FROM
Beyond Culture Wars,
MAY/JUN 1993
God & Other Law-makers
John Warwick Montgomery
©1993,
1999 Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals
In my opinion, the integration of theology and secular disciplines,
or theology and culture, ought to take place. In this article, therefore,
we're going to deal, first of all, with the subject of why law needs
theology. And after we've done that, we're going to turn it around and
we're going to see why theology needs law. As we do this, you'll be
picking up apologetic approaches that it seems to me are vital for the
effective proclamation of the gospel in the secular age.
History Shows Law Needs Theology
We go back to the classic period of legal theory, which extends
from the Greeks on to the 18th century, and during that long period
of time, a particular understanding of law existed. This is called Natural
Law Theory. It has nothing to do with physical law, it isn't natural
law in the sense of Newton sitting in his garden and having an apple
bop off his head and thereby creating the basis of gravitation. What
is meant by Natural Law here is that God has built into human life certain
absolute moral and legal standards. There is an innate sense of justice
that is given to man and all true law must reflect that innate understanding.
The term natural here means that it is already built in. Now, during
those long centuries, the conviction existed that the purpose of a legal
system and the purpose of a state was to arrive at justice, to approximate
those inner standards of right that people knew to exist. One of the
classic illustrations of Natural Law theory is in the Justinian Code.
The Justinian Code was the great Christian law code of the 6th century,
sponsored by the emperor Justinian, and it gathered together the best
of classical Greco-Roman law and it put it into a Christian framework.
And at the beginning of the digest, which is one of the parts of the
Justinian Code, there is a definition of the Natural Law: To live honestly,
to harm no one, and to give each one what he actually deserves, or to
attribute to each person what is, in fact, his own. In other words,
all law and the structure of the state ought to be achieving this sort
of thing--ought to be maximizing honest living, the elimination of the
possibility that one person can harm another, and the proper attribution
of resources to those who ought to have them. The Justinian Code epitomizes
the understanding of Natural Law over those centuries. It also helps
us to see why even at times when there were absolute monarchs, they
weren't absolute, because the expectation was that they would bring
about a conformity to the Natural Law. They were under that kind of
structure of law that is built into the human heart.
Now, as modern pluralism appeared on the scene, as the unity of Christian
civilization broke up in modern times, this theory of natural law fell
apart. One of the reasons that it fell apart was it ambiguity, its lack
of specificity. What exactly did constitute this unwritten law? One
of the most horrendous illustrations of the ambiguity can be found on
the metal doors leading into the death camp at Buchenwald, one of the
two worst death camps of the Nazis during the second world war. For
years I took groups behind the Iron Curtain at a time when East Germany
was not even recognized by the U.S. government, and I would always take
them to Buchenwald, and there on this wind-swept plain above the enlightenment
city of Weimar was this hideous camp. Engraved on the metal doors going
into the camp is this expression: "Each man gets what he deserves."
It is the German translation of the third element in the definition
of Natural Law in the Justinian Code. In other words, because the nature
of what each man deserved was not accurately spelled out, when modern
pluralism came on the scene, it became possible to inject into this
notion of Natural Law virtually anything that one wanted to. So, the
Nazis said, Well, they are Jews--they go in here and they never come
out! But letıs go back to the 18th century when the Natural Law theory
first unraveled.
In the 18th century and in the decades immediately preceding it, there
were political theorists in Western Europe known as "contract theorists."
These were people who said, In order to determine the nature of an ideal
state, you want to imagine people in a state of nature before the state
arose. These people are in a pre-political condition and they will contract
with each other to bring about a state, a state that will reflect the
Natural Law within them. The unraveling is seen by the fact that the
different contract theorists come out with totally different views of
the state. Plus we have Thomas Hobbes, the English atheistic philosopher
who did The Leviathon. Hobbes saw human nature as "nasty,
brutish, and short." So, the purpose of the state turns out to
be, simply, to keep people from eating each other. And Hobbes has all
of these people contract with each other to give up all of their rights
to one of them who acts as an absolute ruler. Why must they do this?
