J. Warner Wallace

J. Warner Wallace is one of television's most famous real-life homicide detectives. NBC's "Dateline" repeatedly highlights Wallace's cold cases — and for good reason. He's good at what he does. He knows how to unearth the evidence and present a strong case.

It's those very skills that turned Wallace from an atheist to a believer in Jesus after he examined the evidence. In his best-selling book "Cold-Case Christianity," he uses his nationally recognized skills to present a compelling case for the Christian faith using cold-case principles.

Now, Wallace gives us a glimpse into the man behind the forensics. Read on to find out what drives Wallace's passion for Christian apologetics, his struggles with the pursuit of power, and his favorite resources that fuel his faith.

The following is a transcript of a live interview. Responses have been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

Ha! You know that you’re talking to a cop, right? Susie, my wife, read these questions, and she said, “You can’t answer any of these!” There are people in jail because of my investigations. That changes things, trust me. I also get letters from people in federal prison. They think I can solve their cases for them and get them out — so they find my home address and track me down. Because of that, in general, we don’t want anyone to know anything personal about us.

But I will do my best.

There’s only one restaurant we go to right now — and that’s for takeout. It’s close by where we live now and serves Thai food.

I was first introduced to Thai food in the 1980s when I was working as an architect in Santa Monica, California — before I became a police officer. There is a great, classic Thai food place on Santa Monica Boulevard called Thai Dishes. I’ve always loved trying all kinds of different foods. And this place was very representative of this multicultural part of Southern California.

Getting Thai takeout now allows me to re-live my 20s through food, I guess.

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So, what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?

Is it even possible to surprise or shock anybody anymore? I feel like pretty much everything anyone does anymore is posted on social media. I mean, if you didn’t post on social media, did you even do it?

Also, this season is so busy, with so little margin, I’ve gotten so that I’m not willing to spend any of it doing anything that’s hobby-ish. I just want to spend every free minute with Susie. And what we do together, is run . . . a lot. We started dating in high school. She was a runner. And I started running because of her. I just wanted to hang out with her. If she was a golfer, I’d be golfing. But she runs. So I run with her.

We love running trails. At least once a week, we’ll run a 13-miler, just to make sure we’re staying within half-marathon range. And when we travel, we look for places where we can run. Many of those places have been in Colorado, where we can participate in high-elevation races. That’s the kind of stuff we do. It’s the stuff I get to do with her. That’s why I’m excited to do it. But I’ll tell you, it’s different now than it was when I was younger. When I run 13 miles, that’s it for the whole day for me. I’m just going to relax the rest of the day. It takes me about six hours to feel normal now after running that distance. After that, I feel like, OK, I’m good to go now. But it takes that long. It’s crazy.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness. Every human too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So, what’s your kryptonite and how do you hide it?

Working criminal cases, I found that everyone’s kryptonite falls into one of three categories. These are the motivations that cause people to commit crimes. Or, from a Christian theological perspective, these are the motivations that drive us to sin. They’re right there in scripture — in II John. It’s either financial greed, sexual lust or the pursuit of power.

For me, it almost always ends up being the third category: the pursuit of power. In this category are things like pride, arrogance, the need for respect or authority. These nuanced versions of power. So, you might, for example, say something you shouldn’t say on social media in response to something so offensive that you just can’t control your response. Well, that’s a pursuit of power thing. You feel like you’ve been disrespected. Someone challenged your authority.

I struggle with this. And it’s one thing you often see with cops. Our jobs become huge parts of our identities. If you’re working as a cop in this generation, you must really think it’s something special. But let’s face it, our culture, for the most part, doesn’t think being a cop is special. So if you're still doing it, it’s because you feel called to it. You feel it’s important work — something noble, sacrificial. And when somebody asks you what you do for a living, you’re proud to tell them. But then you retire. And you can really struggle. And it’s pride. You ask yourself, “Am I still respectable anymore?”

I also struggle with social media. You hear a lot of harsh stuff these days when you make the case for Christianity on Twitter. People are going to beat you up with their words. So if you struggle in that “pursuit of power” category, you can get really angry and defensive. That can be kryptonite for a lot of us.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?

In retirement, I’m working harder than ever before. I feel a sense of urgency. The goal now is simply to leverage what God has given me to make a difference for eternity.

At first, I struggled to give up police casework. In fact, just today, I spent two hours on Zoom discussing a case I started back in 2003. Another suspect popped up last year. I was talking with the team that is working the case now. And I was sitting thinking, Man, I wish I was still working the case. I don’t want to be part of the history of the case. I want to be the closer.

