We’re approaching this systematically. We’re not just making things up as we go along or shooting from the hip. We’ll start by establishing the existence of God as at least reasonable and some characteristics about Him using general revelation, the stuff that is accessible to people regardless of where and when they lived. We’ll proceed from there to looking at special revelation, specific claims of God revealing Himself, to see if it is reasonable to seriously consider Christianity. After that, we’ll be addressing common challenges to Christianity.
There’s a reason we’re presenting this in this order. Each conversation covers a subject that needs to be addressed before going on to the next one. Let’s face it, talking about whether or not the Bible is the Word of God is pretty irrelevant if God doesn’t exist, so let’s talk about the existence of God first. Since most of the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus comes from the Gospels, let’s first establish that the Gospels are reliable history. If you use what we have here as a strategy for when you share the Gospel, we suggest that you proceed from the first post and take them in order just so you can make sure you don’t have to back track because you didn’t realize your buddy had a more fundamental issue that you hadn’t cleared up. It would be kind of annoying to think that you’re talking to someone, bringing them around to the truth of Christianity, only to find out he thinks that the world as we know it is only an illusion. Surprise! Time to go back to the beginning . . .
We’re presenting our material a couple different ways. First, each topic will have a main article outlining the basic idea. This is the way most people present this sort of material and it is the core of the conversation. We will have short side comments by the Guys to highlight certain things from the main article that we feel need a little more explanation and encourage your comments an questions. That way, you don’t need to have a graduate level course in theology to understand everything we’re talking about (not that there’s anything wrong with that). We’re also going to post our conversations about each of the topics we cover. Most of us talk with others about this stuff, so we figured that putting our material in that sort of format would seem a bit more relatable than a formal paper. We hope to include a downloadable podcast so that you can listen rather than stare at a computer screen. We all get enough of that already.