John Warwick Montgomery (1931-2024)

John Warwick Montgomery died on September 25, 2024. John Warwick Montgomery is the most well known apologist from Lutheran circles in decades. From within the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, he fought not just external threats to apologetics, but also internal ones. As a Lutheran, he was forced by turns to defend even the prospect of apologetics from those who would lean towards fideism or some form of Lutheran irrationalism.

Montgomery was highly prominent in discussions about apologetic method. When the presuppositional method arose within Reformed circles, Montgomery was perhaps its most vocal and engaging critic. His famous (or infamous, depending on one’s stance) essay “Once Upon an A Priori” used fables to engage with presuppositional method and showed that the method would likely collapse under its own arguments when faced with an equally staunch presuppositionalist from another faith tradition. He wrote quite a bit in defense of evidentialist apologetics, and generally believed and argued that the Resurrection was historical fact and can and should be investigated as such.

Inerrancy was another of Montgomery’s pillars of argument. He argued against positions which would qualify inerrancy more, and attempted to defend it within the Lutheran tradition. He argued against other Lutherans who left his own denomination, asserting that their changed stance on inerrancy was the “fuzzification” of inerrancy to the point at which it would become unrecognizable as such. Indeed, I find his arguments to that effect fairly convincing, and that is part of the reason I don’t hold to inerrancy; it simply does not work with how the Bible was written. Montgomery would vociferously disagree, but I’m thankful to him for clarifying quite adroitly how qualifying a position like inerrancy begins to make it difficult to pin down.

Montgomery was a lawyer as well. He wrote on a vast range of topics, from law to demonology, from apologetics to historiography. His texts show a man whose mind was capable of absorbing and expanding on countless theologically-inclined topics in ways that, if they didn’t reflect particular expertise, still would show a general grasp of the topic and drive engagement with it. I have read and re-read some of his books to the point where covers are beginning to fall off. It’s often popular to read only those with whom one agrees, or to read one with whom one disagrees only to challenge and condemn. Montgomery, for me, is a constant challenging duelist. Where I disagree, I continue to find reading his works fruitful and challenging. Where I agree, I find pleasure in seeing his defense ably lay out points of impact.

I had the pleasure of meeting him at a conference in 2012. He was friendly and vivacious. The lecture he gave on religious conversion was fascinating to me at the time. I wrote up the lecture notes for a blog post here, and he sent me an email about my post, apparently thinking I had simply re-posted his lecture. He wrote, “Can you inform me as to where you obtained it and whose permission you obtained for doing so? I am willing to have you retain it on your website–but I need to know your source for posting it.” I wrote him back, explaining I had based my post upon my own notes based upon his lecture. His response was gracious, and to the point, thanking me for my detailed response and exposition of his lecture. It was my last interaction with him–I wish I’d had the courage to e-mail him again later.

Montgomery’s voice will be missed. He was an able defender of his positions and his mind wriggled into the logical holes in others’ positions in ways that made it uncomfortable to disagree with him. I admire the man, and I hope to see him in the hereafter.

SDG.

Links

John Warwick Montgomery– See all my posts tagged about John Warwick Montgomery (scroll down for more).

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