But I transitioned to a new season and a new kind of work. There’s a guy named Bob Buford who wrote a book called “Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance.” It’s about planning your life in such a way to transition from career to ministry. That’s what I am trying to do. I am trying to leverage the experiences that God has given me — the experiences that are unique to me — to either preach the gospel or remove the barriers between people and the gospel. That’s it.

I’ve written eight books, and I try to write about the experiences I’ve had as a detective. I try to apply my experience investigating crime to investigating the case for God and the case for Christianity. I wrote “Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels” in 2013 and “God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence for a Divinely Created Universe” in 2015. I stay in my lane. I know what I can offer. I’m not a textual critic or a historian or a Bible scholar. I’m a detective.

A lot of people reading this might believe that God can’t use them. But the truth is, you do have something unique to you. You just haven’t figured out what it is yet. Everyone has to figure out what his or her life is about and what is his or her unique identity and then turn and use it for the glory of God. That’s what I’m trying to do in this season.

I have a new book coming out, and I’m trying to make a case for God’s existence, a case for Christianity, in a way that nobody else has made it — as a cold-case detective. It is probably the most researched book I’ll ever do. Here’s the idea: What if all the manuscript evidence of the New Testament was destroyed? What if some regime came along and burned every copy of the New Testament, burned every Bible?

We could work it just like a missing persons case. Like when a guy kills his wife and gets rid of the body. There is no evidence at all at the crime scene. Well, there was still a lot that happened up until the crime. And then a lot happened afterward. Think of it like a bomb going off. There would have been a long fuse that likely burned for years before the crime. Then, after the crime, there would be shrapnel all over the place. That’s how you make a case to a jury if you don’t have a crime scene. You focus on what happened beforehand and afterward and build a case circumstantially.

Well, we can do the same thing with the New Testament. You can make a strong case for Jesus from the fuse of history that burns up to his appearance and then from the fallout of history that occurs after his death. From the fuse and the shrapnel, we can reconstruct every single detail of the life of Jesus.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it's God when it happens?

I know who I am. I know my nature. I know what a mess I am. I’m at a point in my life where I don't think there’s anything good I’ve ever done that I can take credit for. Here’s an example: All of us detectives, we started as patrol officers. That’s how it works. You don’t get hired and go right to detective. You spend years working on SWAT teams, working on surveillance teams, working patrol, handling all kinds of calls. You see some rough things. And you have to draw a tight circle around the people who you are willing to cry about. And over time, that circle gets tighter and tighter. If you’re willing to cry about the 6-year-old who was shot by his father, you can’t work that case. So you don’t cry over 6-year-old children anymore.

I know my wife’s in my circle, for sure. My kids are in that circle, for sure. My dog is in that circle. But my cat is not in that circle. There are just some things I’m just not going to cry about. But that’s the antithesis of what God calls us to do. That’s the opposite of what the Holy Spirit calls us to do. And so I struggle. And anytime I find myself loving someone or being concerned about someone or crying for someone who’s outside that circle, I know it’s the Spirit of God moving in men. I know it because over the last 30 years, I drew that circle so tight that I’m utterly incapable of doing that on my own. When it happens, I know it’s God working in me.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So, spill it, which spiritual practice is workin’ best for you right now?

I don’t believe anything is secular. Nothing. Everything is sacred. There is nothing over which God does not have complete dominion. Nothing is outside. Nothing is written off as secular.

Scripture says that “ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made,” we can see clearly God’s eternal power and divine nature” (ESV, Romans 1:20). Everything in the universe, all of creation, points to the Creator. God can be seen in what we perhaps have been considering secular, what we’ve perhaps been considering natural.

Every night, my wife and I have been sitting down and reading one page of a Bible that I have. It’s got a pretty big page size, so we feel like one page before we go to bed is good. And we can say, “Well, that’s our sacred time” or “That’s our time that’s got a Christian fence built around it.” But the reality is that I can find God in all things — when I watch the news, when we watch Netflix. We watched a show called “Love on the Spectrum.” It’s about matchmaking for young adults who are on the spectrum of autism. And it was amazing. It has no overt spiritual overtones, but it is deeply spiritual. The joy expressed is best understood within a Christian worldview. Some of the shows out there, by contrast, are about train wrecks. And why are the lives of the characters on the show train wrecks? Because they violate every principle of a Christian worldview. And some of these shows are wonderfully beautiful. Why? Because they celebrate every aspect of a Christian worldview.

So I’ve stopped drawing lines as firmly as I used to. I think I can find a way to think deeply about God and have a holy moment, even in what might be considered a secular environment.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources — lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff, too. What are some resources that have impacted you?

Well, mine might seem like the weirdest resources. But I became a Christian on the basis of the evidence. I tried to be very thoughtful. And I would never have become a Christian if it was something that I had to accept without good reason.

