| Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,
Here in the U.S. we’re looking forward to Thanksgiving, when we give thanks for God’s manifold blessings upon us and our country. Certainly we at Reasonable Faith have many reasons to be thankful for the fruitfulness of the ministry during 2020!
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| Jan and I continue to podcast from my home office my weekly Defenders class, in which we’re discussing the important doctrine of justification. Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason interviewed me for an hour on my most recent book Atonement and the Death of Christ, during which we had a good discussion of the biblical grounds for penal substitution. I was interviewed by our friends at Gracepoint Church in Austin, Texas, a remarkable fellowship of ethnic Chinese and Korean Christians. The interview was aired at their national university student conference of over a thousand students. The son of my college chum Ray “Bud” Ortlund, Gavin Ortlund, who is himself a pastor and an author of a fine book on Augustine and with whom I’ve had really meaningful discussion while I was wrestling with questions pertaining to the historical Adam, interviewed me on his podcast about the doctrine of the atonement. I promised him I’d come back and do another on the historical Adam, once my book In Quest of the Historical Adam is released. I also did an interview about the atonement on the radio station WMUZ out of Detroit on the Bob Dutko show.
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| I didn’t realize how busy October was! I also did international interviews with Christian believers in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, encouraging them to stand strong for the faith in a hostile culture, and with a Swiss missionary for his podcast out of Beirut, Lebanon, a country which has suffered so tragically from Islamic extremism in recent years. We talked about the incredibly important question of how Christ alone can be the way of salvation, which is anathema to Muslim ears. Bobby Conway, "The One Minute Apologist,” who put together our DVD set for On Guard, interviewed me on his podcast. Bobby said that when he’s with his apologetics friends he misses the pastoral element, but when he’s with fellow pastors he despairs at their complete indifference to apologetics. Fortunately, Reasonable Faith is helping to awaken such an interest!
Finally, from October 19-23 I taught a week-long course for Houston Baptist University via Zoom on Molinism. My teaching assistant for the course was the ex-NFL football player Mike DeVito, who is now pursuing a degree in philosophy at my alma mater, the University of Birmingham, England. HBU opened the class to outside auditors, which they capped at 53 people. So we had quite an international group, including folks from Finland, Germany, Australia, Costa Rica, Japan, and elsewhere. This was my first experience with online teaching, and I was really pleased at how well the class went, with lots of student interaction.
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| Unbelievably, I have now finished my first chapter “On Sacred Scripture” of my projected systematic philosophical theology! I’m just amazed how productive this pandemic time has been for me! One of the central questions of this chapter is how the inspiration of Scripture can be plenary, verbal, and confluent, that is to say, inspired throughout (even the trivialities), down to the very words, and yet a fully human as well as divine product. Everyone wants to avoid divine dictation, but no one seems to know how to do it. Even my former professor Norman Geisler confesses that “the mystery remains inscrutable” (Systematic Theology, I.241).
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Saint Paul Writing His Epistles, by Valentin de Boulogne or Nicolas Tournier (c. 16th century, Blaffer Foundation Collection, Houston, TX).
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| I propose to solve this problem by a middle knowledge perspective on scriptural inspiration. Middle knowledge is God’s knowledge of how every possible person He might create would freely act in any situation in which God might place him. Middle knowledge has profound implications for divine providence. For it enables God to exercise providential control of free creatures without abridging the free exercise of their wills. In virtue of His middle knowledge and His ability to create certain circumstances and place certain free persons in those circumstances, God is able to bring about indirectly that events occur which He knew would happen as a direct result of the free decisions of those persons in those circumstances. Thus, God knew, for example, that were He to create the apostle Paul in just the circumstances he was in around AD 55, he would freely write a letter to the Corinthian church, saying just what he did in fact say.
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| The application to the doctrine of inspiration is obvious. By means of His middle knowledge, God can bring it about that scriptural inspiration is in the fullest sense confluent. The Epistle to the Romans, for example, is truly the work of Paul, who freely wrote it and whose personality and idiosyncrasies are reflected therein. The style is his because he is the author. The words are his, for he freely chose them. The argument and reasoning are the reflection of his own mind, for no one dictated the premisses to him. Neither did God dictate the greetings (“Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes,” etc.); these are spontaneous salutations which God knew Paul would deliver under such circumstances. Paul’s full range of emotions, his memory lapses (I Cor. 1.14-16), his personal asides (Gal. 6.11) are all authentic products of human consciousness. God knew what Paul would freely write in the various circumstances in which
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 | A folio from Papyrus 46 containing 2 Corinthians 11:33–12:9.
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| he found himself and thus actualized the writing of the Pauline letters. Perhaps some features of Paul’s letters are a matter of indifference to God: maybe it would not have mattered to God whether Paul greeted Phlegon or not; perhaps God would have been just as pleased had Paul worded some things differently; perhaps the Scripture need not have been just as it is to accomplish God’s purposes. We cannot know. But we can confess that Scripture as it does stand is God-breathed and therefore authoritative. The Bible says what God wanted to say and communicates His message of salvation to mankind. It is thus His word.
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| I recently received unexpectedly from Eerdmans Publishing Company the copy-edited typescript of my In Quest of the Historical Adam to proof-read. This is not printed proofs but a Word document put into their house style by one of their meticulous editors, who checked every letter and punctuation mark! Going through it gave me one last chance to improve the wording of various passages to make my meaning clear. Once I return it, they’ll move to the print stage. Progress!
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Just a reminder that our annual Matching Grant campaign is now underway until the end of the year! It’s been wonderful to see how excited people are about the proposed Center for Christian philosophy, theology, and apologetics! We’ve been working this month on its development, too. I’ve drawn up a list of over forty Master’s degree courses in philosophy, theology, and apologetics based on my work that people could take online. We’ll use that as template for a list of Bachelor’s and certificate courses as well. We hope you’ll take advantage of our matching grant offer to double your gift to Reasonable Faith.
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| For Christ and His Kingdom,
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I wanted to say thank you so much for your ministry of evangelism through apologetics. Many days in the Middle East I will listen to your podcasts for encouragement, grow in understanding how to respond appropriately and lovingly to questions from others, and critically think about my own relationship with Christ. Reasonable Faith is the best resource I have on the mission field and I recommend it to all of the other leaders and ministers I am with. Sometimes on Saturdays some of us will gather together to watch one of your debates or talks and it is so helpful and encouraging to us. Thank you Dr. Craig from my heart of hearts, I speak so often of you with others and share your work whenever I can. My dad and I always love reveling at how brilliant you are and that we are so thankful for you. I hope to stay in touch over the coming years and I will keep you updated on everything.
- Michael
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