Interview with J. Warner Wallace | Rapp Report Weekly 0009 | Striving for Eternity

Introduction and Why J. Warner Wallace Joins the Show

Welcome to The Wrap Report with Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity. For more content, or to request a speaker or seminar for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

All right. Well, welcome to another edition of the weekly edition of The Wrap Report. And today I have with me a special guest, and we are gonna give actually not only some information that he and I worked on some together, but I will say that for The Wrap Report, we will have some exclusive content later on in the show.

So you're gonna want to make sure you pay attention because there's some big things going on with the Striving for Eternity and this podcast. But I want to welcome on none other than J. Warner Wallace.

I'll just call him Jim. Actually, I should ask, why do you go by J. Warner Wallace? I'll first ask that.

Well, my grandfather's name was Warner, and that's my middle name. But there's a Jim Wallace from Sojourners in Washington, D .C., that if I do radio and podcasting and things like that when I was on different shows, they would confuse me for him.

So I started to change the name just so I wouldn't be confused for Jim Wallace from Sojourners. He spells his name differently. He is W-A-L-L-I-S. I am an A-C-E at the end of my name. But on the radio, you can't tell that.

So that's why I ended up changing the name.

And I think a mutual friend of ours, someone you know better than me, though, is Greg Koukla has something to do with that, right?

Oh, yes. I usually I sit in for him when he's gone. And if I do that and I introduce myself as Jim Wallace, then people will say like, you know, next week, Jim Wallace will be hosting the show. And they would say, really, you're pretty open minded, Greg, that you would have because we're pretty polarized in terms of where we would stand on certain issues.

And so he said, you all told me a long time ago, I said, if you're going to continue to do this, you're going to have to change your name. So I wrote the first book. I did change the name to J. Warner Wallace.

And Jim Wallace is a name that is a longtime name in the Los Angeles Police Department, where you're originally from.

Yeah, in our agency, you know, I work in a suburb here in Los Angeles County. It's called the city of Torrance. And so we're the third largest municipality in this area. And so my dad started here in 1961.

He has the same name I have. My son is still working here. We have one open case. I still want to work. So I hope to get that done here in the next couple of years. So, yes, we've had a 57 year tradition of being able to answer the phone if somebody calls looking for Jim Wallace at our agency.

So, yeah, it's been kind of fun.

Has anyone ever called there and gotten, looking for your father or for you and getting either you or your son?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

As a matter of fact, when I first started as a detective, I would call around and people would, you know, if I was talking to an officer who had retired or talking to somebody who my dad had dealt with in the past, they would always assume I was him.

I don't think that's probably happening as now.

It could be happening to Jimmy.

I don't know. Maybe that does happen. And sometimes I've done cases where my dad was a part of the case. I work cold cases. So I work old unsolved murders. And if my dad was part of the investigation team back in the day, well, his name is going to be on paperwork.

And so people will see, how could that be? I mean, you wrote this report in 1979. Well, now my dad wrote that report. So, I mean, I've always asked, you know, do I look so old that you could think for a second that I wrote that report in 19, I guess I do, because you wrote this report in 1979.

So I don't think I look that old. I guess I guess I do.

Cold Cases, Evidence, and Staying in Your Lane

So you you're a cold case detective and we're going to get back to it because you did a book with sort of with that title, but but you have 20 years and if I remember correctly, you never lost a case.

Well, yeah, I mean, that always sounds good, but the reality is that, you know, if you're going to take a case to the D .A., you, for the most part, taking the case is the cream of the crop. You know, the D .A.'s are elected officials.

And so they want to be able to run on a great record. They want to, at the end of four years, be able to say that they, you know, they win 97 .9 percent of all their cases. And they do because they only file about 40 percent of what is presented to them.

So they kind of cut the bad cases out early. So if you get a case filed with the D .A. and that's one of the kind of difficult things about it is that if they're only filing the cases, there are slam dunks because they have to run on their record.

It makes it hard if you were somebody who would say, for example, you had a heart to do defense work and you think, I want to defend people who are who are being falsely accused. Well, the problem with the system is, is that they file cases that are really, you know, I have a hard time getting the case filed.

