On “Cold-Case Christianity” by J. Warner Wallace *****

After hearing an interview with the author, I'd been looking forward to reading this for probably a few years and finally got ahold of a copy. It was worth the wait. Granted, the early going portions of the text were a bit disappointing, but as Wallace moves deeper into his arguments, the case gets more and more compelling. There isn't much that is necessarily suprising; it's all basic Christian apologist argument, but Wallace is pretty thorough.

What the author does here is essentially discuss how the manner in which one goes about solving a criminal case based on evidence and testimony actually fits well with what evidence has been left for us in the Bible about Jesus's life and work. He starts early on by discussing the basic argument that skeptics have against the Bible: namely, that miraculous/supernatural events do not compute with what we understand about the known world. Indeed, if one is a materialist, that is the end of the conversation right there. But Wallace claims that witness testimony of the supernatural can't be disregarded, especially when there are so many witnesses. For my own self, I've been somewhat skeptical of the idea that our five senses explain everything about the world around us; it seems a bit bold to try to claim that all knowledge can be gathered from the “physical” world; there might well be things that we can't see/hear/touch/smell/feel that are real and existent. As such, one can't necessarily dismiss all things that don't fit with our material limitations, even if there is nothing we can glean about things outside of them without some sort of revelation. But we can see, as Warner himself notes in one chapter, the material results of such supernatural power—that is, one chapter is devoted to the creation, wherein Wallace essentially runs down the various well-trodden arguments for creation versus some other less than satisfactory argument for the origin of life and the universe. But in that sense, the book, in its earliest chapters, where it's running through these well-rehearsed arguments alongside his police life, the book seems a little predictable.

The deeper in Wallace gets, however, the more intriguing the work becomes. That's because he begins to summarize some ideas that are somewhat less explored in standard apologetics and theological works, and he does it in a way that is very much easy for a lay reader to understand. I recognized some of the scholarly work that I've seen others write in Wallace's text, but made much more accessible. Some of that work is in books I've managed to check out of the college library, but said books are at such high academic prices I'll never likely purchase a copy; now, I have those arguments, scriptures, and quotes in Wallace's book, and it's nice to have those summations put into such easy to access form. I especially enjoyed section 2 of the book, where he is as much talking about being a detective as he is about examining the evidence. His main point in this section is that, yes, one can still argue other things about the evidence presented, but are those arguments the most logical? the simplest? I think Wallace presents a good point here. We can accept the evidence handed down to us; that is in fact the simplest explanation for all that we know about Jesus. Or we can, by contrast, settle on something that is much harder to defend, some sort of conspiracy theory. It doesn't fit the evidence as well or as simply, but if one is a materialist, such an argument fits with the world one knows. It's really a matter of which one you're going to choose.