John Warwick Montgomery Quotes

To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.

One of the biggest difficulties in our contemporary society is that we try to locate the evil in somebody else and then we try to get rid of him. The police are pigs or the students are worthless, and so on and so on. The Marxists are the devils or the Republicans are the devils or you name it. We try to isolate the evil and then get rid of it. But the teaching of the Bible is that we are thoroughly entrenched in this ourselves, so we can't toss rocks at someone else; we have to see the extent to which the moral ambiguities fall directly on us. We need forgiveness; and only when we receive it do we have our lives cleaned up so that we can start seeing situations accurately.

...historical and literary scholarship continues to follow Aristotle’s eminently just dictum that the benefit of doubt is to be given to the document. This means that one must listen to the claims of the document under analysis, and not assume fraud or error unless the author disqualifies himself by contradictions or known factual inaccuracies. (John Warwick Montgomery, Where Is History Going? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1969), 46.)

Yet, unlike the causal specificity that obtains for microevolutionary processes, origin-of-life researchers have yet to specify the chemical pathways that supposedly originated life. For instance, Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, admits that “no serious scientist would currently claim that a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life is at hand.”5 Self-organizational theorist Stuart Kauffman is bolder yet: “Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows.

Science must not degenerate into applied materialistic philosophy. But this is exactly what it does at the hands of today's alchemists, namely, the materialistic evolutionists who hold their views not because of empirical evidence but because of a prior metaphysical commitment to materialism.

We may not like the Jesus of the historical documents; but like him or not, we meet him there as a divine being on whom our personal destiny, both in time and in eternity, depends.