If it does get filed, that's a case that probably is going to be a hard case to defend because, you know, the ones that were easy to defend, they didn't file to begin with. So so a lot of this is a matter of, you know, how the system works.

But so to say that I never lost, it sounds good, but the reality of it is that there were several cases they just wouldn't file. So, so all those losses.

Right. So, yeah, well, those would be those just wouldn't count.

Yeah. I'm not going to count those.

But you have an experience as as a detective. You have a way of pursuing investigations and things that really has influenced your life as a Christian and the way you approach Christianity, apologetics and your books.

Yeah, I mean, I try to I learned a long time ago that that, you know, everyone has a gift that God has given them some some attribute of their character, some set of life experiences, maybe even some opportunities to be educated in certain areas.

And I'm not going to come out. I have a master's degree in theological studies, but I don't have really any pedigree as an academic. I'm not I'm not somebody who's a textual analyst. I'm not somebody who's got a degree in textual criticism.

I'm not a theologian, a historian. That's just not who I am. What I'm I'm a guy who has been taking, you know, for 30 years now has been looking at events in the past. These are murders and saying, hey, if you have no access to any eyewitnesses, maybe not even access to the people who wrote the reports 35 years ago, would you still be able to put the thing together?

Would you still be able to figure out what happened? Would you still be able to identify a suspect and get that guy convicted? And so that's that's a very kind of, you know, limited I've always known that my value to the church was going to be to to be able to kind of help people understand the nature of evidence, how we make these cases.

Also, I know that the culture is fascinating. No one's doing TV shows about historians and theologians. They just aren't. I mean, I think it's fascinating, but I don't think the culture is kind of caught on yet.

But they are doing shows about doctors and firemen and detectives. So I knew that if I could kind of show how these principles could relate to the stuff that really historians and textual critics and these kinds of folks are usually using these similar tool sets, I knew we could actually draw people into the investigation in a way that maybe we wouldn't be able to do it if we stayed purely academic.

And so that's why I stay in my lane. You know, I don't I don't try to step out of my lane. I if there's if it's not an issue that I can bring, I can shed some light on it by way of showing how a certain investigative process would help us to come to a conclusion.

Then I just know it's not an issue I need to be talking about. So so I have tried to stay in my lane. And there's a lot of stuff that you can talk about if you're a detective. You know, a lot of this, face it, a lot of the analogies we see, you know, evidence that demands a verdict.

You can name it. There's a lot of historic kind of efforts to make a case for Christianity and theism have borrowed from the kinds of or at least from the terminology. But when you read those things, you go, yeah, this is all good.

But it's clear that whoever is doing this has never worked a case because sometimes we'll use language wrong. You know, people will say, well, you need to have said there's no direct evidence for this or that.

They don't know what direct evidence is. I mean, they never have actually had done a case with direct evidence to know how this works. So that's where I want to step in and just be able to kind of put some light on some places that and I stay I do stay try to stay in my lane.

Yeah. You know, it's funny you mentioned evidence demands a verdict because that will be the topic of next week's rap report. But good. But, you know, I was helping someone edit a book on evangelism and apologetics, and I gave him some of your videos that I had to show him like, you know, he is not a pastor.

He's actually a dentist by trade. And I was I was using the examples that you give you to have a talk where you put on your your your SWAT vest or your police vest and you go through all the different aspects of.

Training. Right.

And you use all of the things that you'd have as a police officer to do that. And I was explaining to him that he needs to do some of that. And he responded. He says, yeah, but being a detective is cool.

Being a dentist just doesn't work.

Oh, my gosh. So so, you know, it's funny about that. There's two ways and we've been talking. I just got back last week and we were doing the cross-examine instructors Academy. And what we do is we take people who want to be able to make the case kind of up and coming of Christian apologetics, apologists rather.

And we kind of walk them through some some basic do's and don'ts. And then we had last weekend we did the advanced Academy where we're really taking, you know, the 10 this is the 11th year that we've been doing this.

And so we've got lots of people have been to the Academy once. And now we had 30 who were kind of the advanced. You know, they're already out there speaking. They're already out there writing. And so we talked about this issue.

