Here is the official notice of his death:

“Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, born October 18, 1931 Warsaw, New York died on Wednesday, September 25, 2024 at the the Bischwiller Regional Health Centre in France. Dr. Montgomery was a citizen of the United States, United Kingdom and France. He resided in Soufflenheim, France for much of the past three decades. Details of the funeral to be held in the Alsace will be forthcoming. A full obituary will be posted at www.apologeticsacademy.eu.”

As of this writing, the full obituary had not yet appeared at the Apologetic Academy website; it may well be there by the time you read this.

Montgomery was a great scholar, a great apologist, and a great teacher. But what I remember and will miss most about him is an attribute many will find it strange that I should use of him, given how full of mischief he was: his innocence.

His innocence? By that I mean that he had no filters. Everything he did, he did with all his soul, with nothing held back. There was a childlike joy in his defense of the faith that I have never encountered so fully in any other person. Nobody ever had so much sheer fun preaching the Gospel or defending its truthfulness. He was like Father Brown as Chesterton describes him: always fully concentrated on what he was doing, never on whether it was done.

To combine such a childlike innocence with that much sophistication and that much mischievousness–Dr. Montgomery was truly a walking Chestertonian paradox. I will miss him more than I can say.

Here are just a few of Montogomery’s more influential books (he wrote fifty!)

The Shape of the Past: An Introduction to Philosophical Historiography, Edwards Brothers (Ann Arbor, MI), 1962, revised edition, Bethany Fellowship, 1975.

The Altizer-Montgomery Dialogue: A Chapter in the God Is Dead Controversy, Inter-Varsity Press (Downers Grove, IL), 1967.

Where Is History Going? Essays in Support of the Historical Truth of the Christian Revelation, with a commendatory letter by C. S. Lewis, Zondervan, 1969.

The Suicide of Christian Theology, Bethany Fellowship, 1970.

In Defense of Martin Luther, Northwestern Publishing, 1970.

Damned through the Church, Bethany Fellowship, 1970.

The Law above the Law, Bethany Fellowship, 1975.

Faith Founded on Fact, Thomas Nelson, 1978.

Human Rights and Human Dignity, Zondervan and Probe Ministries International, 1986; second edition, Canadian Institute for Law, Theology and Public Policy.

Tractatus Logico-Theologicus, Verlag fuer Kultur und Wissenschaft (Bonn, Germany, 2002).

Through these books and others, Montgomery’s legacy lives on. Still, I will miss him more than I can say.

Donald T. Williams, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College and a past president of The International Society of Christian Apologetics.  A dual citizen of Narnia and Middle-earth, he stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, theology and literature, poetry and apologetics. He is the author of fifteen books, including, most recently, Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023) and “An Account of Things Accomplished: An Exposition of the Gospel according to Luke (Christicommunity Press, 2024).