory of the late Italian uomo universale Umberto Eco, best known for his novel and film The Name of the Rose.

John Warwick Montgomery

When my wife and I are in London, we generally attend the church of my Inn of Court. Barristers must be members of at least one of four “Inns”—medieval guilds of lawyers. I am a member of both Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn. (I was called to the bar at Middle, and subsequently joined Lincoln’s in part because of its superior wine cellar; but that is another story.) Each Inn has its own church or chapel; they are “Royal Peculiars,” that is, directly responsible to the Queen and not under the authority of the local bishop (in this instance, the Bishop of London). Traditionally, they are—like the barristers themselves—conservative in temperament, using the 17^th-century Book of Common Prayer’s magnificent liturgies.

During the so-called legal “long vacation” in the summer months, one needs to find another worship location. Close to Ludgate Circus is St Bride’s Church, designed by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666, and traditionally the church of the journalists (when they inhabited Fleet Street). On the Ninth Sunday after Trinity (13 August 2017) we attended service there, especially because of the wonderful Choral Eucharist.

The downside was the preacher: The Revd Canon Alison Joyce, rector of St Bride’s. After it was too late to go elsewhere, I remembered a sermon she had preached some time ago on death, arguing, with no mention of the biblical teaching that death is the product of sin (Rom. 3:23) or that Christ is the answer (Rom. 6:23), that death is essential to the human race since otherwise the world would be overpopulated and people would still be forced to live even though suffering from the dreadful diseases and pain of extreme old age.

Joyce’s sermon on this occasion was an interpretation of Matthew 14: 22-33, where our Lord walks on water.

She began—encouragingly—debunking a Florida university professor who claimed that a rational explanation for the event was the extreme climate at the time: ice formations on the Sea of Galilee would have given the impression that Jesus was walking on water.

The rector then followed this with her own brand of rationalism (a rationalism picked up, to be sure, from the literary critics of the New Testament). Said she: We must understand what the Gospel writers were actually doing: They wrote to show how special Jesus was. The feeding of the 5,000 was to show that Jesus was infinitely more important than the Old Testament prophet Elisha, who had miraculously fed a small number of people (II Kings 4: 42-44)—and the walking on the water was so much more effective than Old Testament parallels—that those hearing the story would have seen the merits of believing in Jesus (cf. Job 9: 8).

Moreover, said she, what good would Jesus’ actually walking on water be to us today? Whereas Jesus’ message to Peter and the other disciples, “Fear not,” is available to us right now in our difficulties. The miracle of calming fear and giving us hope takes place all the time in the church and in the lives of believers.

What is going on here?

1) The text is being dehistoricized, in flat disregard of what the Gospel writers say they are doing, namely, presenting the precise facts of Jesus’ earthly ministry (Luke 1: 1-4; cf. II Peter 1: 16).

2) A new, unhistorical meaning is being given to the text on the basis of Old Testament parallels. These parallels are, of course, genuine and function as “types” of Christ, but they hardly suggest that the New Testament writers redid the events of Jesus’ life in defiance of what actually occurred–to show that he was greater than what one finds in the Old Testament. Moreover, how could they have gotten away with it? The Gospel materials were in circulation when hostile witnesses of Jesus’ ministry were still alive; they would surely have blown the whistle on such falsifications—they had means, motive, and opportunity.

3) If the miraculous event did not in fact occur, why should one accept the spiritual lesson the preacher draws from it? Jesus said, notably, “If I have told you earthly things and you believe not, how shall you believe if I tell you of heavenly things?” (John 3: 12).

4) The obvious reason for handling the text as Joyce did is to avoid having to assert and defend the miraculous. But isn’t a miraculous Resurrection the very heart of Christian faith, and would we not potentially lose even that if such an interpretive method were forced on the New Testament? Maybe there wasn’t a historical, bodily Resurrection at all—maybe the important thing is to see that Jesus is more life affirming than Old Testament prophets?

Conclusion: The preacher’s rationalism is no better, and no more justifiable, than the Florida professor’s appeal to ice formations. Indeed, it is far more dangerous, for it provides the ideal opportunity to disabuse ourselves of the factual reality of the saving biblical message—of the factuality of the very Incarnation itself. A God who miraculously created the cosmos out of nothing is surely capable not only of de facto Virgin Births and Resurrections, but also of de facto walkings upon water.

John Warwick Montgomery

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Even Christians with little or no knowledge of legal apologetics have heard of Frank Morison’s classic, Who Moved the Stone?—a powerful case for the facticity of the resurrection of our Lord. This issue of the Global Journal features Australian legal scholar Philip Johnson’s fine essay on that great Christian writer and his contributions. Also, and appropriately, Boyd Pehrson, another non-lawyer (Morison was a layman), refutes a lawyer-skeptic who has endeavoured to deep-six the Editor’s legal apologetic for the truth of the Faith.

Film buffs appalled by Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ may well have vowed to ignore anything else he does.  But in the case of his latest epic film, Silence, this would be a mistake.  It is clear that Scorsese, whatever bizarre personal take he has on the nature of the Christian gospel, has been bitten by the Hound of Heaven and understands well the difficulties Christian believers face in a secular, pluralistic world.

