The Case for Heaven

A Journalist Investigates Evidence for Life After Death

Lee Strobel

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310358435
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Bestselling and award-winning author Lee Strobel interviews experts about the evidence for the afterlife and offers credible answers to the most provocative questions about what happens when we die, near-death experiences, heaven, and hell.

We all want to know what awaits us on the other side of death, but is there any reliable evidence that there is life after death? Investigative author Lee Strobel offers a lively and compelling study into one of the most provocative topics of our day.

Through fascinating conversations with respected scholars and experts--a neuroscientist from Cambridge University, a researcher who analyzeda thousand accounts of near-death experiences, and an atheist-turned-Christian-philosopher--Strobel offers compelling reasons for why death is not the end of our existence but a transition to an exciting world to come. Looking at biblical accounts, Strobel unfolds what awaits us after we take our last breath and answers questions like:

• Is there an afterlife?
• What is heaven like?
• How will we spend our time there?
• And what does it mean to see God face to face?

With a balanced approach, Strobel examines the alternative of Hell and the logic of damnation, and gives a careful look at reincarnation, universalism, the exclusivity claims of Christ, and other issues related to the topic of life after death. With vulnerability, Strobel shares the experience of how he nearly died years ago and how the reality of death can shape our lives and faith.

Follow Strobel on this journey of discovery of the entirely credible, believable, and exhilarating life to come.

CHAPTER 1

The Quest for Immortality

Our Frantic Efforts to Outlive Ourselves

How can I rest, how can I be at peace? Despair is in my heart . . . I am afraid of death.

EPIC OF GILGAMESH (CIRCA 2100 BC), OLDEST KNOWN FICTION

No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.

HUMANIST MANIFESTO II

It was a sermon on heaven and hell by famed evangelist Billy Graham that brought a troubled twelve-year-old named Clay Jones to faith in Jesus. The son of an atheist and astrologer, he had grown up sickly and bullied, a mediocre student and a self-described “rebellious little punk.” Graham’s 1969 rally in Southern California became the turning point for him.

Over time, Jones was utterly transformed. He married his high school sweetheart Jean E. and ended up as a pastor and seminary professor. Then came the phone call that rocked his world—specialists had finally diagnosed his chronic back pain. The news was grim: he was suffering from a virulent form of bone cancer that kills 100 percent of its victims within two years.

Hit the pause button. Can you imagine getting a call like that? How would you react? What emotions would surge through you? What’s the first thing you would do?

As for Clay and Jean E., tears streamed down their faces. They held hands and offered a prayer of thanksgiving for what God had done in their lives and for the fact that he was in control of the situation. They asked for healing.

“This is going to sound strange,” Jones said later, “but I wasn’t afraid of dying. Some people scoff when I say that, but it’s true. Yes, I mourned that I’d be leaving my wife. But, you see, I had a robust view of heaven—and that’s what made all the difference. As the apostle Paul said, ‘To live is Christ and to die is gain.’¹ The worst thing that could happen would be that I would graduate into God’s glorious presence—forever.”

How someone reacts to life-shattering news like that depends on their worldview. If there is no God, there is no hope. Said Stanford psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom, “Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.”² Indeed, the desire to cheat death and live forever, to somehow achieve immortality apart from God, has been a driving force throughout history.

As for Jones, a few weeks after that initial call, a specialist realized there had been an error in the diagnosis—yes, he had bone cancer, but it was a much milder form that could be treated by surgery. Today, Jones has been healed for more than fifteen years.

Still, his own health scare, his chronic childhood illnesses, and the deaths of friends have given Jones special insights into the topic of dying.

I flew to Orange County, California, and drove to his modest Mediterranean-style house to chat with him about his latest book, a profound and provocative work whose title explains exactly what I wanted to discuss with him: Immortal: How the Fear of Death Drives Us and What We Can Do about It.³

Interview #1: Clay Butler Jones, DMin

Jones has a multifaceted background as a leader, author, and professor. After receiving an undergraduate degree in philosophy from California State University in Fullerton, he went on to earn his Master of Divinity degree from American Christian Theological Seminary and his Doctor of Ministry degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

He is widely known for his work in the apologetics program at Biola University, where he started teaching in 2004. He has taught classes on the resurrection, why God allows evil, and other topics as an associate professor at its Talbot Seminary, and he is currently a visiting scholar there.

Along the way, he hosted a national call-in talk radio program for eight years, sparring with Buddhists, Scientologists, secular humanists, Muslims, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others from varying religious perspectives. Currently he serves as chairman of the board of Ratio Christi, a ministry that defends Christianity on more than 115 college campuses.

His 2017 book Why Does God Allow Evil? is a masterful treatment of a troubling topic. Philosopher J. P. Moreland said Jones “fearlessly and deftly addresses all the hard questions head-on,” adding, “There is no ducking of issues.”⁴ Apologist Frank Turek said Jones’s new book on immortality, published in 2020, “could be one of the most important books you’ll ever read.”⁵

We sat down in adjacent cushioned chairs in Jones’s living room for our conversation. Jones is an all-too-rare combination of being an unvarnished straight shooter with a heart full of compassion and empathy. There is, to echo Moreland, no ducking of issues with him.