You know, how do you influence yourself? How do you increase your influence in culture? I think there are two ways if you're listening and you want to be able to make the case for Christianity as a believer, maybe even teaching in your local church or working in your local community.

I think there's two ways to do this. And one is kind of speaker centric and the other is audience centric. And so what I mean by that is that that one thing you can do is you can ask yourself, well, how are you uniquely gifted?

I call this X factoring where you say to yourself, OK, there's something about me that is just who I am. It's so much of who I am. And if you're friends with Dennis, to me, he's worked probably very, very hard to get that.

He's got to go to med school in order to become a dentist. It's not easy. So he's invested a lot of time, a lot of energy, and that is who he is. And there's a lot of us who would be like, that would be awfully I'd be very proud if my kids became a dentist.

So so that's his identity. And if he's been doing it long enough before, I'll say his name is Joe. Well, you know, Joe, the dentist. Oh, yeah, the dentist. OK, well, that's his identity. As a matter of fact, it's such a strong identity that you could exchange the dentist for Joe's name and people would go, oh, you're talking about him.

I know him. He's the dentist. The dentist does apologetics. I mean, that sounds crazy, but there's probably not very many of those. And that's the second thing. If if the X factor you have that is so strongly connected to your identity is unique, it's a unicorn.

Well, then you're even going to have more influence if you're the only one of those guys out there. So, for example, let's say you're somebody who you want to preach the gospel. And there's a lot of guys who want to preach the gospel.

OK, great. But I am a championship world class surfer. Oh, that's there's fewer of those. There's fewer world class championship surfers who have enough understanding of the gospel and of theology to be able to preach the gospel.

Right. So that's that's OK. That's that's now you've got an X, you're a world class championship surfer and you're you're separating yourself from the crowd. Well, how about this? I'm a female world class championship surfer who wants to preach the gospel.

There's even probably fewer of those. Right. Because I think there are probably fewer women surfers than there are men surfers. How about this? I'm a woman surfer who is a champion and had her arm bitten off by a shark.

OK, well, there's one of those. There's one of the Hamiltons. And now because you have that unicorn identity, well, you've got opportunities. I think his last name is Wojciech. Yes. Born without legs and arms, a little flipper for a foot there.

He always makes fun of his own foot there. But he has been doing tent revivals now for a couple of years and drawing huge crowds and preaching the gospel. And here, the thing that's unique about him and his unicorn position is really what we would probably have considered to be an extreme disadvantage, a disability that he has turned for the glory of God.

And so I think it is every one of us has to say that the first approach then is speaker centric. What is your X? And now you may think I only have a crazy great X. Well, I've got a friend named Natasha Crane who writes about apologetics for parents and what she does because she's a marketing, you know, her degree is in marketing.

What she has said is, no, I know it's not about that. I know me this well or that I have this unique X is that I know the audience I'm trying to reach. And she's trying to reach parents of young kids who are starting to see that their kids are being challenged and need to have answers for their questions.

And so she knows that it's parents of young children who get it, who are sensing that the culture is starting to threaten their kids faith. That is her specific audience and what she does. So for me, as somebody who's looking at it from my my X factor, I know if it's not, it can't be talked about from the perspective of a cold case homicide detective.

I'm probably not talking about it. Natasha, on the other hand, says if it's not interesting or of importance to parents of young kids who have this, you know, get it, then I'm not going to write about it.

So we're each using a one direction or the other to increase our influence. Either you're going to be speaker centric or you're going to be audience centric. So so it's just a matter of us deciding, you know, which way we're going to go.

Marketing, Social Media, and the Need to Grow an Audience

Yeah. And by the way, the dentist's name is Anthony Silvestro. His book is called On the Origin of Kinds, which is basically addressing it's a complete rip off of Darwin's book, but he takes it basically shows how Darwinism.

Doesn't work. Yeah, that's awesome.

So so a lot of this is, you know, either you're either he's going so you have to figure it out. Look, sometimes your audience is such you learn who the audience is and you realize that audience is going to require a particular kind of writer or they're not going to pay attention.

