Lee Strobel Fouls Out
Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 8:00AM | by Otter I took an hour or two today to watch Lee Strobel’s “The Case For Faith.”
The Amazon reviews are typically full-throated exultations of the video’s power.
I found it weirdly lacking in substance. Strobel has for years struck me as a strange bird. He makes a lot (of money?) out of his skeptics’ credentials. But as a semi-skeptical theist, I’ve always found him defectively curious, or overly ready to fall back on self-referential arguments. I can only think that the glowing Amazon reviews are from people who would love to believe that “logic” is defined as whatever arguments support one’s faith-prejudices, not as a strict index to the truth.
The video doesn’t amount to a rational defense of the Evangelical understanding of sin and forgiveness. Rather, it’s a constant barrage of reiterations of that understanding. There are certainly highlights: Bishop N.T. Wright is always worth listening to, and I thought not coincidentally that this is because he’s the only expert in the whole thing who makes reference to the Holy Spirit, which is the intersection of the personality cult of Jesus and the ethics that are otherwise separable from Jesus: it’s almost pointless to talk about Christian belief without exhaustive reference to the Holy Spirit, as Jesus himself reiterates.
Too few of the other “experts” really speak to the rational problems of the Evangelical understanding of atonement.
The first twenty minutes or so deal with Strobel’s interactions with Charles Templeton, the Evangelical pastor-turned-agnostic whose questions motivated Strobel’s search for answers.
Templeton’s questions are rooted in a reaction to Evangelicalism: “Why is Jesus the only way to God?” and “Why does God allow suffering?” Templeton’s rejection of the exclusivity of Jesus as a path to God is of course dependent on the Evangelical model of Christianity, both ancient and modern.
The experts that are dredged up and dealt like playing cards in defense of Jesus’ claims to exclusivity are, mostly, conspicuously theologians, not historians. There’s a disturbing circularity of logic to the video: for instance, the idea that “all religions cannot be true” crops up, but never is it considered that they might all be false, or that they might all be metaphorically true in some sense.
C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, Lord” Trilemma is trotted out: I have an ongoing quarrel with it. So is the argument from prophecy. Wright is tempting when he says that he’s absolutely persuaded of the historical resurrection: but he is not allowed to offer any real evidence. Strobel merely circles the wagons around scripture’s “500 witnesses” and the argument from prophecy: but he’s no scholar on the level of Wright, who should be allowed to make a more hefty defense.
In response to the problem of evil, Peter Kreeft and J.P. Moreland sum up the “defense”: that we do not know what words like “good” and “all-powerful mean. Fair enough. But it’s not clear what business anybody has saying that “God is good” or “God is all-powerful if those terms have no meaning. And of course they are obliged to admit that, in effect, logic is greater than God, who can do nothing that violates logic. More to the point, this doesn’t really solve the problem of evil: there’s nothing counter-logical about delivering someone from a wasting disease or sending rain on a drought-ridden country. God just chooses just not to do it. The claim is made that “evil entered the world” when people chose wrongly; but what is the evidence or rationality behind this? That there was a mythic time when there was no suffering and death? When? Where? What’s our evidence for that?
That’s the guilt-complex of Evangelicalism: whatever’s wrong is our fault. But I don’t see that that’s true at all. Indeed, much evil is a response to creation’s inability to meet our needs.
And this guilt complex is taken as self-evident. “Human freedom” caused the diminution of goodness in the world. ”[I]t was the free will of human beings that caused evil,” Strobel remarks as though this were clearly true. Sure: human free will causes tremendous evil. But that really isn’t an answer to the question.
Slightly better is the argument that love and suffering are not incompatible: parents allow children to suffer. Evangelical sufferer-in-chief (I say that more respectfully than it sounds) Joni Erickson-Tada is brought in to make a heartwarming case that suffering does change a person, often for the better.
But God allows people to suffer and die, not just suffer the natural consequences of action. The analogy is not at all an answer to the question.
In a strange appeal to emotion, Jesus’ suffering is presented as a paradigm for suffering as a path to life. But of course, that only makes sense if one believes already that the suffering of Jesus really was redemptive and good instead of the brutal meaningless murder of a revolutionary preacher by the Romans. Without the clear defense of the resurrection on historical rather than theological grounds, the crucifixion makes no sense to the skeptic.
The most sweeping hope of Christianity is that in the incarnation, God participates in the suffering of humanity. Strobel’s intellectuals argue that God was at Auschwitz. One might be excused for hoping it was so; but one might be excused for wondering how one might endure the assurance that God was without vomiting from indignation.
Strobel closes by asking what an atheist like Bertrand Russel has to offer to people who suffer. This is a bizarre thing to put in an apologetics video: is it better to offer false hope than truth? Would Strobel say that if there were no God that we should pretend that there is?
I wonder what will become of the Christian mind in the hands of people like this.
Oh: and the music is insipid.
Reader Comments (3)
Strobel and his tribe are barking up the wrong tree—apologetics-as-evangelism is a silly, silly idea, and one that seems strongly counter to a belief in (among other things) divine revelation as essential/primary/foundational to knowledge of the supernatural. Do you watch videos like this one because you think that the path that begins at your feet and ends at the throne of God is paved with logic? and that one of these guys will reveal it to you? Preparing the way of the Lord begins in repentance, not in argument.
Susan, I'm so glad you're on the planet....
Back atcha, Prof Otter.