Because if they retain any rights or powers of their own whatsoever,
they will use them to bash each other. So, the idea is that they must
be controlled by some political entity that will prevent that. This
of course, is the political basis of a modern totalitarianism: People
donıt know what is good for them. If left to themselves, theyıll destroy
themselves. So, we turn the thing over to someone who presumably can
handle the whole business in a better fashion. Hobbes called that leviathon
a "mortal god" that controls everything in the state.
In diametric opposition to this we have Rousseau. Rousseau in his work,
The Social Contract, began it by saying that man was created
free. Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Now, says Rousseau,
we've got to get rid of those shackles. How do we do it? We create a
situation in which each individual is able to do "his thing,"
exactly the opposite of Hobbes. Rousseau did an educational treatise
called Emil, named for the leading character, in which the main
principle was that each little squirt should be left to himself or herself
simply to develop the potential within said squirt. This is the basis
of contemporary progressive education. Dewey went back to Rousseau.
In the 18th century, after this was published, a nobleman wrote to a
friend of his and said, "You know, I have followed assiduously
the principles of Rousseau. He is now 18 years of age and he is an imbecile."
Then John Locke, who had such an influence on the American Declaration
of Independence, as a Christian believer said that man is fallen, but
that he is a creature of God, so there are two sides: There is a positive
and a negative side. Locke came up with a theory of limited rights.
That is to say, man gives up certain of his rights to the state, but
there are other rights he must never give up. These are the inalienable
rights which he must retain, because if those were man's to give, they
would also be man's to take away. The inalienable rights are the ones
that the founding fathers believed ought to guaranteed by the Bill of
Rights and the Constitution. Of course, that begged the question, how
could one establish those rights, or be sure that those were in fact
inherent to human nature and that they represented the positive and
not the negative side of human nature. All of those questions were left
up in the air by the contract theorists, and they indicated clearly
that the natural law theory was insufficient.
We come to the middle of the 19th century in which a new philosophy
of law replaces Natural Law theory. Natural Law theory moves to the
wings and a new approach is now at stage center. This approach is known
as legal positivism, or realism. The principle of it is simplicity itself:
There are no natural law standards, there is no innate sense of justice--the
only law that exists happens to be the law of the land. That is to say,
the law that the state brings into existence. Law is a creature of the
state, or as John Austin said, "Law is the commands of the sovereign."
The only law that there is, is the law that the sovereign commands.
If you are in a representative democracy, it means law consists of what
the congress or parliament passes. Or if you are in a common law country,
where in a very real sense law is made by judges in judicial decision,
whatever the judicial decision is, that is the law, and you can never
ask any other question about it. You can never say, for example, "It
may look like law, taste like law, and smell like law, but it is against
justice! And therefore it isnıt law at all." You can't say that,
because there is no higher standard any longer. The two foremost representatives
of legal positivism in our own time are H.L.A. Hart and Hans Kelson,
who died twenty years ago. Hart died just in the last few months. He
was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford. These two gentlemen, even
though they came from very different backgrounds, one from an English
liberal background, the other from an Austrian/German strict philosophical
background, arrived at the same conclusion. Namely, that you can't use
any higher standard to judge the law. You simply look at what the state
does, and that is it. Said Hart, if you try to judge the ultimate principle
in the legal system, what he called the rule of recognition, this is
like two trains passing in the night because you will only be able to
judge it by another legal system. Therefore, it could be turned around
and the other person could judge you. So that is of no consequence.
Hans Kelson said this is a lecture at the University of California:
It is of the greatest importance to be aware that there is not only
one moral or political system, but at different times, and within
different societies, different moral and political systems. These
systems come into existence by commands or custom, and if men believe
that the personalities who created them, like Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed
are inspired, well, they will consider them absolute. But as a matter
of fact, there are, there were, and probably always will be different
moral and political systems, and therefore the values constituted
by them are only relative.
