If the Christian doesn't get reality right, he loses effectiveness in this life. If the non-Christian doesn't get reality right, he loses much in this life, and everything and the next one. As Jesus put it, "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?"

Two things have been bothering me for a long time. The first is the tendency of people in general - and that includes Christians - to "relativize" religion. Any religious belief is only "true for," so to speak - true for you or true for me or true for those people on the other side of the world. Second, I've been bothered by how poorly believers understand their own Story. They have bits and pieces, of course, but they're missing enough that they can easily become prey to ideas that sound spiritual, but end up being foolishness in the end.

If man is not special, if he's not deeply different from any other thing, then there's no good reason not to treat him just like any other thing when it's convenient for us to do so.

Trouble, hardship, difficulty, pain, suffering, conflict, tragedy, evil - they're all part of the [Christian] Story. Indeed, the problem of evil is the reason there's any Story at all.

I'm hoping that The Story of Reality will fill in more details for the Christian believer and will create a crisis of faith for the nonbeliever.

Our reasons for believing Jesus existed and also that He was who He claimed to be - the God who came down - are the same reasons for believing any fact of history: the documentation is substantial and it passes all the tests of historical reliability. Scholars - both liberal and conservative - overwhelming agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a man of history and the Gospels, on the main, tell His story accurately.

God existed before He made anything else, and He Himself was never made. God is eternal.