Journal: Global Journal of Classical Theology
Volume: GJCT 17:3 (Mar 2021)
Article: A Note From Our Editor: “In Re William Lane Craig”
Author: John Warwick Montgomery

A Note From Our Editor: “In Re William Lane Craig”

John Warwick Montgomery

Your editor attended the annual national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, held (November, 2018) in Denver, Colorado. The theme was “The Holy Spirit,” and I presented a paper on that subject in a session with four others, including Angus Menuge and J. P. Moreland. As those two names suggest, the Evangelical Philosophical Society meets simultaneously with the E.T.S., and the featured E.P.S. speaker was William Lane Craig, presenting a defense of the vicarious atonement.

Many moons ago, I was Craig’s first apologetics professor at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. In subsequent years, he has become one of the leading evangelical philosophers. In Scripture, we are given the Pauline model—that wherever Christ is preached, we are to rejoice (Philippians 1:15–18). And so I rejoice in Craig’s debates and publications; but I am uncomfortable with his style and approach. I was particularly bothered by his E.P.S. address, based on his little book, The Atonement (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Let me explain my misgivings.

The lecture, like most of Craig’s presentations, was dense to the extreme and reminded me of the scholastic arguments characteristic of medieval theology. I go with the Wittgensteinian adage that “anything that can be said can be said clearly.” To be sure, this is a problem with most professional philosophers, but if one is also doing apologetics (as is Craig), extreme care needs to be exercised so that the results are more like the writings of C. S. Lewis than those of Thomas Aquinas. (See the section titled, “Apologetics Philosophy” in my article, “Apologetics for the 21^st Century,” included in my Christ As Centre and Circumference.)

On one occasion years ago, I attended a Craig presentation focusing on metaphysical questions such as the relationship of time to creation. (Craig loves these issues, but I have never found a single non-Christian whose objections to the faith lie at that level.) To Craig’s irritation, I cited Saint Augustine, who, when dealing with the question as to what God was doing before he made heaven and earth, cited someone who responded facetiously, “Preparing hell for those who pry into mysteries” (Confessions, XI, 12). (Cf. James Fodor’s overstated critique, Unreasonable Faith: How William Lane Craig Overstates the Case for Christianity [Hypatia Press, 2018].)

Craig’s atonement paper focused particularly on legal analogies to vicarious punishment and substitution. Craig is not a lawyer or legally trained, and in his book he thanks an Edinburgh law professor for “directing him to legal literature on various subjects” and a legal practitioner “for help i...