Product Description

A student edition of Lee Strobel’s prize-winning The Case for Faith, created by the same writers, Strobel and Jane Vogel, who produced the popular The Case for Christ--Student Edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24409 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780310246084
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From the Back Cover
Who Was Jesus?

A good man? A lunatic? God?

There’s little question that he actually lived. But miracles? Rising from the dead? Some of the stories you hear about him sound like just that--stories. A reasonable person would never believe them, let alone the claim that he’s the only way to God!

But a reasonable person would also make sure that he or she understood the facts before jumping to conclusions. That’s why Lee Strobel--an award-winning legal journalist with a knack for asking tough questions--decided to investigate Jesus for himself. An atheist, Strobel felt certain his findings would bring Christianity’s claims about Jesus tumbling down like a house of cards.

He was in for the surprise of his life. Join him as he retraces his journey from skepticism to faith. You’ll consult expert testimony as you sift through the truths that history, science, psychiatry, literature, and religion reveal. Like Strobel, you’ll be amazed at the evidence--how much there is, how strong it is, and what it says.

The facts are in. What will your verdict be in The Case for Christ?

About the Author
Lee Strobel, educated at Yale Law School, was the award-winning legal editor of the Chicago Tribune and a spiritual skeptic until 1981. He wrote the Gold Medallion-winning books The Case for Christ and The Case for Faith. A former teaching pastor at two of America’s largest churches, he and his wife live in California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One What’s Wrong with Me? I could take you back to the very place where I lost my faith in God. I was 14 years old. At Prospect High School in Mount Prospect, Illinois, the biology classroom was on the third floor in the northwest corner of the building. I was sitting in the second row from the windows, third chair from the front, when I first learned about Darwin’s theory of evolution. Revolutionized by Evolution This was revolutionary to me! Our teacher explained that life originated millions of years ago when chemicals randomly reacted with each other in a warm ocean on the primordial earth. Then, through a process of survival of the fittest and natural selection, life forms gained in complexity. Eventually, human beings emerged from the same family tree as apes. Although the teacher didn’t address this aspect of evolution, its biggest implication was obvious to me: If evolution explains the origin and development of life, then God was out of a job! What did we need God for? Life was just the natural result of the random interaction of chemicals. To my mind, this was great news! Finally, here was a rational basis for atheism. If evolution explains life, then the first chapters of the Bible must be mythology or wishful thinking. And if that were true of the first chapters, why not the rest? Jesus could not have been God. Miracles aren’t possible; they’re just the attempts by pre-scientific people to make sense out of what they couldn’t understand but which now science can explain. For the first time, I had a rational reason to abandon Christianity. Bored by Religion Not that I’d ever really been a Christian. My parents believed in God and had done their best to try to spark spiritual interest in me. When I was a kid, they brought me to a Protestant church, where I would struggle to stay awake during the 20-minute sermons. I didn’t understand the rituals, I couldn’t relate to the organ music, and I quickly concluded that religion was a waste of an otherwise perfectly good Sunday. When I was in junior high, my parents enrolled me in confirmation class. This meant that one day a week after school I was forced to sit in the church’s airless basement and go through a series of classes. I can’t recall learning much about the Bible—or about Jesus, for that matter. Mostly, I remember having to memorize things like the Ten Commandments and then stand and recite them. Nobody knew them well; we sort of bluffed our way through as the pastor would prompt us. It was mind-numbingly dull. I don’t remember anything that I was forced to commit to memory back then, although I do have vivid memories of the pastor lecturing us and telling us sternly that we didn’t have enough "diligence." I didn’t even know what that was, but apparently we were bad for not having it. Graduating from Church When the time came to be formally confirmed and made a member of the church, we were told in advance the kind of questions we would be asked so that we’d know the answers. I didn’t want to go through with this because, if I had any faith in God at the time, it was hanging by a slender thread. To me, God was irrelevant, mysterious, and a stern disciplinarian who, if he existed, was probably mad that I lacked "diligence." On the other hand, I wasn’t too excited about the idea of standing up to my parents and saying, "No thanks, I’m not interested in being confirmed, because I think your God is probably just a fairy tale." My dad would have gone ballistic and my mom would have freaked out. I didn’t need that. If there were no God, then what would be the harm in going through some meaningless ritual? So I went through the confirmation ceremony. Afterward, we got a stack of pre-printed envelopes so we could give money to the church. That, I figured, was probably what was really behind the whole confirmation scam—and probably behind all of organized religion. But confirmation had its advantages: I figured that my confirmation ceremony was actually my graduation ceremony—I had graduated from church. Now I was on my own. My parents stopped dragging me to church on Sundays, and I was happy to sleep late. I had done the religion drill. Time to party! Looking for Love After that day in biology class, I had even more reason to party. After all, I’d figured out that God did not exist. And that meant I was not accountable to him. I would not have to stand before him someday and be judged. I was free to live according to my rules, not his dusty commandments that I had been force-fed in confirmation class. To me, all of this meant that nobody else really mattered unless they made me happy. But there was someone who mattered—and who made me happy. Her name was Leslie, and we met when we were 14 years old. On the day we met, Leslie went home and told her mother, "I’ve met the boy I’m going to marry!" Her mother was condescending. "Sure, you did," she said. But Leslie didn’t have any doubts, and neither did I. We dated on and off during high school, and after I left home to attend the University of Missouri, we maintained our relationship through the mail. We became convinced that there was nobody else we would ever be happy with. Within a year, Leslie moved down to Missouri, and we got engaged. We decided to get married in a church because ... well, that’s where people get married, isn’t it? Besides, Leslie wasn’t hostile toward God, as I was. She wasn’t opposed to religion, especially for other people. For herself, though, God was just another topic she had never taken the time to seriously explore.

