Dr. Craig, we found an article by John Warwick Montgomery discussing your lecture on the

Atonement at the ETS EPS meeting in 2018. He said he was your first apologetics professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. What are your memories of him?

That's right. I had a number of courses with Professor Montgomery during my time at Trinity. He was a very eccentric character.

He had quite a reputation on campus as someone that was very difficult to get along with.

But I must say that when Jan and I joined him on a Luther tour over the Christmas and New Year holidays to Reformation sites, which were all behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany, controlled by that dark Marxist state,

we saw quite a different side of Dr. Montgomery. He was so attentive and even doting on all of us who were on the tour that it just showed a real personal side to the man that we really came to appreciate.

He writes in the article, in subsequent years, he has become one of the leading evangelical philosophers talking about you, Bill. In scripture, we are given the Paul line model that whenever Christ is preached, we are to rejoice, Philippians chapter one.

And so I rejoice in Craig's debates and publications, but I am uncomfortable with his style and approach. I was particularly bothered by his EPS address based on his little book, The Atonement.

Let me explain my misgivings. The lecture, like most of Craig's presentations, was dense to the extreme and reminded me of the scholastic arguments characteristic of medieval theology.

I go with the Woodgen Stinian adage that anything that can be said can be said clearly to be sure this is a problem with most professional philosophers.

But if one is also doing apologetics as his Craig, extreme care needs to be exercised so that the results are more like the writings of CS Lewis than those of Thomas Aquinas.

Now wait a minute, Bill. I thought that our professors wanted us to be dense.

Well, I must say that I was very surprised at this criticism of what was an academic paper at a scholarly conference.

This was not a popular level talk on a university campus or in a church. This was a scholarly paper read before scholars.

And honestly, I have to say in all candor, I didn't think it was very difficult. I wonder what he found hard to understand. I thought I was extremely clear in my defense of the

process of penal substitution against the attacks upon it made by its detractors.

He continues, on one occasion years ago, I attended a Craig presentation focusing on metaphysical questions such as the relationship of time to creation.

Craig loves these issues, but I have never found a single non-Christian whose objections to the faith lie at that level.

To Craig's irritation, I cited St. Augustine who, when dealing with the question as to what God was doing before he made heaven and earth,

cited someone who responded facetiously preparing hell for those who pry into mysteries.

So Bill, he doesn't think those issues are relevant in current apologetics?

Well, apparently not, as an example of someone who does press this sort of objection against theistic belief, I would cite the extremely influential author, Paul Davies, who in his books argues that God can be neither in time nor timeless,

...