If you happen to live in the Near East, and you think that Mohammed
was indeed the prophet of God, then you will think that that particular
set of pronouncements is absolute. But the fact is that that is just
the situation in reference to Islam, and doesnıt have any absolute force
at all. Therefore, the law only consists of what the state establishes
it to be.
Those positions were set forth before the Second World War. During
WWII it appeared that something especially messy was going on, namely,
hideous atrocities--inhumanities beyond imagining. At the end of WWII
the Nuremberg war trials took place to deal with exactly that. The Nazis
who were on trial were very satisfied with legal positivism. Why? Because
it made it possible for them to say, "Of course you donıt agree
with us. Of course we did things that you think were wrong, but we operated
within the framework of our own legal system, and there is no higher
standard by such we can be judged. Our legal system is internally consistent,
we just didn't think that people like Jews were genuine persons who
deserved legal protection. The only reason we are trial is that we lost,
and you won!" This forced the prosecution at Nuremberg to appeal
to "higher" standards. Robert Jackson, associate justice of
the Supreme Court of the United States, one of the prosecution team
at Nuremberg, in summing up said this, "We rise above the provincial
and transient, we seek guidance, not only from international law, but
from the basic principles of jurisprudence of philosophy of law, which
are the assumptions of civilization." Of course, the Nazis were
not impressed, they regarded this as rhetorical puffing, and nothing
more. There is no attempt to show where such assumptions of civilization
come from, or how they can be identified, or how they can be justified.
That of course, created a gigantic question mark over legal positivism.
The subsequent history of this has been attempts by secular legal scholars
to shore up legal positivism, because they don't think there is any
hope in hell of getting Natural Law theory back into the picture. They
see that as hopelessly ambiguous, just as people have since the 18th
century. A couple of examples of people who have tried to do something
with legal positivism. One of them is Hart's successor at Oxford, Ronald
Dworkin. He is American, with a chair at Yale and also this very prestigious
chair of Philosophy of Law at Oxford. I had contact with him recently
at a seminar at Oxford. Dworkin criticizes Hart by saying that Hart
limits himself just to legal rules. Dworkin says it is more sophisticated
than that. You must go beyond legal rules to legal principles. Principles
are wider and more general, so they can give us a more comprehensive
picture of a legal system. A legal principle, for example, would be
that no one must profit from his own wrong. These wider principles will
always have exceptions, for example, adverse possession. That is to
say, if you sit long enough on your neighbor's land, under certain conditions,
it can become yours. This is known as legalized stealing. It's an exception
to the general principle that you must not profit from your own wrong.
These principles, says Dworkin, can create a more sophisticated system.
And judges, says he, have got to work with these wider principles. He
hypothesizes a judge by the name of Hercules, and Hercules takes these
wider principles and brings them to bear on the rules of the system
so as to arrive at a genuine concept of justice. Now, this sounds just
fine, but of course, the main question is, Where do the principles come
from? Listen to Dworkin in his book Taking Rights Seriously,
"We argue for a particular principle by grappling with a whole
set of shifting, developing, and interacting standards, themselves principles
rather than rules about institutional responsibility, statutory interpretation,
the persuasive force of various sorts of precedent. the relation of
all these to contemporary moral practices and hosts of other such standards."
We discover that Dworkinıs sources are so diverse that it is as impossible
to get anything as it was from old Natural Law standards. But we also
discover that these are all horizontal, they are all human and nothing
more than that. Thereıs no God in the picture injecting absolute standards.
What you do here is try to derive these from the chaotic mess of human
culture. This opens the door to any particular biases that the investigator
has personally. Therefore, a person like Dworkin, who is a very nice
type, will find good principles embedded in the society. But other people
will look at the society and find the kind of principles that fit their
own nastiness. If Genghis Khan were to engage in this analysis, the
results would be very different from the results when Dworkin engages
in it. Mr. Justice Hercules turns out to be a very god-like figure on
the bench, but how does he get those powers and abilities, weıd like
to know.
