I mentioned this author in a conversation the other day. I’ve read (and re-read) his books, so here’s a brief review.
He has a fairly successful series of apologetics books called The Case for Christ, The Case for a Creator, The Case for Faith, and The Case for the Real Jesus, respective to their dates of publication–the first being by far the most popular. The series may have grown since I last looked in the bookstore–I think there’s a condensed version of Christ.
His shtick is that he’s a lawyer and former atheist, and he knows how to suss out the truth (TM). He’s also a pompous asshole.
I will say that his books are an absolutely fantastic and accessible demonstration of the use of rhetoric in argumentation. When I get hauled into a kangaroo court as a teacher down the road, there’s a decent chance it’ll be because I had the kids read one of his books to find rhetorical techniques in argument, because the material’s loaded with it, it’s approachable, and it’s an engaging subject. The corollary to that is he does a terrible job of making some of man’s most deeply personal and arguable questions into a game to be won. It’s my beef with Socrates: okay, yeah, you won the argument, but you clearly didn’t address what that guy was going for, so it doesn’t actually help anyone. He “wins” because of rhetorical acrobatics, not cogent arguments. The fact that his entire premise that it is a winnable debate for certain is itself probably enough to suggest it will not be helpful to anyone who isn’t already at least leaning his way.
I’m still kicking around the idea of writing rebuttals some time (although very good ones already exist on the internet), is how annoying I found him.
Christ‘s content is more or less a mix of Josh McDowell and CS Lewis. Creator is basically Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box. Faith is some intro theodicy and an inordinate amount of strawmanning. Real Jesus is more or less supplement to Christ.
All of them are set up based on interviews with “experts”. To be fair, he has a number of very legit people he interviews. Each person gets a chapter, and each chapter is a “question” or “objection”. At the end of the book, he rests his case. I massively object to that style of argumentation. There’s no actual debate, so there’ no bonafide effort to find anything approaching truth. The most pernicious example I can think of when he criticizes the beliefs of the “Jesus Seminar” (a group of liberal Christian scholars). The criticisms are fair, but he never allows them a rebuttal. They’re a group who does that. They go around and do talks and stuff, and I’m sure they would have taken him up on it. It just makes the courtroom shtick more insufferable. The defense is not allowed to speak for itself. It’s just a series of straw men. He interviews Bruce Metzger in “Christ”, who’s a solid scholar, but never Bart Ehrman, who studied under Metzger and has very different viewpoints on faith. Etc.
Also, his “I used to be an atheist” deal bugs the shit out of me. It’s the “I used to be an atheist, so I can speak on behalf of all of them”. He sounds like one of those guys, based on his own telling in the book, just never took Christianity seriously. Which is fine, it’s just that’s not every atheist’s experience. His wife was Christian, and he converted after marrying her and getting involved in the church despite his skepticism. Contrast that to someone like Ehrman, who was “born-again” in high school and went to a religious college to study the Bible, who became more and more skeptical of his religion after learning more and more about the Bible.
The brilliance of his persuasion is that he breaks down massively complex questions about religion into little chunks, isolates them, and “wins” the argument one piece at a time. The old proverb about the bundle of sticks comes to mind: he breaks apart each stick on its own, but he doesn’t have the integrity to attack it as a whole. And it’s not as if he knocks each argument out of the park. A skeptic may come out with a, “well, maybe, I mean…” at the end of each chapter, but his mind will hardly be content when Strobel concludes. It’s not about allaying all doubts to the skeptic, it’s about shoring up the ego of believers’, which I think is a shame for both sides. It’s the truth that we are all looking for, and it’s a disservice to avoid dealing with finding it for the sake of being “right”.
Nonetheless, Strobel’s writing style is very down-to-Earth, and he covers a lot of modern apologetics. He’s my go-to paperback on apologetics arguments if I’m looking for a reference. Yes, there are better writers out there, but his books have their merits.