Nuggets from Seeking and Finding God—Meeting the Challenge (Part 1)

To make such an investigation was the challenge delivered to Professor Simon Greenleaf, co-founder of the Harvard Graduate School of Law, by some of his students in the mid-1800s. Greenleaf was, according to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller, “the highest authority [on legal evidence] cited in our courts.” After making an exhaustive examination of the claims of Christ just as he would examine evidence or testimony introduced into a court of law, Greenleaf, who had been a life-long self-professed agnostic, embraced Christ as his Savior and all that the Bible portrays of Him. As a result, he wrote Testimony of the Evangelists, in which he declared that the Bible withstood every test of evidence a court of law could impose and challenged fellow members of the legal profession to examine it honestly. Declaring that biblical Christianity does not seek accommodation with world religions but denounces “all…religion[s] of the world [as]…false…and dangerous,” Greenleaf argued:

[The claims of] Jesus Christ…solicit the grave attention of all [and] demand their cordial belief as a matter of vital concernment. These are no ordinary claims; and it seems hardly possible for a rational being to regard them with even a subdued interest; much less to treat them with mere indifference and contempt.

If not true, they are little else than the pretensions of a bold imposter…but if they are well founded and just they can be no less than the high requirements of heaven, addressed by the voice of God to the reason and understanding of man….