Welcome back to Shams Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire. And before I say anything else, I need to start with this.

I love William Lynn Craig. He's a personal hero of mine, even when I disagree with him, as I will be

doing very much so today. I'd even suggest that he should be a hero of yours too, despite his faults.

It's hard to quantify just how many people he's led to Jesus Christ, but it's got to be a lot.

But perhaps the best almond that can be paid to him is not from a fellow Christian, but from

the atheist Sam Harris, who once referred to him as...

The one Christian apologist who seems to put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists.

Craig's not just a great debater.

He's actually a brilliant scholar in his own right.

He's doing important work on a variety of philosophical and theological topics.

The website Academic Influence ranks Craig as the world's 11th most influential living philosopher,

as well as the six most influential living theologian.

I can't speak to their precise methodology, but those numbers at least seem roughly correct.

They point to the fact this is someone of enormous influence in philosophy, in theology,

and in apologetics and religious debates.

But here's the problem.

While Craig is, in one sense,

arguably the greatest living Christian apologists, or at least up there, his version of

Christianity is wonky, which might be a polite way of saying heretical. His views on both

the natures of Christ and the nature of God are from the perspective of historical Christianity

heresy,

and in a way that arguably places him outside of Christianity itself.

...