J Warner Wallace Talk, "Cold Case Christianity" 4/09/13

• John Vandivier

J Warner Wallace gave his talk tonight. My wife reported on the talk live for The Houstonian, SHSU's school paper. She used a cool bit of technology called CoveritLive which allowed her to take notes and post them live as the presentation progressed. The notes are recorded <a href="http://www.houstonianonline.com/a-e/cold-case-christian-speaks-at-shsu-live-event-1.2822207#.UWTW0qIcdBE">here.

Some of the highlights include:
-Two main branches of apologetics are evidentialist and presuppositional. Wallace specializes in evidentialist apologetics.
-Cold cases are run off of indirect evidence, also called circumstantial evidence.
-Something may be "possible" but not "reasonable."
-Christianity can be argued to be reasonable, or true beyond reasonable doubt.
-Circumstantial evidence can build a case beyond a reasonable doubt.
-Circumstantial evidence and direct evidence are the only two kinds of evidence. Sometimes indirect is preferable because, for example, an eyewitness may lie.
-Luke wrote Acts before the destruction of the temple and did not mention the deaths of James or Paul. This indicates he wrote Acts prior to 60 AD, when James was martyred because he would not have failed to mention such a great event, seeing as how he records the deaths of much less influential others.
-Acts is Luke's second book. By the time of the writing of Acts, the book of Luke is already seen as mainline Christian scripture. If Acts was written in 60 AD then Luke would have been written about 53 AD (his estimate, other reasons too.)
-Luke was based on Mark, which was written even earlier. Mark is argued to have been written in the 40s AD. This makes the original Gospel very early and therefore reliably eyewitness, not simply recounting.

Wallace argued that the Apostles were present, verified, accurate and unbiased. The following video is part of the same talk but given at a different time and location. His talking points and the slides used are nearly the same ones we saw though:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUpXpwoGlfI&w=560&h=315]


Be sure to check out <a href="http://pleaseconvinceme.com/">his website, the <a href="http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7973">Stand to Reason website whom he is partnered with, and <a href="http://coldcasechristianity.com/">his book's website!