I was struck, in the New Testament, as I read it for the first time, that Jesus was such a committed evidentialist. He would say, over and over again, “If you don’t believe what I’m telling you, at least believe on the evidence of the miracles I’ve worked in front of you. I rose from the grave. I’m going to assign you as eyewitnesses. You will testify about what you saw.”

As a matter of fact, he spent 40 days after the resurrection with the disciples in Acts 1. Why would he do that? Well, Scripture says that during those 40 days, he gave the disciples many more convincing proofs. The text uses the Greek word for evidence.

I was struck and moved by people who were thinkers. I was struck by C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity.” It was huge for me early on. I read that book before or when I was making the decision about Christianity. He was one of those guys I read. And now, whenever I write anything, I always think, This is not going to be as good as C.S. Lewis. And it irritates me. When I write a book, I will quote C.S. Lewis. Then, inevitably, a year later, somebody will say, “Oh, I got this great quote from J. Warner Wallace.” And they will quote from my book, but it won’t be from me. They’re quoting me quoting C.S. Lewis, attributing it to me. It’s bad when the best stuff in your book is somebody else’s work.

Once I became a Christian, I began to read things like Millard Erickson’s “Systematic Theology.” It’s this huge thing, like an encyclopedia. And if you could see mine, you’d see nearly every page is marked up. Only a couple of chapters aren’t. As an early Christian, I was constantly going through it. I needed to know whether the Christian worldview was internally consistent. I needed to know that the nature of the claims were such that everything made sense when locked together like a puzzle.

Erickson’s book is helpful if you want to try to answer the question, “Is it true?”

We all have things we cling to to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season — and tell us what it's done for you.

There is no reasonable middle right now. Everything in our culture has been supersized and vilified. It’s not just that you’re wrong. It’s that if you hold a position that’s different than mine, you’re evil and must be canceled.

I determined a long time ago that I would not write about politics. I won’t write about current affairs. You won’t find anything like that in my social feeds. I read tons of articles. I never even so much as re-tweet them or re-post them. I talk about one thing and one thing only: Is the Bible true? And should you take it seriously?

Because, as it turns out, all the strife and the things we argue about are downstream from those two questions. If we all believed that the Bible is true and took it seriously, we would mostly agree on every other issue. So all of my work is spent on studying and making the case for why the Bible is accurate — why it’s telling us something that is true — and if it’s true, why we shouldn’t read a verse here and one verse there. I make the case for why we should learn to read it in context in order to understand what God is telling us.

What is going to change the race issue, for example, is the gospel, the gospel, the gospel, the gospel. And the other thing is the gospel. That’s it! There is no alternative. The only thing we should be focused on right now, as Christians, is this: Do you know what God says about any of this? So I can point folks to a bunch of resources, but nothing trumps Scripture. I find that people are much more ready to run to resources before they will complete the Old Testament. Before they’ll review the Gospels for the second time. Before they’ll get on a reading plan to actually learn what’s in Scripture.

We’re in a time right now when we need to return to core principles, and most of us don’t even know what the core principles are. I do church events, and when I open things up for Q&A, it becomes clear that many of us aren’t reading the text.

So you ask me for a resource? I’ve got one. It’s the book of books.

QUESTION #8: dream

God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So, give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

It’s been going on for years, but things are shifting toward visual modes of learning. Young people are reading less and less, and they’re watching more and more video. So we’re starting to think about how we need to shift our style of communication.

I mean, if someone was going into the mission field, they would probably pick the largest lost people group they could find. And there is a massive group of people on YouTube and social media platforms. I’ve put my foot into those worlds a bit, but we’ll probably do more in the future. A lot of my friends are already moving in that direction. I’m probably one of the last guys to do it because I’ve been writing books.

I love the written art form. When I was a kid growing up, I wanted to write. I wanted to be a writer. In my 50s, I’ve gotten a chance to do it. And I had to. I had to get it out of my system. And the opportunities were there. I still have two books that I’m contracted to write. There might be a third because I’ve got another idea that I’m trying to push and nobody wants to publish. But after that, I think I’ll pretty much have written everything I need to write. And then it’s a matter of, “What’s next?” I think video is where we’re headed.

I worry, though, If I wait another five years and finally jump into visual media, am I too old to do it? I hope not. But I do think about that. But yes, that’s probably the future.

Did you know that nearly 185,000 homicide cases went unsolved from 1980 to 2008? When solving those kinds of cold cases, detectives must look at the evidence from a fresh perspective. In our culture today, as Wallace pointed out, we’re reaching a boiling point regarding many issues. Yet how many of us are taking a step back to look at those issues from a fresh perspective — the perspective of the Gospel? Today, instead of being quick to shoot off a zinger on social media, why not pause and think about the situation from a Gospel perspective? It might vastly improve that social post.