The Resurrection with a Cold-Case Detective Part 1

Answering Mormons Questions by Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson deals with 36 commonly asked questions by your LDS friends and neighbors. It's a great resource for Christians who want to share their faith with friends and loved ones.

Be sure to pick up your copy today at your favorite Christian bookstore. Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a biblical perspective. Viewpoint on Mormonism is sponsored by Mormonism Research Ministry. Since 1979, Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry. And with me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM.

But we're also pleased to have with us J. Warner Wallace. Now, let me give you a little bit of an introduction. We've had Jim on the show before, but we wanted to have him again, and you're going to find out why. But let me give you a little bit of a background. J. Warner Wallace is a Dateline.

That's an MBC program. He's a Dateline-featured cold case homicide detective. He continues to consult on cold case investigations while serving as a senior fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He's also an adjunct professor of apologetics at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California, and Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, as well as a faculty member at Summit Ministries in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Now, Jim, you also are a very popular speaker, a bestselling author.

Your works include Cold Case Christianity, God's Crime Scene, and Forensic Faith. And those three books are also in a kids' edition. Yeah, for eight to 13-year-olds, we thought this is the age that really starts to have the most penetrating questions. So we wanted to make sure we had a version for them. Well, we're glad to have you on today, Jim, and the reason why is we're going to discuss something that really isn't directly related to Mormonism per se. But with Easter coming up, we thought, let's look at a booklet that you wrote.

It's called Alive! A Cold Case Approach to the Resurrection. And the reason why we wanted to do this is because, as we've mentioned on this show a number of times, we see a lot of people coming out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for a number of reasons, but primarily because of historical and theological things that they've run across that have shown them that Mormonism cannot be true. But what's sad about this, Jim, is we've seen them leave not only Mormonism, which of course we want to see happen, but they don't even seem to give any time of day for the claims of Christianity, one of the most important claims of the Christian faith, of course, being the resurrection, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, which we find a little bit odd because The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially affirms that they do believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ. So what that tells us is that a lot of Latter-day Saints, while claiming to be Christian as members, leave apparently, what would you say, Jim, never owning the resurrection of Jesus?

What would you say to that? Well, gosh, a lot of it, I think, is due to the fact that, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. I think a lot of times people discover that they've been lied to or that they've been told something that's untrue and they believe something that's untrue, especially if it has such a robust expression in their own lives. If you went to the ward every Sunday, if this is something your parents believed and talked about, if something that's that rooted in your upbringing, let's say, is not true, that you probably feel like, I'm not going to be fooled again. I'm not going to trust any of that nonsense because if this thing that I was so sure was true isn't true, why would I step off in that direction again?

But I always look at it this way. If you had been raised by parents and you're now 25 years old and you discover that the entire life you were raised by your parents, your mom told you that she was your mom, but she wasn't really your mom. She just raised you. She adopted you and she raised you and you discovered that whole thing was a lie? You want my birth mom? Would that then cause you to reject looking for your birth mom or knowing that there was a birth mom? I mean, if you've got good reason to believe you've got a mom, this person who's told you that she was your mom but isn't should not keep you from looking for your real mom.

And I think a lot of us look at this issue as far as I get it. My dad remarried after I was probably about four or five. And his second wife quickly became a Mormon and I have six half brothers and half sisters who were all raised LDS. As they discovered, some of them discovered it wasn't true, two or three of them, they really went through a season of complete atheism and agnosticism because they felt like nothing is true about God. If this version is not true about God. But then at some point, I think there's enough good reason to believe that God exists. And then you're trying to figure out which of the views of God that are out there is actually accurate. So I'm a Christian because I was an atheist until I was 35. And as I became interested in looking at scripture to see if any of these worldviews were true, I examined Christianity at the same time I examined Mormonism because I had Mormons in my family who brought me a Book of Mormon.

But for me, I'm like the investigator that I am. So I read through the Book of Mormon, Doctors and Covenants, Pearl of Grace. I wanted to know all of it.

I wanted to know what is every expression of this. And I didn't know at the time because I was an atheist. I didn't know. I mean, Book of Mormon sounded relatively similar to the King James version of the New Testament, which I was reading for the first time as well. And so I didn't have the discernment. So I just simply applied that test that I talk about in Cold Case Christianity, the test that determines if a witness is reliable. I applied it both to the New Testament Gospel authors and to the Book of Mormon simultaneously. And it really confirmed that the reliability of the New Testament Gospel authors at the same time that it deconstructed the story offered by Joseph Smith.

And so I always say that I became a Christian at 35 at the same time that I became a not Mormon, because I knew that that process led me in one direction and protected me from error in the other. Well, you know, you say in your book, Alive, under the heading, Investigating the Resurrection, and you talk about your atheism. You said, I was a committed atheist when I first heard a pastor preach a sermon that described the resurrection of Jesus. This pastor seemed to actually believe Jesus rose from the dead and was still alive today. I assumed it was just another example of, quote unquote, blind faith, another well-intentioned church leader believing something for which he had no supporting evidence. Worse yet, I suspected he possessed an unreasonable faith and trusted something in spite of the evidence. Now, you talk a lot in your books about your background as a detective and using evidence and to draw conclusions from that evidence. I wish so many Latter-day Saints who have come out of their church would do the same thing.

