This past summer I had been listening to a podcast where the speaker was talking about the importance of philosophy, and how children aren’t taught it today in school in many countries, which is why their ability to think and discern is stunted. I was intrigued, and so our family began a course on introduction to philosophy this past summer. We haven’t finished it yet, but once we get the hang of this busy school schedule mixed with our teaching schedules, we will get back to it. (Jay’s science teacher was quite stunned that Jay knew who Aristotle and Plato were!)
I mention that because it led me to a professor of philosophy, J.P. Moreland, he has some very interesting thoughts (check him out on youtube, just search his name). In one of his presentations at a college, he mentioned the story of Lee Strobel having an impact on him. Have you ever heard of Lee Strobel? He has written several books, but I thought his story was worth posting as someone who has a master’s in law and also experience in journalism, which may be areas that our children go into…who knows. It is a bit of a read, but I really appreciate his willingness to study and search, and I would just like to preserve this here on our website for our kids to read one day. I think you might like it too.
Lee Strobel:
A former atheist, Lee holds a Master of Studies in Law degree from Yale Law School, was an investigative newspaper reporter, and was the award-winning legal editor of the Chicago Tribune.
I was an atheist for most of my life. I thought that the idea of an all powerful, all loving God was just silly. I learned in school that evolution was where life came from, so what do you need God for? And I had a lot of self-motivation for living an atheistic lifestyle. I was living a very immoral life and a drunken life, life that was really a hundred percent focused on journalism.
Right from journalism school I went to the Chicago Tribune, which was unusual; but I had so much experience for a kid…because I knew since I was a little kid what I wanted to do. So I started as a general-assignments reporter. I went to Yale to get my masters in law, came back as a legal editor, covered federal courts, covered criminal courts, covered the Illinois Supreme Court and really enjoyed it but without God, without a moral framework, my personal life was out of control, the drinking, the carousing. I had no moral framework of how to do journalism so I would do whatever it took to get the story. I would steal; I would commit a federal crime by stealing federal documents from the courthouse. I made friends with the court clerk, and he allowed me to go by myself into the court files; and so I would go in there, and I would beat the competition all the time by finding all this wonderful stuff in the court files that no one knew about. So when I would find something particularly juicy, I would slip it under my vest, and I would steal it so when the story broke, the competition couldn’t find the documents. Then I gave it a day or two, then I put it back. I figured it was worth it because I never got caught.
My wife was agnostic. She had virtually no experience with church growing up. She never really thought much about God. Then, one day we moved into an apartment building; and the woman downstairs was a Christian. And she built a friendship with my wife, and they became best friends. And they would talk and spend time together. It was very natural in their conversations for Linda to share her faith with my wife, Leslie; and Leslie was fascinated. No one had ever told me about Christianity before. Not really. Here we are in our late twenties at the time. She just soaked it up.
And so she came to me in the fall of 1973 and said, “Lee, I’ve made a big decision. I’ve become a follower of Jesus Christ.” I thought this was the worst possible thing that could happen to our marriage. I thought we were gonna get divorced. I felt like I’d married one Leslie and now she’s changed into something else. I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t want that. And I said, “Look, if you can’t face life on your own two feet, if you have to out your faith in a book of mythology and bad history and make-believe, then you go ahead and do that. But, number one, don’t give them any of our money, because that’s what they’re after; and, number two, don’t try to get me to go because I’m too smart for that.”
So I decided to take my legal training and my journalism training and investigate: is there any credibility to Christianity? I would do what I did at the Chicago Tribune. I would check out stories to see if they were true, if they could be printed in the papers. So I would investigate. I went out, and I applied those skills to the question of, ” Who is Jesus Christ?” I didn’t do it with an antagonist attitude; I did it with a journalist’s attitude…I said, “Give me the facts. I’m going to look at both sides, I’m going to look at other world religions.” And I began to do that. And it was an amazing journey: to look at other faith systems and see the internal contradictions that, to me, disqualified them from being true. And yet to see in Christianity, as I looked into the historical evidence for Jesus, as I looked at the reliability of the New Testament, as I looked at the fulfillment of Old Testament prophesies in the New Testament, as I looked at the resurrection: very powerful evidence. And I looked at some of the most brilliant legal minds of history: Simon Greenleaf of Harvard, Sir Lionel Luck, who, the Guinness Book of World Records describes as the most successful lawyer in the history of the world (had more murder trials won in a row than any other defense attorney ever). These are brilliant people who have applied the laws of evidence to the resurrection accounts and walked away convinced that they are true.
My big hang-up was that it was legend…that this was a legend that grew up a long time after Jesus…and then I found a very interesting fact that to me was one of the pivotal facts in my investigation. There is a passage in the Bible, 1 Corinthians 15:3, that is a creed recited by the earliest Christians that Paul is providing there for the Corinthians; and in fact he refers to the fact that he already has provided this, “This what I received, I pass on to you.” In other words he says this is tradition that I am now formally passing on to you, and it affirms the essentials of Christianity. That Jesus died for our sins. That he was buried and resurrected on the third day and he mentions the eyewitnesses to whom he appears.
