Lee Strobel and the Journalist's Questions

In the late twentieth century, in the busy newsroom of one of America's great papers, there worked a man whose job was to doubt. His name was Lee Strobel, a legal affairs editor at the Chicago Tribune, a journalist trained to trust nothing he could not verify. He had a law degree. He had a reporter's nose for a weak story. And he was, by his own description, an atheist who found the Christian faith not merely false but faintly ridiculous. Then his wife became a Christian. And Lee Strobel set out to prove her wrong.

Here was a man who believed he could dismantle the whole thing with the tools he already had. He knew how to cross-examine a witness. He knew how to spot a lie, to weigh a source, to chase down a contradiction. So he turned those tools on the figure at the centre of his wife's new faith. On Jesus of Nazareth. On the Gospels. On the claim that a crucified man had walked out of his own tomb.

This was no quiet afternoon of reading. This was an investigation, pursued the way he pursued any story. He went to scholars and historians and pressed them with the questions a sceptic would ask. Were the Gospel accounts written too late to be trusted? Had the texts been corrupted over the centuries? Could the resurrection be explained away, as so many wished to explain it away, as legend, as fraud, as a grieving mind seeing what it longed to see? He asked the hard questions, the ones the church is often afraid of, and he asked them without flinching.

And something happened that the journalist had not planned for. The evidence did not collapse under his pressure. It held. He had expected to find a house of cards and instead he kept finding stone. The manuscripts were earlier and better attested than he had assumed. The witnesses did not behave like men spreading a lie they had invented. Piece by piece, the case he had built against Christ began to turn, until the verdict pointed the other way. The man who set out to rescue his wife from her faith found himself unable to escape it. He weighed the testimony, and he believed.

Now, it would be too simple to say that one argument did it, or that a clever man was merely out-argued. Conversion is never a courtroom trick, and Strobel would not pretend otherwise. Faith is not won like a wager. But what his story gave the church was something quieter and more lasting than a knockdown proof. It was a posture. It was permission. It said to every doubter in every pew that a question is not an enemy to be shamed into silence.

Later he would gather his investigation into a book, The Case for Christ, and it would travel into more hands than he could ever have imagined, carried by sceptics and seekers and the simply curious. He went on to write, to speak, to spend his working life on the very questions he had once asked in anger. The reporter who came to expose the faith became one of its plainest defenders.

What endures is not that Lee Strobel won an argument. Arguments are won and lost and won again, and the field is more tangled than any single book can settle. What endures is the picture of a hard-nosed journalist with his notebook open, leaning in, asking the questions everyone else was too frightened to ask. Because in the end he discovered the thing the church so often forgets. That the living Christ is not protected by our fear of hard questions, and never has been.