Lee Strobel Remembers Sharing Gospel With Playboy Founder Hugh Hefner
By Movieguide® Contributor
Author Lee Strobel recently recalled the time he talked to Playboy Magazine founder Hugh Hefner about Jesus and the Gospel.
“I found myself in the most unlikely place for any Evangelical Christian,” Strobel told First Baptist Dallas. “I was in the living room of the opulent Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, California, getting ready to interview Hugh Hefner, the notorious hedonist and founder of Playboy magazine.”
“He was quite engaging in terms of the conversation. We talked about what he believed, and he had a very minimalistic, deistic view of God,” Strobel told The Christian Post about Hefner in 2017. “He said he has a minimal belief in God.”
Hefner stated that God was a “little too childlike for me.”
However, Strobel added that he seemed interested when he asked Hefner about Jesus’ resurrection.
“If one had any real evidence that Jesus did indeed return from the dead, then that is the beginning of the dropping of a series of dominoes that takes us to all kinds of wonderful places,” Hefner said.
“I don’t think he is any more the Son of God than we are,” he added.
When the official interview concluded, the “Case for Christ” author shared the Gospel.
Strobel revealed that the late Playboy founder “saw the relevance of the resurrection, he saw the significance of it” and seemed genuinely interested.
During the conversation, Strobel explained to Hefner that “humans are ‘separated by our sin, by wrongdoing’ and that Jesus ‘offers forgiveness as a free gift of his grace,’” Belief Net wrote.
As Strobel departed the Playboy Mansion, he left Hefner with a copy of his book “The Case for Christ,” hoping that Hefner would read it.
The book documents Strobel’s journey from atheism to Christianity.
“Lee Strobel, former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, cross-examines a dozen experts with doctorates from schools like Cambridge, Princeton, and Brandeis who are recognized authorities in their own fields. Strobel challenges them with questions like, How reliable is the New Testament? Does evidence for Jesus exist outside the Bible? Is there any reason to believe the resurrection was an actual event,” an overview of the book reads.
Movieguide® previously reported on Lee Strobel’s most recent book, “The Case for Heaven”:
Author Lee Strobel, a former atheist turned Christian apologist and pastor, revealed that the inspiration for his book The Case for Heaven came from his own near-death experience.
“It started several years ago, when I almost died,” Strobel explained. “My wife found me unconscious on the bedroom floor. She called an ambulance. I woke up in the emergency room and the doctor looked down at me and said, ‘You’re one step away from a coma, two steps away from dying,’ and then [I] went unconscious again and lingered between life and death for a while until the doctors were able to save me.’”
Strobel said he found himself “hovering over that blurry line between life and death,” which led to his curiosity about the afterlife.
“It caused me to dig a little deeper,” Strobel shared. “And I was really kind of surprised by several things I discovered, because they really do…in an unexpected way…corroborate what the Bible tells us about the afterlife.”
Strobel shared that some of the most compelling stories he found came from people who were “clinically dead” but aware of their circumstances.
He continued, “[These are] people who are clinically dead, and yet their consciousness, their mind, their spirit, their soul continues to exist and see things and experience things that are impossible if, indeed, they weren’t having an authentic out-of-body experience.”
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