Customer Reviews

Great for students who want reasons for belief in Christ
Much condensced from the original The Case for Christ, this book gets five stars because it is simple enough for the average junior/senior higher to understand his faith. One of my students says this is the best book that he ever read and was genuinely appreciative that the book was aimed at his level of understanding. The former skeptic Strobel asks some of the tough questions that many skeptics pose to Christians every day. Many Christians have been scared from sharing their faith because they don't have all the answers, and that's a shame.

The nice thing about this book is that Strobel asks prominent Christian scholars about the authenticity of Christ, His nature, and the veracity of the resurrection. Strobel interviews such greats as Bruce Metzger, Edwin Yamauchi, Gary Collins, D.A. Carson, William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, and J.P. Moreland. While the aforementioned scholars have all written plenty on their own, many of their tomes are unreadable by the average Christian layperson. But in the student edition of The Case for Christ, the writing is not too theological or difficult to understand. I believe anyone with doubts about Jesus Christ will view Him differently after reading this book. The Christian layperson will also benefit by learning answers to support her beliefs (1 Pet. 3:15-16). For these reasons, I highly recommend this book.

The Case For Christ is Enlightening for Christians and Skeptics
Like many American Christians, I was brought to church most Sundays and endured countless sermons and lessons. Despite this seemingly rich education on Christian principles, I never was exposed to a lesson or class on the existence of God; God's existence was assumed as fact. As I matured into my twenties and went to college, the existance of God was no longer taken for granted. I encountered many agnostics and atheists among my many college professors. The net result of their influence was to question my faith in the existance of God. I never lost my faith, but I found it was a faith that could not withstand scrutiny.

Reading Lee Stobel's "The Case For Christ" began in me my search for the certainty of my faith. Strobel's book is an excellent place to start. He presents interviews with several Christian apologetics that involve issues related to the veracity of the Biblical account of Christ, the Son of God.

The issues are as follows:

The trustworthiness of the Gospel accounts.
Historical evidences for Christ outside of the Bible.
Archaeology and the Life of Christ
The "Jesus Seminar" account of the life of Christ.
Did Jesus claim to be equal with God?
Is Jesus the promised scripture's Messiah?
Did Jesus really die on the cross?
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

Mr. Strobel investigates each issue thoroughly. He approaches the issues as a skeptic who wants to be convinced of the truth. Apparently, Strobel was once a skeptic himself and his investigative journalism convinced him of the truth of his childhod faith in Christ. The only weakness I could find in the book is the lack of rebuttal from those individuals who do not believe in the deity of Jesus. Strobel claims to be the main rebuttal witness, as he assumes the skeptical viewpoint, but he is writing from the position of a believer, and his rebuttals are perhaps not as forceful as a "true" unbeliever.

If you have questions like I did, (and as did Strobel), then this is a good starting point for your journey. There are other books that go into complete detail on all the issues raised here, and you may want to purchase these as well. But this is a very good starting point for answering those nagging doubts about your faith in Christianity and one's faith in the person of Jesus.

Most highly recommended.

Jim "Konedog" Koenig

Interesting for the "somewhat churched"
This book gave a good basic layout of how and when the Bible was written, and how it survived centuries of translations while remaining accurate. I started reading and couldn't put it down. It's down to earth and easy to understand.