Writer: Chris Ahrens
I don’t know what a best-selling author is supposed to look like, but Lee Strobel isn’t it. He looks too young, too joyful, too humble, too sober. Yet, I am assured through his testimony that if I had met him when he was the legal editor for the Chicago Tribune, he would have been less humble, less joyful, and, depending on the time of day, perhaps less sober. Not that he was an alcoholic or a bad guy. He was just another unfulfilled young man, with no idea of why—or even if—he was created.
    I have read three of Lee’s works: The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, and The Case for the Real Jesus. So I should have known that he was capable of putting me off balance. He did, but not in an unpleasant way. I have read and reread Lee Strobel’s books, mostly in times of doubt. What I like about the writing is that he assumes my doubt, confesses his own doubt, and takes me on a journey of getting some of the world’s toughest questions answered to the satisfaction of both of us. These questions that haunt an honest seeker at three in the morning—they’re questions that an award-winning journalist with a sharp legal mind asks. The types of questions that honest and dishonest Pharisees asked of Jesus. This time, I’m asking the questions.

Risen Magazine: You’re on your first novel.
Lee Strobel: My daughter writes novels and I thought, I’ve written books, I know how to write. But it’s a whole different world. My whole life I’ve been tethered to facts. As a journalist, I try to double-check everything, not to exaggerate, to be accurate. Now to have the freedom to make this stuff up, these characters, this dialogue, these situations; I’m having a blast, but I’m finding that it’s more difficult than it looks.

RM: I began writing fiction as a kid, because I wanted to make the world in my image. Do you feel that?
LS: A little bit. To be able to create my own version of reality and imagine what life would be like with people created from your imagination is a lot of fun. I keep telling my publisher, I might have to give you back the advance. [Laughs] So far they like it and I like it.

RM: What’s the book about?
LS: They tell you to write about what you know about. It’s a novel about Chicago, and it has three plot strands that come together—one involves a megachurch, one involves a big-city newspaper, one involves a crime syndicate. I used to cover a lot of crime syndicate stuff for the Chicago Tribune. It’s been fun to wrestle with some issues theological issues in it, in a more oblique way than I do in my other books. I mean, I may never write another one. [Laughs]

RM: I was wondering this morning if some people have a predisposition for belief. I mean, I was probably nine years old and still an apologist for Santa Claus. [Laughter] Do you think you are predisposed for belief?
LS: No, I mean, I don’t think I had a predisposition to find what I found when I finished my spiritual investigation. Like Evel Knievel, whom I got to know before he died. He didn’t seem to have any predisposition to faith. He had two planes with his name on them and he would sit in one, drink champaign, and watch his name on the other one as it flew through the clouds. Now that’s the definition of a narcissist. [Laughs hard] He once got in a dispute with a business associate, took a baseball bat to him, and beat him up and went to jail for that. He had women… he told me stories… Anyway, he came to faith radically before he died. One of the reasons was the book The Case for Christ. He and I became friends, and… you talk about a radical transformation... oh my gosh! I think it was Maxim that interviewed him, and all he wanted to talk about was Jesus. They didn’t know what to do with it. He actually has on his tombstone: “Believe in Jesus.”

RM: I found your book when I was teaching at a secular high school. There was a religions teacher who had bought into the Jesus Seminar works, and a young kid would stand up against him with nothing but your book and the Bible.
LS: I had one of those guys in college. He was a Unitarian, which means he essentially believed in nothing. He would basically say Jesus Seminar type of stuff, using very leftwing scholarship. I walked away from that class reaffirmed in my atheism. I just ran into a guy a couple weeks ago in St. Louis who had taken that same class, and he became an atheist. I thought, How many people went to that class where he was feeding one-side of this skewed, flawed, outdated methodologies that caused people to lose their faith?
    George Mason University just did a study that showed that the proportion of atheists who are college professors is three times greater than the population as a whole. I don’t have a problem with being an atheist or a skeptic, but let’s be on equal footing and discuss the evidence, instead of taking a position of authority and telling one side of things.

RM: The other day, I started reading the Bible from the beginning and there’s a talking snake. That didn’t so much make me question my faith, but it did make me question the inerrancy of the Bible.
LS: Yeah, let’s pray. [Laughs hard] No, the greatest defender of Christianity today is William Lane Craig. He told me once that he had trouble with the Virgin Birth. For this to be true it means that God would have had to create the genetic material inside of Mary necessary for a child to be born. He said it was really a struggle for him and sounded too similar to mythology. Finally he realized that he had really good evidence that God existed, and if the cosmological evidence is true, then creating the generic material for a virgin birth is child’s play. All of the sudden it wasn’t an obstacle anymore. I like to focus on where the evidence points and I think it points toward God, Jesus being His son, and the Resurrection. There are a lot of hard things to believe in the Bible, but if you start with the evidence establishing and supporting the basic beliefs, then a talking snake does not become impossible. On the other hand, if you want to believe that some of the difficult things to explain are myth, go ahead. There are plenty of Christians taking a view that the Genesis account is not literally true, but is teaching certain points about God. You don’t have to believe in the inerrancy of the Bible to be a Christian. I try to diffuse those situations and go back to the essentials. When I was a skeptic and investigating the evidence for God and Christianity, I didn’t believe the Bible was inerrant. I didn’t believe it was divine, I didn’t believe it was inspired or the Word of God. I did believe what I had to believe, that it is a set of ancient, historical, and literary documents. I could take the New Testament and apply the kind of historical tests you would apply to Josephus or Tacitus, convinced that they point to the essential truths of the Christian faith. I think a lot of the issues that skeptics raise are really side issues.
I was on a panel discussion recently with Christopher Hitchens, William Lane Craig, and a couple of other guys. Bill Craig and I presented at least ten or twelve lines of reasoning that pointed toward the existence of God and the truth of Christianity, of which Christopher Hitchens addressed zero. He did not try to refute it; he did not try to answer it. His position seemed [to be] that God did not exist and I [Hitchens] hate Him. [Laughs] I hate him even though he doesn’t exist.
RM: That’s what C.S. Lewis said—he hated God for not existing.
LS: I think Christopher Hitchens hates Him for who He’s depicted as being and sets aside the issue of whether or not He really does exist. When Bill Craig debated Christopher Hitchens in April in Southern California, Bill Craig obliterated Christopher Hitchens. Why? Because Bill Craig presented a case that he was not able to rationally attack. That’s what often happens in