Also, an attempt to help this messy situation comes from John Rawls,
also an American, the greatest political philosopher of our time, who
has influenced the whole scope of political philosophy in every country
where his great work A Theory of Justice is available. Rawls
delivered a lecture at the seminar previously mentioned sponsored by
Amnesty International to try to show the grounding of human rights.
Rawls' approach is to go back to those contract theorists. He thinks
that he can build up a proper society from man in a pre-political state
of nature. What he does is to abstract all the prejudicial, personal
quantities from man's activities so that people cannot base their political
decisions on their own interests. He takes away their relative age,
their strength, their wealth, and all of that, so as to get them to
a point of basic, rational equality. Then they come up with principles
of justice and a kind of modern liberal state.
The problem with this is exactly the problem of the contract theorists
that we talked about, Hobbes and Rousseau and Locke. The problem is
that human nature is not purely rational, and people are not going to
make rational decisions. The decisions people make are based upon the
differences that they perceive exist within them. You go to Genghis
and you say, "Genghis, what you need is a liberal state."
And Genghis says, "Arhhh!" You say, "Now listen, Genghis!
We canıt bring strength into this. Granted, you are stronger than the
average person, but we canıt consider a thing like that. Thatıs got
to be abstracted from the situation." Genghis then grabs you by
the throat, and says, "Really?!" And He turns you upside down,
pounds you into the ground, and proceeds to establish a state in which
he can rape and pillage.
To assume that there is this overarching rationality that everybody
ought to conform to is incredibly naïve. As the psychoanalists
have pointed out, many decisions that are made are not based on a rational
ground anyway. Other things bubble up.
Now, this has been a long, agonizing trip through the history of modern
jurisprudence, what is my point? My point is simply this, that if you
want a standard of justice (and you do, otherwise you can't handle the
Nuremberg trial problems of the modern world), you are going to have
to get it from outside the human situation in order to make sure that
it is, in fact, absolute. Water doesn't rise above its own level. Standards
that human beings try to create will not rise above the level of the
human beings that create them.
Even Rousseau in a fairly sober moment said, "It would take gods
to give men laws." You can't derive them by analyzing human nature,
because human nature is a mixed bag. Human nature consists of the original
created goodness, but it also consists of the fallen nastiness. Locke,
Rousseau, and Hobbes were all right, in that they were looking at different
aspects of human nature. Even Rawls is correct that there is the rational
element. But the fact is that that is not the full picture. Which elements
do you pick in order to establish true human nature? The mixed bag means
that you can't derive from an analysis of human nature the ultimate
principles that you need. What you do need to solve this problem is
standards breaking in from the outside. If they are transcendent, if
they are created outside the human situation, they are validated by
the very God of the universe, then you can say regarding particular
laws, "These are not what they ought to be. These need to be changed
and brought into conformity with God's eternal standards."
This is why Law needs theology. Only theology can take you to those
ultimate standards which are not built up inductively by looking down
someone else's throat (or your throat) to find out what's going on inside,
but instead, take what God has already given as an absolute. The only
inalienable rights will have to be rights that God has created, because
if man creates them on any level, then man can take them away. That's
why Law needs theology.
Why Theology Needs Law
Now, let's look at the other side of the reversible reaction. Why does
theology need law? Because in a pluralistic age you can't just go out,
stand on a soap box with a long beard and a white robe, and say, "Lo,
here are the absolute, divine standards!" People will not accept
that simply because you say so, and they shouldn't, because there are
all sorts of kooks out there maintaining the same thing. Claiming divine
absolutes is a very facile operation. There is no problem in doing that
whatsoever. It becomes mandatory in a secular, pluralistic age, if you
want to provide absolute standards to a legal system, that you be able
to justify them.
One of the greatest skills within the law is the skill of evidence.