He was casual in his attire, unpretentious in his demeanor, and passionate in his convictions. Though over sixty years old, his hair was still pretty much black (and slightly tousled), while gray was on the verge of fully conquering his beard.

Our conversation stretched into several hours as we delved into the issue of how the fear of death drives humanity, and how the desire to achieve immortality—of any sort—is a relentless pursuit for so many people.

“What prompted you to research this topic?” I asked.

“I came across the book A Brief History of Thought, by French philosopher and secular humanist Luc Ferry,” Jones explained. “Ferry wrote, ‘The quest for a salvation without God is at the heart of every great philosophical system, and that is its essential and ultimate objective.’⁶ That rocked me! He was saying that the heart of philosophy is trying to find a way of dealing with death without God. I needed to find out if other philosophers felt the same way.”

“What did you discover?”

“That indeed much of philosophy is trying to conquer the fear of death. For example, Plato writes that in the last hours before his teacher Socrates died, Socrates said, ‘Truly then . . . those who practise philosophy aright are cultivating dying.’⁷ Philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote an essay called ‘To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die,’ in which he said that all the wisdom in the world eventually comes down to teaching us how not to be afraid of dying.⁸ German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, ‘Without death men would scarcely philosophize.’⁹

“So philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists—they’re fascinated with how death affects behavior,” he continued. “Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.¹⁰ Becker says that ‘the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else: it is a mainspring of human activity.’¹¹ His premise was that everybody is terrified by their own death and they’re trying to do everything they can to compensate for it.”

“How did your friends react when they found out you were writing a book on death?” I asked.

Jones chuckled. “They’d say, quite defensively, ‘I’m not afraid of dying.’”

“Were they telling the truth?”

“They weren’t being entirely dishonest—because they don’t think about their own death. They’ve blocked it from their minds.”

“Until they have chest pains,” I offered.

He pointed at me like I’d won the jackpot. “Bingo,” he declared. “Then the fear of death stands in front of them—and it won’t leave the room.”

Denial, Distraction, Depression

In his book, Clay Jones quotes social scientists as saying that the fear of death drives culture—in fact, some claim it fuels all of it. As social theorist Zygmunt Bauman wrote, “There would probably be no culture were humans unaware of their mortality.”¹²

“Are these experts exaggerating?” I asked.

“Just barely,” came his response. “Remember that Hebrews 2:15 says Jesus came to rescue people who are ‘held in slavery by their fear of death.’ So Scripture confirms that we are in bondage to a fear of dying. And I do believe that is what motivates much of human behavior. If people don’t follow Jesus, who’s going to free them from that slavery? They’ve got to somehow find a way to free themselves—and that leads to all kinds of problems.”

“For example?”

“It affects people in every conceivable way. The first thing they do is deny. They shove it out of their minds and say to themselves, ‘I’m the exception. If science keeps advancing and I live long enough, medicine will cure anything that threatens my life.’ Then they distract. We pay entertainers and sports stars huge amounts of money because they’re valuable to us—they divert our attention from the fact that we’re going to die.

“Then there’s depression,” he added. “The prospect of our death and the deaths of those we love is the major reason for depression. Staks Rosch said in the Huffington Post, ‘Depression is a serious problem in the greater atheist community and far too often, that depression has led to suicide. This is something many of my fellow atheists often don’t like to admit, but it is true.’”¹³

“I can understand depression, but suicide?” I asked. “People kill themselves because they’re afraid of dying? That’s counterintuitive.”

“Essentially, what they’re doing is taking control of that which has control over them. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno said that ‘the self-slayer kills himself because he will not wait for death.’”¹⁴

In his book, Jones quotes research published in the American Journal of Psychiatry: “Religiously unaffiliated subjects had significantly more lifetime suicide attempts and more first-degree relatives who committed suicide than subjects who endorsed a religious affiliation . . . Furthermore, subjects with no religious affiliation perceived fewer reasons for living.”¹⁵

Since my interview with Jones, Harvard researchers released a new study documenting that attendance at religious services dramatically reduces deaths from suicide, drugs, and alcohol. Attending services at least once a week cut these so-called “deaths by despair” by 33 percent among men and a whopping 68 percent among women, compared to those who never attended services.¹⁶

“People often talk about an epidemic of suicide,” concluded Jones, “but the real epidemic is the increasing rejection of a robust belief in an afterlife. That’s what is miring more and more people in hopelessness.”

Crack-Crack-Cracking the Brain

I picked up my Bible and quoted Ecclesiastes 3:11, which says God has “set eternity in the human heart,” and then I asked Jones, “What does that mean to you?”

“That there’s more than just a fear of death. We want to live forever. It’s implanted in us. We want to understand eternity, we want t...