Monday, March 04, 2019

Books read in 2019: No. 17 -- The Case for Christ

by Lee Strobel

Started: Feb. 28
Finished: March 4

Notes: Of my Christian readings, the apologists are by far my favorites, so it's a natural for me to turn to the author who is arguably the best known of the modern apologists. Strobel was apparently a journalist who initially set out to do an investigation to disprove Christianity when researching this book, but instead he became a believer.

Mini review: Nearly all of this book is a collection of interviews done by the author with various professionals in philosophy, psychology, history, theology, etc., all of those experts being Christian, which in a way harms the authors approach but is to some extent understandable considering he had apparently done other research with non-believing sources and the main focus of this book is as the title suggests, The Case for Christ. Strobel's writing is strong enough, but I felt his journalistic approach a little disingenuous, and though I understand he had become a Christian by the time he wrote this book, I felt he went a little overboard in trying to convince the reader he had been a skeptic and something of an atheist before logically exploring Christianity. Much of the information provided here, the logic put forth for believing in the Resurrection and that Jesus was the Son of God, was not new to me, but I did appreciate the final chapter in which Strobel outlined his own becoming a Christian because his approach has been somewhat similar to my own over the years. However, when it comes down to it, Christian belief truly is a matter of faith, of having faith, of making that leap of faith, and while the information presented here might sway some, it also isn't likely to convince those who are determined against it and who can come up with their own counterarguments however well thought out or not they might be.

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