I guess what I'm trying to ask is, how can we use something like what is in this booklet that you've written, Alive, and hopefully try to convince the Latter-day Saint that abandoning the Christian faith is not something they should be considering? Well, I think what we want in the end is a view of the world that describes the world the way it really is, that gives us insight, that allows us to use it as a filter when making decisions, when trying to determine what is the nature of humans, what is the nature of the most important worldview questions we all have. How do we get here? Why is it all messed up?

And how do we fix it? Those are important worldview issues. And modernism is similar to Christianity in the sense that it makes a claim, a theistic claim about God that is rooted in an event in history.

This is unusual. Think about it. If I was like the Baha'i and I was reading the writings of Baha'u'llah, these are like wisdom statements, like proverbial wisdom statements that I can either accept or reject based on if they resonate with me, if I have a sense that there's some spiritual connection to these words. But there's nothing about the history of Baha'u'llah which is going to confirm His deity or confirm His prophetic authority. Look, in our view, an event occurred in history.

It's not like fortune cookie kind of theism. This is an event that we could test because it's connected to an event locked in history, the resurrection. Now, Mormonism also hinges on the resurrection.

If Jesus didn't rise from the grave, if that's not true, then the entire thing is a force. But it adds an entirely new set of facts, an entire thousand year history in the North American continent. And so what I would say is I would test all of it. What you're going to discover, for example, is that you can confirm and verify facts and ideas and notions and claims in the New Testament in a way that you cannot verify them in the Book of Mormon.

And that directed me, like how much layering should I accept here? There are a lot of people who, after the apostles made their claims as eyewitnesses about Jesus, who added to the text. There's an entire Gnostic history of the non-canonical gospels before the fourth, fifth century in which people were already changing the story and adding details to the story. And it was up to those who were investigating these claims to determine which of the core facts are true and which is the stuff that's just fallacious late edition stuff.

This has been going on for 2,000 years. And the same thing happens with the Book of Mormon. Yet another additional set of data built on the core claims, and just like those Gnostic non-canonical gospels that occurred early in history, we have to be able to say, well, no, no, no, that stuff that we added late, I can't trust it.

I have to be able to trust the stuff that is closest to the real action, dated the earliest, and written the closest to the region in which the events occurred. Those are the four canonical gospels. Anything else that's added later is written either hundreds or centuries later. Hundreds of years or thousands of years later, as you see, even people today, there's a whole new movement of progressive Christianity which tries to change the gospel so that it no longer has the meaning it had from originally, but is now being morphed toward all kinds of either social justice or whatever it is that your inclination is.

People will try to twist the gospel toward their means. So I guess what I'm saying is, in the end, we have to have a detective's perspective. If someone is telling you the truth about what happened in the crime scene, and then 10 years later someone comes up and tells you a lie, how am I able to discern between the original truth claims and the late lies? The fact that there are late lies does not mean I should ignore the original truth claims, like, okay, then I can't trust anything.

No, no, no. I have to be able to separate the lies from the truth. You would do that, by the way, if it was anything else. If someone were trying to sell you a car, and they were the third owner, you would try to separate the original truth claims from the late lies. And I think to do that in our Christian worldview is entirely appropriate.

Do not abandon the endeavor altogether, but instead do the work that's required to separate truth from error. Jim, you wrote a booklet that we're talking about from 2014, and it's titled, Alive! A Cold Case Approach to the Resurrection. And we've ordered three cases of those. They come in sets of ten.

My wife is going to be handing those out to some of her co-workers. We're pretty excited about being able to do that with your booklet, but why do you think taking a cold case approach to the resurrection is going to work for people like yourself and many others who are basing truth on the evidence? Well, what I want to do is offer a strategy called Abductive Reasoning, which we use in every death scene to determine what kind of death we have. Not every death scene is a murder scene. I, lots of times, get called out to death scenes, and I get to go home because it's not a murder. It's a suicide a natural or an accidental.

It's something that is not going to require a criminal investigation. But you don't know that at first. You get there, and you've got a dead guy laying in the room, and you've got to figure out, okay, well, how do I know if this dead guy just didn't die one of the other three ways that aren't criminal? And so we use a process called Abductive Reasoning. In tomorrow's show, we're going to continue this thought because this idea of Abductive Reasoning is a major part of your booklet, Alive, and I think it's something that's very intriguing and something that our listeners really need to know. So tomorrow, we're going to continue our conversation with Jim Wallace. He's the author of the booklet, Alive, as well as the author of Cold Case Christianity, a detective who uses his skills in showing that the biblical message is worth believing. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism.