FamilyChristian.com Exclusive Interview
Lee Strobel: Making A Case ...continued

FamilyChristian.com: The Case for Faith is a follow-up to The Case for Christ. It follows the same kind of investigative style and answers common questions. What made you decide to write another book?

Lee: A couple things. One was that The Case for Christ was the historical evidence for Jesus and I realized in my own life that even though that was hugely important for my spiritual journey to come to the conclusion that Jesus really existed and really established His deity by rising from the dead, I also had questions about other tough issues, like: What about all the pain and suffering in the world? How can a loving God send people to hell? What about evolution? Does it explain away where life came from and developed and so forth? So I had all these tough issues that were barriers between me and God.

The historical evidence, while it was important, was not the whole story of my spiritual journey and I wanted to help other people who had spiritual sticking points in their own journey, tough questions they couldn't find answers to. I wanted to use a similar format: go to the best possible people I could interview and ask them the tough questions I had when I was a skeptic and force them to give meaningful and articulate responses.

As I started to get letters, I realized, ironically, that the biggest single group of people who've come to Christ through the book The Case for Christ are 16 to 24-year-olds. A lot of young people. I get letters from all over the world. It's amazing. And so we decided to do The Case for Christ Student Edition, which is a completely different version of the book. Same information but in a completely different format to try to reach those young people. That's a tough book for a 16-year-old, I think. We didn't want to dumb down the book. We just wanted to present the same information in a format that was more accessible to teenagers today. There are people who, for emotional reasons, due to their upbringing, their relationship with their father, divorce or to death of a father, it becomes an emotional sticking point in their spiritual journey. Those people are often looking for some solid ground upon which to build their life because their childhood had been sinking sand and they need the solid ground of Christ to build their life on. They're looking for evidence to say, "How do I know that God loves me? How do I know He's not going to abandon me too? How do I know I can be secure in my relationship with Him?"

FamilyChristian.com: Which is that whole struggle with faith. You want some security because you haven't had security, and faith requires you to step beyond what you can see and touch.

Lee: I think that's very true. Some people were saying that post moderns don't care about historical evidence, they don't care about facts and data. They're more experiential. I think there is some truth to that. People do believe less and less in absolute truth and they do believe in relativism more and more. But I'm finding that young people are fascinated by the evidence for Christ. Whenever I speak to young people—I've spoken to high school students and Generation X churches and so forth—the response to The Case for Christ has been phenomenal. It's really blown me away. A lot of Gen X pastors are finding that, to their dismay, young people are interested in both evidence and doctrine, apologetics and doctrine, which was counterintuitive. That's not what they expected to find and yet that is something that seems to be reaching them. I think they are looking for solid ground upon which to build their life.

FamilyChristian.com: As people communicate with you, what's the most common question people have?

Lee: It's really the pain and suffering issue. I had a national study done, and it confirmed that it's the number one question on the minds of Americans. I think it can be asked in two ways. One is by people who themselves are suffering. They personally have suffered a loss. Those people are not looking for answers; they're looking for love. They're looking for Jesus. They're looking for somebody to console them and be with them and comfort them and be a friend to them. But many people ask it purely out of intellectual concern.

Fortunately, I think there are good answers to that issue. In my book The Case for Faith, I interviewed Dr. Peter Kreeft of Boston College and I thought he did a tremendous job of giving a solid answer to a very, very difficult issue. No one book can do justice to a topic that volatile and that serious but I think he does a good job in that interview of summarizing good arguments for why we can believe in both a loving God and the existence of pain and suffering in the world.

FamilyChristian.com: But doesn't that beg the question of, why is it that we're so quick to blame God if something doesn't go according to how we plan or desire, but then we're just as quick to take credit for anything that does go well? Why don't we see the inconsistency of that logic?

Lee: That's true. Who was it who once said we have a hand and we can either feed the hungry with it or we can use a gun to shoot somebody with it. And if we shoot somebody, then it's a little disingenuous to then blame God for the person you shot. There is free will that God has given us in this world so that we can experience love and that free will has also opened the door to us hurting other people and causing pain and suffering in the world. It's sort of like the famous Pogo cartoon where he looks in the mirror and says, "I've seen the enemy and he is us." We are the ones who have opened the door to pain and suffering in this world. God created the world perfectly. It says in Genesis that everything was very good. We've ushered in pain and suffering and God, in His mercy and grace, has been able to use it to accomplish good, to draw people to Christ, to sharpen our character. Of course, He makes a promise that the day will come when pain and suffering will cease and that when those who have done evil will be judged. [Editor's note: this interview was conducted before September 11].

FamilyChristian.com: Will there be a youth edition of this book as well?

Lee: We're doing a youth edition of The Case for Faith and I'm very excited about that because as I interact with young people, the kind of questions in that book are the very ones that they're asking. When we wrote the book, the first thought was, "Here's a graduation gift, twice the price of a greeting card, that you can give to a graduating eighth grader or high school senior or somebody coming back in the fall." Especially in the public schools, where they're going to be faced with skepticism and they're going to be challenged about their faith.

FamilyChristian.com: That's a great idea! Talk about a gift with eternal impact. So what's next? Are you working on another book?

Lee: I'm also doing a book about my marriage to my wife when I was an atheist and she was the Christian [Surviving A Spiritual Mismatch in Marriage]. When you find yourself married to a nonbeliever, first, how do you live and survive and thrive in that kind of relationship? And then secondly, how can you lovingly and appropriately and sensitively help lead them to Christ?

That book is going to address a real need in the church, and will challenge those who see their spouse's lack of faith as an out.

No question. It's a huge source of strife in relationships. People end up unequally yoked, as the Bible puts it, for a lot of reasons but almost all of them find that it's an incredible source of stress and conflict in their marriage, as it was in my marriage. We almost got divorced. We had a very difficult time at first. So we tell from our own experience. I tell my story, my wife tells her story.

The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel

FamilyChristian.com: Is she co-writing with you?

Lee: Yes. We're going to talk about some principles that we learned the hard way about what not to do and what to do and hopefully it will help people who find themselves spiritually mismatched is the term we use. There seems to be a big need for it because there are so many people in that position. It's fun to do the book together. I'm just finishing the chapter on dating, which is very interesting. Do you date non-Christians and what does the Bible say about that? What are some lessons that we can learn about that?

FamilyChristian.com: What's the most important thing you want people to know about you?

Lee: I don't think I'm that important. I think what's important are the resources that God's opened the door for me to produce. I hope people think of my books as resources that will enrich their own faith as well as give them a tool they can hand to a non-believing friend to help reach them with the gospel. I hope the resources encourage people in their own personal evangelism. There's this thing that I call the "Christian pass along market," which is essentially Christians who hopefully get a book like The Case for Christ, read it and feel better equipped to defend their faith. And they can also feel confident that they can give that very same book to a nonbeliever and then use it as a source for common discussion and sort of enter into the process of spiritual seeking with them.

Jen Abbas, a writer in Grand Rapids, Mich., conducted this interview exclusively for FamilyChristian.com.

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