And then you can go out and try to get that pedigree or try to become the guy they're going to listen to. So a couple different ways to do this. But, yeah, it's tricky right now. And this is a very noisy world.

It's cluttered with all kinds of voices and noises and trying to stand out in that kind of a world with the gospel is is going to be more and more of a challenge.

Yeah. And I don't think social media has helped completely. It has opened some doors, but it's created a lot more noise, too.

Oh, it absolutely has. Are you kidding? Yeah. I mean, I think and also, you know, look, before if you're going to have to split your attention now and that's another problem with social media is that you're going to have to and I always say it this way.

You know, there's two things. We all have a message we want to communicate to a culture, to an audience. And we think of our developing of the message, you know, how refining the message, learning our theology, understanding the biblical text.

All of these things are a holy work of God because we always think we want to work on one side of that equation, you know, this message we want to deliver to an audience. But growing your audience, we kind of see that as like dirty marketing, you know.

And what's happening in this culture is if you have, you know, no knowledge and a huge audience, you can lead them astray and you can be a danger if you have great information and great ability to communicate, but no audience at all, then you have no impact.

So you have to grow both of these things. And I think that both kinds of efforts are holy works of God. So I don't look at marketing anymore like, oh, that's that dirty thing. But you're right. Social media has forced us now to not only kind of refine our skills as communicators and as students, but also to refine our skills as social media marketers, because this is the world we're living in now.

You know, give me an example of this. You and I just got involved in this book on evangelizing Mormons. And this is not, you know, it used to be that you'd write a book and once the author was done writing the book, he would hand that text to the publisher and the publisher took it from there, that their job was to kind of run with the ball that was handed to them.

And we actually had a publisher come out and talk to her, to the academy last week. That has completely changed. That is not the way publishing occurs anymore. You have to write it and you have to market it.

It's self-marketing. And they're only signing those people who have a platform from which they can market their own material because we're living in this crazy social media world. Everything has changed.

There's not even any more brick and mortar stores. We're selling books. Everything is an Amazon kind of online world.

Why Apologetics Is Better Framed as Christian Case Making

Yeah. You know, it was interesting because when we were working on that book, and we'll get to that later discussing it, but it was interesting. They wanted to know how many, how many followers on Twitter and Facebook and you'd basically how many people are on your newsletter list.

And it was those were the things the publisher wanted to know.

But there's no doubt it's two questions. What's the idea for your book? OK, and who are you? And only the second question really matters. OK, you have a great idea for a book, but if they don't think you can sell it, they're not going to sign it.

So it's sad, but this is where we are.

And, you know, it's some things you brought up that are very interesting. You brought up, you know, Josh McDowell's book, famous book, Evidence Demands a Verdict. And really, I think what shocked people or got really got that so well known was there wasn't anything really like that in the marketplace of ideas.

There was scholarly work, but some of when he did More Than a Carpenter, it really opened it up. And people like myself who got More Than a Carpenter ended up getting the more technical two volume set that they were back then.

And then it's been where it's more easily readable and not so much of notes. And really, there wasn't anything for people to dig into back then. And apologetics has has taken on different forms and somewhat of a bad name in the atheistic circles.

And you've been doing you know that you've been doing something for years, which is really kind of a changing of the term. You talk about case making, not so much about apologetics.

Why this? Because for me, I wasn't part of a kind of a Christian culture growing up. I didn't have that background in the church. And if you saw I was thirty five when I first started getting interested in even looking at scripture, and I right away made inroads into in terms of what do I believe is true about the text.

But I really couldn't understand. There's kind of two questions. You know, what do we believe as Christians? What are the claims of Christianity? And there's also for a lot of us who come to this late, we have a second question we hardly ever talk about, which is why are we doing it this way?

You know, like like I mean, if I did, I always put it this way. If you were an alien who was coming in kind of exploring the universe and you got like your adjutant who's kind of helps you to prepare for the landing in each planet you land on and you're coming in toward Earth and you're you know, you're getting closer and now you're about as far away as the moon and your adjutant says, OK, it's time for us to to get ready to meet these folks.

And a lot of these folks are Christians. So so you might want to read this Bible in order to know what all about this group. So you're this alien who only has that the text only has the scripture to learn about.