The film is the third adaptation of a novel by famed Japanese Christian writer Shûsaku Endô (1923-1996).  Set in the 17^th century, it tells the story of two Portuguese priests who persuade their superior to let them go to Japan to find their mentor, a missionary who is reported to have apostacized during the extreme wave of Buddhist and nationalist persecution of Christians taking place there.  Once in Japan, they find the persecution far more extensive and terrible than imagined; one is killed, and the other discovers that their mentor has indeed left the faith and become a Buddhist scholar.  The government Inquisitor has perceptively learned from experience that “martyrdom is the seed of the church” and now employs another method to stamp out Christianity: until a missionary recants, his flock are subjected, one by one, to horrible and excruciatingly painful deaths.  The argument is presented: didn’t your Jesus do everything to save you—so you must recant your faith to save the remaining members of your flock.  The young priest apparently does so recant, but seems to have remained a secret Christian, since a tiny crucifix is hidden on him as his body is burned in Buddhist fashion.

The theme of the novel and the film is particularly relevant today, when Christians around the world are being persecuted as never before—particularly by Muslim fundamentalism.

We offer seven—the perfect number— of lessons from the film:

• In the Western context today, Buddhism is presented—by way of the Dalai Lama, Christmas Humphreys, et al.—as a religion of sweetness and light, in stark contrast to supposedly persecutorial, imperialistic, missionizing western Christianity. The film illustrates the utter fallacy of such interpretations.  Novelist Arthur Koestler, who flirted briefly with Eastern religions, rightly rejected Buddhism for its lack of any meaningful ethic (cf. the Buddhist kamikaze pilots in World War II).
• The film should finish off any naïveté that “all religions teach the same thing.” The horrible cruelties inflicted on the Christians by the Buddhist Inquisitor do not bother him at all. (The Roman Catholic inquisitions of the medieval period offer no analogy:  they were contrary to the teachings and example of Jesus Christ and New Testement Christianity, whilst the Buddhist treatment of Christian missionaries could not be condemned by anything within that religious tradition.)
• The arguments of the apostate mentor and former missionary against Christian truth show just how silly such arguments are. He denies any genuine Japanese conversions to Christianity—the martyrs are not dying for Christ but out of commitment to the missionaries.  He even denies the possibility of translating biblical truth into Japanese (Francis Xavier is supposed to have accepted a Japanese translation of “Son of God” that was actually “Sun of God”—so instead of Christ’s rising on the third day, he rises every morning).
• The young priest correctly asserts that “truth is universal”—so Christianity is as true in Japan as in Europe or anywhere else. The reason for its lack of success in Japan is not the “soil”—the Japanese character and culture—but the fact that the soil has been “poisoned”—by Buddhist and other false religious teaching and by the persecution conducted by the opponents of the gospel.
• Naturally, the Inquisitor sees the issues nationalistically and politically. He tells the story of a lord who had four mistresses who were continually fighting with each other—so he got rid of all of them and had peace.  They represented European powers (Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, and England) wanting economic advantages in Japan.  The young priest said:  “We Christians are monogamous; the ruler should have just one wife.”  The Inquisitior replied, “The Portuguese?”  The priest:  “Christianity.”  The priest saw clearly that the problem—and the  solution— was not political but religious.
• The indifference to cruelty on the part of the Inquisitor and his minions reminds one of the Eastern theatre in World War II. A non-Christian culture has no foundation for or respect for human rights.  The Burma railway and the Japanese prisoner camps of the Second World War should remind us that what one believes directly influences what one does.  Did generations without Christ create an inherently dangerous Japanese personality, particularly in the political realm where totalitarianism could easily be justified?
• The most difficult question posed in the film is surely the following: Is there ever a justification for apostasy—as here, where it was the only way to save lives?  God is not going to intervene; He is going to remain silent (note the film and book title) in a world where we sinners have corrupted everything.  So what is to be done when facing such an ethical dilemma?

Note that the problem is not the Corrie Ten Boom “hiding place” dilemma:  it is not a question of lying to the Nazis to protect Jewish lives.  The issue is the priest’s denying the faith publicly to save the lives of people who have already denied the faith or who must also deny it to survive.

As a lesser-of-evils situation, what is the greater evil—the loss of other people’s lives through horrible torture, or the public denial of Christianity by its representative, thus telling the world that the faith is not worth dying for?  Of course, the ideal is a heroic martyr’s death on the part of all concerned, but suppose one simply does not have the personal strength to choose that route?

In general, the fundamental theological principle is that evangelism trumps all moral issues except right-to-life (the qualification is due to the fact that once people are dead neither evangelism nor moral values are relevant).  Keeping the flock alive at least takes into account the possibility that the totalitarian Buddhist government may weaken and that returning to the faith may ultimately be possible.

More importantly, saving faith in Christ is a matter of one’s inner commitment.  The Reformation theologians insisted that saving faith is present only if one goes beyond notitia (doctrinal knowedge) and assensus (public affirmation) so as to arrive at fiducia (personal, heart commitment).  If assensus is no longer possible, surely fiducia is still an option.  This seems to be the film’s lesson:  In a world of sin, where believers do not always have the strength to withstand the individual and societal pressures of evil, outward conformity may sometimes be the lesser-of-evils.  Faith in Christ should not properly exist only within the heart, but history has provided examples of such inner faith as the only humanly acceptable alternative.

John Warwick Montgomery

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The present issue of the Global Journal contains another fine piece by one of our regular contributors:  Donald T. Williams obtained from his publisher permission to include a chapter from his just-published book on C. S. Lewis.  Readers of the Global Journal will thus have the opportunity to revisit Lewis on the Holy Trinity—and will have no excuse for not obtaining the entire volume in which that essay originally appeared.  Then, against the background of United Kingdom politics and BREXIT, Ross Maidment analyzes the pluses and the minuses of the late Margaret Thatcher’s individualistic, Methodistic take on Christian faith.