Evidence is a central discipline within the law, because legal systems
are dispute-resolution systems. When people cannot solve their intractable
disputes they go to court, so this can be handled in a fairly civilized
manner. Lawyers can be seen as substitutes for the parties, so that
instead of the parties bashing themselves over the heads to determine
who is the stronger, there then becomes (in substitute) a verbal bashing
which makes it possible to resolve the dispute with more pleasant consequences
for the society.
In order to resolve disputes in society by a legal system, you've first
got to find the facts. Then you bring the law to bear upon the facts.
So, lawyers have to have techniques for finding facts. The techniques
are the evidential techniques that make it possible to determine the
difference between what is fact and what isn't. Theology is not strong
in that area. Theology tends toward proclamation, tends toward the pulpit,
raised up above the level of the humble masses beneath. The idea is
that you simply present the truth, and people are supposed to take it.
Through much of Western history that's exactly the way it went because
there weren't any very significant alternatives offered. But now we
are in the modern, pluralistic world that caused the breakup of Natural
Law theory, and in this modern, pluralistic world, every body and his
brother maintains a different basic understanding of the universe. If
everybody just shouts at each other or tries to build higher pulpits
than the other person has, it really doesn't accomplish very much. It
becomes necessary to take these viewpoints and arbitrate them to determine
where the facts do lie, if anywhere, in these disputes. That's where
the law can help theology, in its method. It can get theology to a more
sophisticated and mature view of establishing facts. Now, I can't go
into all the details of how this all works, but I can give some illustrations.
Some Illustrations
First, law deals with probabilities. It does not deal with absolute
certainties or with mere possibilities. The significance of this is
that in arbitrating diverse religious claims, people invariably either
expect absolute certainty, and/or they will introduce any lame-brained
possibility imaginable. The pendulum swings from the extremes of an
alleged absolute certainty to mere possibility. Say in a discussion,
you present evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. A non-Christian
might ask, "Is that evidence 100% certain?" Well, no, it isnıt,
because that evidence is based on observation, and observations can
be mistaken. There is the possibility that there might be a problem
there. But there is strength to the testimony. The non-Christian responds,
"Aha! Iıve got you! It isnıt absolutely certain, and yet, you expect
me to make a 100% commitment to this. I will not commit myself 100%
unless I have 100% certainty." And you might leave with your apologetic
tail between your legs feeling immensely depressed.
But you shouldn't feel depressed at all. If you operated in terms of
legal reasoning you would be able to deal with that, because absolute
certainty is possible only where facts are not in the picture at all!
Absolute certainty occurs only in pure mathematics, deductive logic,
and tautologies, where the statement has the same predicate as the subject.
Those are realms of definition. The minute you enter the realm of fact
it is a matter of evidence--that's how courts work! When it is a civil
case, the judge says to the jury, preponderance of evidence will decide
the case. Weigh the evidence. If it's 51% for the plaintiff, he wins.
If it's 51% for the defendant, he wins. In a criminal case, which is
much more severe because of the consequences of it, the jury needs to
be convinced to a moral certainty beyond reasonable doubt. It is not
absolute certainty, it's moral certainty, and it is not where there
are no doubts at all. There can be reasonable doubts, but there cannot
be unreasonable doubts. The doubts that can operate here are in the
reasonable realm.
In the case of the resurrection argument, the non-Christian might say,
"Listen, isn't it possible that Jesus was a Martian, cleverly dressed
in a Jesus-suit, so that he was able to perform miracles like he did.
It's possible, isnıt it?" In a contingent universe, anything is
"possible," but we must look at the evidence. "But it's
possible! It's possible, therefore I don't need to accept Christ."
Suppose that went on in the law. If a murderer is caught with a bloody
axe in his hand, and the jury refuses to convict because of the possibility
that invisible Martians did it, the courts will not accept nonsense
like that in the slightest. The fact of the matter is that you've got
to go with the admitted evidence, and you must draw conclusions from
that. If you can take any possibility imaginable, then of course, all
logic falls. The whole universe crumbles under those circumstances.
The law of evidence can take us back to reasonable probabilities in
handling situations. But what about absolute commitment? When jury brings
in a guilty verdict in a murder case (in a jurisdiction that exercises
capital punishment), that murderer will 100% lose his head on the basis
of that probabilistic evidence.
This is part and parcel or ordinary life. When you cross a street you
check the probability of getting across safely. It is never 100% because
this is an area of fact. But if the probabilities look good you go across
the street, and you take 100% of yourself! All that Christianity asks
is that we act reasonably in terms of the weight of the evidence in
its behalf. And that's not any different from what all realms of life
expect. There is no absolute certainty of things going well in a marriage,
yet you make a 100% commitment after evaluating your relationship. In
the case of Christian faith, you are working on the basis of a high
level of probability for the evidence that God was in Christ. You commit
yourself to this by adding to the evidence the dimension of faith. Faith
jumps the gap between probability and certainty. Once you have been
willing to make that commitment, you enter into a personal relationship
with Christ. In terms of the concept of reasoning, you get immense help
from the law in the area of theology.
Finally, I'm going to illustrate this by a very concrete instance.
A few months ago in London's Inns of Court School of Law, I debated
the foremost English rationalist historian, G.A. Wells, Professor at
Berbeck College, University of London. Wells has written four books
on Jesus, and these are published by Prometheus Press in Buffalo, NY.
Anyway, the debate with Wells turned on questions of fact: Was Jesus
an historical person? Did His acts really occur, as set forth? Did He
really say what they claimed? And, is this sufficient for making a commitment
for eternity?
Wells, of course, answered all of these questions in the negative.
I employed a legal style of reasoning to deal with him, and I want to
give you several illustrations to show how this all worked. Take the
matter of the New Testament manuscripts--How good are the manuscripts?
Wells said the manuscripts are of no value whatsoever because we don't
have a sufficiently absolute basis for establishing them. Wells needed
careful instruction as to how probability works in historical scholarship.
We compare the strength of the case for the New Testament documents
with the strength for other historical materials which everyone accepts.
If it turns out that the case for the biblical documents is stronger
than the case for other historical material which everyone accepts,
then you cannot logically reject the New Testament documents. They should
have been accepted first, rather than rejecting them.
This points out the fact that if this the situation, in rejecting the
biblical documents, it is on some ground other than evidence. Of course,
that ground is a moral ground. If these documents are sound, and Jesus
turns out to be the Lord God of heaven and earth, you may be in big
trouble, and you can no longer function as the god of the universe.
You have been demoted and must conform to something. This is exactly
what autonomous man does not want. He wants to run the universe himself.
It has been said, first God created us in His image, and ever since,
we've been returning the compliment. I was able to show that the New
Testament documents are immensely better historically than the documents
we all accept. The documents of the classical world don't have the same
kind of solid bibliographical internal and external evidence in their
behalf as the documents of the New Testament. And that means that if
we accept the one, we must accept the other. It is obvious we can't
throw out our classical knowledge merely to be rid of Jesus Christ.
The lawyers who have looked at the New Testament documents have invariably
been willing to go with them.
A.N. Cherwin White said, I don't understand what the higher critics
are doing. I compare the evidence for the best known contemporaries
of Jesus and particularly the four documents which give evidence for
Tiberius Caesar, and I find that all four of these are inferior to the
four Gospels in terms of objective, historical criteria. I can't very
well get rid of Tiberius, and therefore, I must confront Jesus Christ.
Lord Haleshim, the Lord Chancellor of England (retired), came into the
faith much like C.S. Lewis, dragged into the kingdom by the sheer weight
of the evidence. He was involved in a forgery case when he asked himself,
could anyone have gotten away with literary forgery where the New Testament
was concerned? The answer was absolutely not! Why? Because of the presence
of hostile witnesses. These documents were in circulation while people
were still alive who had been instrumental in the crucifixion of Jesus.