Christianity.

So in your mind, as you're getting closer to the earth, you're going to start to formulate ideas about, OK, given this book, I expect that Christians are going to look like what? I mean, how how are they going to organize and what will their structure be and what kind of social groups will they have and what kind of what will the meetings look like and all that stuff?

Right. All you have is the text. That's it. What do you think you're going to expect to find when you get here? And do you think that anything we see today is what you would expect to find if all you had was the text?

And that's how I felt as a nonbeliever. I was kind of coming in and, you know, I'm, you know, I'm thousands of miles away and I'm no experience with no church traditions to to kind of say, oh, I know what church I used to put in that evangelical church.

That was the first time I had put in a church like that at all. I mean, I've been at funerals and weddings, but that's that's a little bit different. Right. And I've been in Catholic masses as a kid, but I really had no experience with the church.

Why would you church the way we do church? And I think that for me, that's always been the thing I've had a harder time getting my hands around. You know, why do we do it this way?

Yeah, you know, I can relate to that being raised Jewish and never being in a church before I became a Christian. Actually, I think it was several years, about two or three years after being a Christian before I actually walked into a church.

But, you know, I totally didn't understand Christian lingo. You know, people to me seem like they talk funny. However, I also realized that if you were to come to a synagogue, it would sound the same.

We have our own lingo.

Yeah, yeah. No, no doubt. And that whole idea, you know, the word apologetics, the reason why I don't use the word very much is that, you know, not everyone's talked about how confusing the word can be and blah, blah, blah.

But you just know from a in a world of social media or digital or all in a digital world that is very, very gives you very, very brief opportunities. If you have to if your book, you know, the idea of a second line, a subtitle, you know, sometimes subtitles don't get read where this is a noisy, cluttered world.

If you have to take a breath and explain yourself, you've already lost because somebody else out there is just trying to pitch a similar idea who's managed to do it without another need for explanation.

If I've got to stop and say, well, this word comes from the Greek that means this, you've already lost. So we're really talking about is can you defend but defend that can sound defensive. And I don't think I'm not I'm not defensive.

I'm just going to make the case. This is what we do. We make the case. And so I thought Christian case making was a better way. And by the way, whenever I put it that way, no one asked me a follow up question.

So what do you do? I make the case for Christianity. I'm a Christian case maker. And OK, they already get it. It doesn't require the subtitle, you know, or what is that? You know what? You know. And so it's not just that apologetics can sound like it's submissive or defensive or that it's apologizing for something.

It's just that it requires the second line. And we're in a world right now where we don't get time for the second line.

The Testimony of the Gospels and the Reliability of Witnesses

Yeah, well, we're going to take a break. Now, I want to get back to I want to get to talking about some of your books and maybe even how you came to Christ. So let's do that right after this quick break.

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All right. So, Jim, we alluded to this, but you you were a professing atheist for 35 years of your life. Well, not exactly. I mean, you were actually very much against Christianity and you became a believer.

Explain to our audience, not everyone may be familiar with you. How did that come about?

Well, I think that a lot of us who are in my dad's in this category right now, he's not a believer and he just seems to be sometimes immovable on these issues. But he would go to church with you because he thinks that, you know, first of all, two things.

He loves the kind of tradition he lives in the South and he loves the structure that emerges from a Christian ethos. You know, he loves the kind of culture that emerges from a Christian worldview and he lives in the middle of that.

And so he's appreciative of it. You know, he would much rather live in the midst of the South where there's a pretty still a pretty strong in that he's in that Bible Belt region than someplace else. But number two, I think he would say that he actually agrees with the values that are taught in Christianity.

So if nothing else, this is a source of the values that he affirms. So you would say, hey, this is in essence a useful delusion that seems to produce the kind of world I'd like to live in anyway. So if you want to go to church, I'll go.

And he's culturally familiar with the church enough to be able to sing the hymns and do all of that. But he is very committed to his non-belief. And that's kind of where I was as well. I just was not I thought this was so ludicrous on its face.