It mentions skeptics like James and Paul. This Creed can be dated back by scholars from a wide range of theological belief to within 2 years to sixty months after the resurrection itself. This is an extremely early account that Paul is preserving for us. It’s not his words…he’s passing this along. And when you look at Sherwin White, the great classical historian from Oxford- Cambridge (he did studies about the rate at which legends grew up in the ancient world, and he found that two generations of time was not enough for legend to grow up and thoroughly destroy a solid core of historical truth). And yet here you have something not two generations of time…but that goes back to within two to five years of the events themselves. And the statements in that creed (which were affirmed that it was given by Paul by the witnesses themselves, Peter and James), goes back to the cross itself, to the eyewitness accounts. So there has never been a legend in so short time. In 1844 a historian said, “I challenge anyone anywhere to come up with any example in history where legend grew up that fast and thoroughly destroyed or distorted solid, historical belief…it has never happened that anyone has been able to find.” That was very powerful to me. It told me that this wasn’t wishful thinking, it wasn’t legendary development. This was something that we had a creed of the early church that goes right back to the events themselves, virtually; and, therefore, was very fresh and trustworthy in terms of what it conveys…and when you look at the other aspects of the empty tomb, the eyewitness accounts, the early nature, the extra-biblical evidence, the emergence of the early church…I call them the five Es…you look at all that together; and that’s a very powerful case for the resurrection.
So I did this investigation for almost 2 years of my life: looking at evidence inside the Bible, outside the Bible. One of my favorite things: I found 110 facts outside the Bible recorded in ancient history that confirmed (and again these are many things some are higher quality than others, most are somewhat questionable) that form together a very powerful corroborative aspect. One of them, my favorite, is a guy named Thalus, who was a Greek historian in the first century, who wrote a history of the Eastern Mediterranean world in 52AD. So this is right after Jesus’ life. Thalus was not a believer and Thalus’ works have actually been lost; but in the year 221, a guy named Julius Africanus quotes Thalus, and Thalus had written about the darkness that fell over the Earth during the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Now when I had seen that Bible verse, I remember thinking, “Don’t you think someone other than Mathew, Mark, Luke or John would have noticed this.” And Thalus not only recorded it, but he tried to explain it away as being an eclipse of the sun. Which, given the timing of the Crucifixion, it could not have been. And I thought Thalus’ was a weak historical claim; but the more you investigate Thalus you find that’s a very powerful bit of corroborative evidence and it’s not the only bit. There’s other references to the darkness outside the Bible. I just had a great time as a journalist investigating all this stuff. On the plus side, journalists respond to evidence; the negative side is I tended to be an observer, I was never a participant, I was the critical observer. I didn’t join anything; I kept things at arms length. So the idea of making a commitment to God was alien to me; and yet the evidence was so powerful that on November 8, 1981 (after spending two years of checking this out) I just realized that in light of this torrent of evidence that points so powerfully towards Christianity, it would have required more faith to retain my atheism than to become a Christian. Because to maintain my atheism I would have had to defy the evidence. To become a Christian, I just had to make a step of faith in the same direction that the evidence was pointing. That’s logical, that’s rational, and that’s what I did.
On that day I repented of my sin, which took quite a while, and gave my life to Christ. I thought maybe my wife would be interested in the fact that I just did this; so I thought I’d tell her. So I came out and was walking down the hallway and turned into our kitchen, and my wife was standing there with our daughter who was almost five; and our daughter was standing in front of her reaching up and touching the faucet, for the first time…that’s how tall she was. And she said, “Daddy, look I can touch it. I can reach it.” And I said, “Oh wow you’re getting so big.” And I gave her a hug, and she ran off; and I said to my wife, “That’s how I feel! I feel for a year and nine months I’ve been reaching out and reaching out, and I just touched Jesus Christ. It’s real and it’s true, and I just gave my life to him.” She started crying and said, “You hardhearted son-of-a-*&#, I’ve been telling you this for two years.” And it had turned out that she had met some women in her church, and she told them about her husband who is a hard-hearted, hard-headed journalist that she didn’t have much hope for, and they said we’ll pray this verse Ezekiel 33:23 [the correct citation is 36:26]. It says more over, “I will give you a new heart and I will put a new spirit within you. I’ll remove your heart of stone, and I will give you a heart of flesh.” And she said, “I’ve been praying that every day for two years.” And God began to answer that prayer as I opened my life to him and yielded myself to him, began to seek to follow his ways; and, now, empowered by the Holy Spirit, my attitudes, my philosophy, my worldview, my professional standards, my marriage, my job…everything began to change so much so that my little daughter Alison had only known in her first five years a dad that was angry. I remember…so frustrated from work one day and I kicked the wall and I put my foot right through the wall, anger over life and frustration…that’s all she knew of her dad. I’d come home drunk or I would come home angry and that’s all she had known. And then five or six months after I became a Christian, having seen how God changed my attitudes and my life, she came up to my wife and said, “Mommy, I want God to do for me what he did for daddy.” She gave her life to Christ at age five and now has graduated from college and is now in the ministry, trying to reach this next generation; and my son is now going to seminary, he graduated from bible college this year and is going to seminary here in California in the fall to study philosophy and religion.
My whole life has changed: my attitude, my family, all of our eternities.
https://youtu.be/ZC7ifE3NLkc
