John inspired me to see each sermon as an apologetic opportunity.
It was September 11th, 2008, and as the curate (priest in charge of pastoral care), I was scrambling between a 9/11 memorial service at the local precinct, a new parent meet-and-greet at our preschool, and a 4 p.m. funeral service for Mary Schumacher, beloved wife of 52 years of our longest serving vestryman and warden, Bob Schumacher. I was told to be at St. George’s Church promptly at 3 p.m. to greet the family and to assist “her brother John with the liturgy. A Lutheran minister-turned-lawyer who would be preaching.” As an Episcopal priest, I had interacted with plenty of warm mainline pastors, including Lutheran, where everything would be easygoing, and we would receive a banal funeral sermon filled with platitudes. I arrived in the sacristy shortly after 3 p.m. “John” had arrived at 2:30 and was very short with me because he had already found four errors in the bulletin. He also had a question about the number and placement of the eulogies in the service. I had no idea who I was dealing with, but at that moment, I realized I was not dealing with your standard mainline Lutheran fare.
The service went on without a hitch. I observed in the bulletin his full name was Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, along with the entire alphabet following his last name. As I listened to Dr. Montgomery preach, I realized I was listening to one of the finest funeral sermons I would ever hear. In fact, his sermon remains the basis for most of my funeral sermons to this very day. He weaved images from literature throughout his sermon, hypnotizing the very WASPY mainline congregation that had gathered. Then, with their full attention, he began to focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This was followed by the crescendo of the sermon: because our faith is founded on this fact, we can all trust his sister Mary into the beloved hands of our savior, Jesus Christ, who had died and risen again. His gospel focus and the presentation of its validity through literary and legal apologetics made the entire liturgical experience all the more rich.
At its heart, the evidential approach to apologetics struck me as both winsome and pastoral.
I will never forget our next interaction because it changed my life. At the reception following the funeral, I saw him enjoying the wine and canapé, and I timidly approached him and said, “Dr. Montgomery, I want to thank you for your sermon. Thank you for preaching the gospel today.” To this, he responded, not with a nod of acknowledgment or a thank you, but with, “And what, my dear boy, would you say is the gospel?” With a huge gulp, I proceeded to echo St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, “ For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.” To which he retorted, “Thank God! I thought you were going to talk about something ridiculous like loving each other or the kingdom.” We both laughed and began to talk about theology, which culminated in an invitation to join him in Strasbourg at the Academy the following summer.
As an evangelical Episcopalian, my apologetics had been shaped by the various schools of reformed presuppositionalism and was defined by three characteristics: 1. It sought first and foremost to debate one’s worldview and bring them to my own. 2. It was primarily informed by philosophical arguments rather than grounded in the Biblical texts. 3. If the apologetic was successful, it typically ended in a generic or general theism. (As a result of arguing for hours about worldview, typically, everyone was too mentally exhausted to go any further than general theism).
Under the mentorship of John Warwick Montgomery, I have been shaped by his teaching and writings on evidential apologetics. I was taught to emphasize the positive evidence that exists from archeology, fulfilled messianic prophecy, and jurisprudence in favor of the truth of Christianity. At its heart, the evidential approach to apologetics struck me as both winsome and pastoral. Evidential apologetics demonstrates how beliefs that are shared by Christians and non-Christians alike convey the truth of Christianity. Such beliefs get us not just to God but (quoting Luther, to shock all of the nice nondenominational Christians at the Academy), as Montgomery would say, “the God who suckled from the breast of Mary.”
The evidential apologetics I learned from John Warwick Montgomery also empowered my preaching. John inspired me to see each sermon as an apologetic opportunity. I remember him telling me that a lack of evidential apologetics often leads to preaching filled with what he termed “theological fuddlement.” The evidential apologetics that John taught assured preachers like myself that our faith is not blind, nor is it naive. Therefore, to speak of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as anything other than fact is terribly harmful in an age desperate for the truthful and triumphant cry, “The Lord is truly risen indeed! Alleluia!” John wrote it best in his book Faith Founded on Fact:
Let’s stop the fuddlement. Let’s go beyond A. H. Ackley’s “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within in my heart” and proclaim to a lost society that Jesus lives in our hearts because he first of all rose in the very history of which we are embedded. (Montgomery, 79).
This last July, I had the opportunity to return to Strasbourg, along with my friends Kurt Winrich and David Brewer, and see John teach his final classes. On one occasion, I escorted him to the lectern, and, although extremely frail, he was still as sharp as a tack. John taught for several hours straight. Nevertheless, he was resting confident in the knowledge that the case had already been won. “And what, my dear boy, would you say is the gospel?” Jesus has truly risen from the dead, and because of that, not only John but you and I stand before the judge with a positive verdict. The verdict is not simply “Not guilty,” but on account of the shed blood of Jesus Christ for sinners in real history, we are completely and totally innocent. That is the gospel. That is our faith founded on fact.