They would not have stood by and allowed that kind of material to circulate
without refuting it, if the material had been forged, altered, or turned
into the faith-experiences of the early church. The Jewish religious
leaders would have gone after them, hammer-and-tongs. They never could
have pulled it off. Haleshim examines this and says that the only consistent
conclusions we can reach are that these documents are worthy of belief.
Take the resurrection itself. Legal reasoning applied to the resurrection
is found in Frank Morrison's Who Moved the Stone? Morrison says,
if Jesus did not rise from the dead, there must be an explanation for
the missing body. There were only three interest groups here: the Romans,
the Jewish religious leaders, and the disciples. Romans and Jewish religious
leaders are not going to move the stone, for it is against their interests.
The Romans did not want more of a fuss, which would have certainly resulted
if they had taken the body from its burial place. The Jewish religious
leaders would have been the last people on the face of the earth to
take the body, because then rumors would have started that Jesus rose
from the dead. The documents tell us they were worried about this, and
they asked the Romans to put the guard on the tomb to prevent it. As
for the disciples, they aren't going to steal the body, and then go
out and proclaim that Jesus rose from the dead, and get executed for
it. They would not be willing to be executed knowing that what they
presented was untrue. There have been many deluded people through the
centuries who have been willing to die for things they thought were
true that weren't, but that is not the case here. We are talking about
people who allegedly knew that what they were proclaiming was false
and still went out and died for it.
There is a doctrine in legal evidence: the thing speaks for itself.
Let us say, that you go to the hospital to have your left leg amputated.
So you go under the anesthetic, and when you come out in the hospital
room, your left leg has indeed been amputated, but so has your right
arm. Now, you were not able to see anything during the operation. In
a case like that, does the burden of proof lay on you to prove that
the hospital staff did something they shouldn't have? Not on your life!
The thing speaks for itself. There was negligence, and the negligence
was under the sole control of the defendant, and you as the plaintiff
were entirely passive. Under those circumstances, the burden of proof
shifts, so that it is necessary for the wretched hospital and its staff
to show why there is now an extra limb in their supply cabinet. Now,
in the case of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, nobody was present
at the moment of resurrection. But Jesus was assuredly dead before he
was put in the tomb (Read the excellent 1986 article in the Journal
of the American Medical Association on the examination of the crucifixion),
and for forty days after Easter morning he was assuredly alive. He ate
fish and allowed Thomas to touch the nail prints in his hands. This
was a physical, concrete resurrection of the same person. If he was
dead at point A, and alive again at point B, the thing speaks for itself,
and the burden of proof lies on the person who says, "There ainıt
been no resurrection!" The evidence is on your side, not on his
side.
Well, where does this lead? It leads in the following direction. People
in theology must not operate in a vacuum, only reading theologians.
Or, Christians must not operate in a vacuum, just coming into the warm
womb of their church. Theologians and Christian believers need to have
contact with the disciplines that can help in the defense of the faith.
Apologetics does not exist in a vacuum. This is the biggest problem
with presuppositionalists, who think that they can start from a clear
a priori and deduce everything from it. Since the Christian faith is
a matter of fact, there is no self-evident starting point of that sort,
so their whole system falls apart. More than that, they are isolated
from what is going on elsewhere.
The law is one illustration of fields that can be of tremendous help
in the defense of the Christian faith. At the same time, all of these
fields in their fundamental principles, are in desperate need of absolutes.
These fields lack absolutes, and the absolutes can only come from the
transcendental source of theology--they can only come from God himself.
And so theology, or the average Christian, can go to people in other
areas of life and tell them, "You have been worshipping unknown
gods. Let me tell you should properly be worshipping." Thereby
supplying the ultimate foundations that those fields need. And these
same fields can simultaneously offer bridges by which the Christian
faith can demonstrate its factual validity to those who so desperately
need it.§
Dr. John Warwick Montgomery holds eight earned degrees
in philosophy, theology and law, and is the author of more than forty
books, including History & Christianity, Faith Founded On
Fact, Human Rights & Human Dignity, and The Shaping
of America.