There wasn't much point. I didn't think you could. All the Christians I knew could not make a defense for what they believe. So it seemed like the only way in was something I was not willing to do, which was to blind kind of blindly accept.

You know, I think cops, too, are are not probably the best candidates for being told what to do. Or, you know, it's just that kind of nature of what happens to you if you work this job long enough. You're usually in a position where someone's calling you because their life has fallen apart and you've got a few minutes to fix it before the next call.

So I just was not ready to submit to anything like that. And but my wife was certainly more open to it and and had been raised in an environment where she her mom kind of left an open, wide and inviting door to the possibility of belief.

And although she would have said that God exists, I think she would have said that, but didn't have any idea what Christianity taught. And so but she did kind of think when we had kids like my dad, she was you should be help them to form their moral views based on something that maybe, you know, I didn't have to agree with it or believe it in order to see its value.

And so I was willing. Now, look, I tried my best to avoid it because it's going to take time and it's going to be boring and I didn't want to go. But but so I avoided it for probably three years in this neighborhood we were living and we had been together about 18 years before I I she got me to go.

But but this particular church we walked into really was a church for unbelievers. I mean, it really the pastor was was clever enough to always contextualize it in a way that there'd be some nugget that would catch your ear if you were a nonbeliever.

He said a bunch of stuff that first day. But the one thing that I always remember is he said that Jesus was smart, really smart and really and was a great moral teacher and pretty much affirming the kinds of things that my dad and I would have said, you know, on the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth stood the the entire Western culture.

And here we are enforcing the laws of Western culture. And I just wanted to see what he said. In other words, I was really just interested in red letters. And so I bought a pew Bible for six bucks that allowed me to at least read what this guy had to say.

And I kind of suspected it was going to be more like the writings of Baha 'u'llah or some prophet of other some of the world. I didn't didn't anticipate how these letters were going to be encased in this historical narrative.

And that really intrigued me. And that's really what started for me that the whole investigation of whether or not that text could be reliable. Was it telling me the truth? Was it telling me something true?

Was there was it filled with ridiculous exaggerations? And I was a very committed philosophical naturalist. So I assumed up front that it's going to be full of a bunch of either lies or misperceptions or hopeful, wishful thinking, because I don't believe in miracles.

And so once I got to those passages, I would typically I began by just kind of skipping over them. But then eventually I tested the document using all the tools that we use to test documents. We test documents all the time when we're working these kinds of cases.

And there's a set of tools in place to do that. And that's what I tried to do.

And those tools became a book.

Yeah. And it took a while to kind of I never I just didn't I didn't see I didn't think of myself as somebody who was making the case. I just needed to know if it was true. And I figured everyone who comes into Christianity must do something similar.

Right. I mean, they must have to do the same thing I'm doing. It took me about six months. And so I did it. And then I started living my life as a Christian once I became a Christian. And I went to seminary and I never really revisited the manner in which I got in until I became a youth pastor.

And I saw these kids were struggling and needed to know. And then we started taking trips to Berkeley and Salt Lake City and places where we could really stretch them. And they're both their understanding of theology and of philosophy and of evidence.

And as we started to do that, I just I said I started sharing, you know, the journey that I took. And I was with training, for example, we were in Berkeley. I was training the students and I was with Sean on that trip, Sean McDowell.

And I'd done these trips with Brett Kunkel and a bunch of other people. But on that trip, I think it was just me and Sean. And he said to me, hey, you should write a book about this. And that's how the whole thing started.

And the book is called Cold Case Christianity. And I mean, one of the things I loved about that book was the fact that when I when I went through and read it, it was a easy to understand, which is always good.

But the fact that you brought in your your history as a cold case detective, bringing examples of what you're explaining from cases, being able to explain it in a way that look, this is what eyewitness testimony should look like.

And the the so much. And as you know, I I'm I'm on the streets. I you know, I had my seminary professor has a Ph .D. in in presuppositional apologetics. Right. And he had me come in to teach a class. And I'm like, you have a Ph .D. in this.

Why am I teaching? He's like, I teach in classroom. You take it to the streets. There's a big difference. And I hear all the time from guys on the streets. Well, if the Bible was accurate, everyone would be saying the same thing.