J Warner Wallace on Cold-Case Christianity & Christmas

tonygill — Sun, 14 Dec 2014 09:00:54 +0000

What could a homicide detective, who was an ardent atheist early in his life, tell us about the historical veracity of The Bible? We invite J. Warner Wallace, a real-life detective and author of Cold-Case Christianity, to explain how he came to applying police forensics to the study of Christianity and how it affected his life.

Following a bit of chatter about college football,* as both Jim and Tony are alumni of UCLA, we dive into Jim’s personal history focusing initially on his career as a homicide detective. He talks about his family’s history of being police officers and how he gravitated to detective work and cold cases. A number of his investigations have been shown on shows such as Dateline. Jim talks about a few recent cases he investigated for all of you murder mystery fans (like Tony). Our conversation also covers Jim’s conversion to Christianity beginning around the age 35. While an atheist, he attended church with his wife every now and then, but he started to become curious about the historical nature of Jesus and began employing his investigative skills to look at the evidence not of whether Jesus ever existed (which he did accept), but about Christ’s divinity. Jim notes that his journey to Christianity was a gradual process and he notes some of the barriers he had to overcome to finally yield to belief and become a church planter. We share some general speculations on why some atheists become religious.

We then move into how Jim wrote his book Cold-Case Christianity and some of the contents therein. Jim mentions a few of his influences including Lee Stroebel, and Sean McDowell. This is the part of the interview where we go over what it takes to be a detective and the different kinds of evidence that are needed to convince a jury in a legal proceeding, with an emphasis on indirect (or circumstantial) evidence. We cover several of Jim’s ten important lessons for every detective and how they relate to Christianity. Jim discusses how conspiracies are difficult to maintain and how his examination of both the authors of the Gospel and the Church Fathers would have had a difficult time keeping their stories consistent. We talk about the pressure on individuals to recant their stories about Jesus and how their refusal factors into Jim’s overall body of evidence. He then applies this methodology to the “birth narrative” — i.e. the Christmas story. While noting that Jesus probably not born on December 25, he nonetheless says there is reasons to believe that many aspects of the story are true including an interesting rhetorical reference about the “son of Mary.”

Our interview concludes with what Jim has learned over the past two years following the writing of his book. He shares some thoughts on the importance of communication and challenging individuals to really interrogate their religious beliefs and not just accept them as true because of how you were raised. Recorded: November 10, 2014.

*Tony asks Jim for his prediction of the 2014 UCLA-USC game and he forecasts a Bruins win. He must be a good detective since the final score was 38-20 in favor of the team from Westwood!

Jim Papandrea on the Church Fathers & Patristic Exegesis

tonygill — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 08:00:11 +0000

Who were the early Church Fathers? How did they interpret the Scripture? And how did their interpretations change over time and shape Christianity? Prof. Jim Papandrea of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (on the campus of Northwestern University) takes up these questions in a fascinating discussion of “patristic exegesis,” or how the early Church Fathers understood and interpreted the Scriptures. Our conversation begins with an examination of who qualifies as the early Church Fathers and whether or not this list is consistent across different denominations. We also chat about the difficulties early Christian bishops and theologians had in trying to create a relatively unified doctrine of the faith, though Jim reveals that there was much more agreement and harmony that one (particularly your host) would think. Dr. Papandrea then walks us through what he defines as the four main phases (or eras) of patristic exegesis, showing how the different eras varied by the degree to which they favored literal/historical or more allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures. Interestingly, Jim makes that point that most of the disagreement in interpretation tended to revolve more around the Old Testament, although the divine nature of Jesus was also up for debate by different theological factions. In this discussion, we talk about the role that the First Council of Nicaea played in solidifying Church doctrine and how different theological schools, notably Arianism, reacted to the Nicene Creed. Jim makes the case that patristic exegesis tended to move in more allegorical directions during the latter second century through the fifth century, but then moved back towards a more historical-contextual (or some might say “literal”) meaning in subsequent centuries, eventually reaching a balance between allegory and more historical interpretations in the fifth century. Prof. Papandrea provides some examples regarding interpretations that are overly-allegorical. Throughout this discussion, we touch on some specific Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, and Augustine. The podcast also veers in some other interesting directions, examining whether or not Augustine was the patron saint of the hippopotamus, if Christians can now safely eat weasels, and the profound implications relating to clothing tags at Sunday services. It is also revealed what theatrical performance both Jim and Tony were in during high school, and that they were “neighbors” in Los Angeles without ever realizing it. Recorded: July 11, 2011.

Research On Religion » gnosticism

J Warner Wallace on Cold-Case Christianity & Christmas

Jim Papandrea on the Church Fathers & Patristic Exegesis