Snapshots of My Heart

Alright, stick with me for one minute. I believe in the God of the Bible (God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit). I believe that Jesus came to earth on a mission to save our broken world and redeem me from my sin (along with all humanity). I believe he lived a perfect life, performed many miracles, rose from the dead, reigns in heaven, and is coming back soon to take his Church home.

Hold up! Look at all of those things I just said I believe. They are wild! Many of the events I just mentioned are supernatural and so, by definition, are difficult or impossible to measure or explain. Believe me, I see that.

Growing up in a generation that primarily sees life through the glasses of philosophical naturalism (a view that exclusively values properties and causes that can be confirmed and measured by science) I have to defend my faith regularly, mostly to myself. I do not like being fooled. I want to know the arguments that can be made against the Bible and the God it describes. I also want to know what defense the Bible, history, science, archaeology, and philosophy can make to argue for the scriptures and the God they describe. I want to face every tough question that comes up because if the Bible is true (as I believe it is), it changes everything in beautiful ways.

Cold-Case Christianity is an excellent resource for examining the reliability of the New Testament. The author, J. Warner Wallace, walks his readers through the investigations he made as a skeptic in his thirties.

Wallace was working as a homicide detective who specialized in cold-case homicide investigations, looking into cases that were years or decades old where the original investigation team had been unable to find or convict the killer. One of Wallace’s tasks was to examine all of the old eyewitness reports and to weed out any that were unreliable. Every eyewitness report has to acceptably answer at least four questions before it can be considered trustworthy.

1. Were they there? Was the witness actually present at the scene?
2. Are they corroborated? Can the witness’s story be corroborated by other evidence?
3. Are they accurate? Does the witness’s story stay consistent?
4. Are they biased? Does the witness hold any biases that would compel him/her to withhold or highlight certain pieces of information?

When Wallace decided to investigate the claims of Christianity, he centered his examination on the New Testament. Specifically, he wanted to determine whether the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John could be trusted as eyewitness accounts. Much to his surprise, he eventually concluded that they could.

I appreciated learning from Wallace’s unique perspective. I was surprised to see the overlap between tools that he used in his work as a detective and tools that he used in his study of the gospels. I came away wanting to do more research of my own.

Reading Cold-Case Christianity certainly did not answer all of my questions about the gospels. In fact, it introduced me to some questions I had never thought to ask before. I don’t think Wallace would be disappointed to hear that, though. If I tried to summarize his message in a few words, it would look like this:

Bring your questions

One and all

Skeptic

Christian

Doubter

Student

~

Come near

Sit here

And we will look together

At the questions

In front of us

~

Don’t hold back

Bear down

With all the weight of your uncertainty

And we will see if this little Book

Will hold up

~

The God I know is big enough for questions