I want to be honest with you before we begin. Most courses about Christianity start with a problem — your sin, your brokenness, your need — and then introduce Jesus as the solution. I understand why. It works, at least for a while. But I've spent more than thirty years watching people accept the solution without ever really seeing the one who offers it. They received the answer before they learned to ask the question. And somewhere in that shortcut, something essential was lost.

CRUX starts somewhere different. It starts with Christ. Not as a conclusion you're invited to reach, not as a position you're asked to defend, but as a premise — a living lens through which everything else comes into focus.

This changes everything about how I approach apologetics. I am not primarily interested in arguing you into Christianity. Arguments have their place — CRUX will not shy away from the hard questions. But I've also learned that the deepest resistance to Christ is rarely intellectual. It is perceptual. People don't mainly reject Jesus because the arguments are unconvincing. They reject him because their entire way of reading reality has been formed by a different story.

Almost nobody who met Jesus was primarily changed by his arguments. They were changed by what happened to their attention in his presence. A fisherman glimpsed a different horizon for his own life. A woman at a well discovered that her entire existence could be spoken without being weaponised against her. A rich young man walked away unsettled — not refuted, but disturbed, which is often the more honest response. Again and again, what Jesus altered was not first the will but the eye.

This is why I describe Christ as the premise of CRUX rather than its conclusion. A premise is not something you prove. It is something you think from. My claim — and CRUX is built on this — is that Christ is the most adequate premise available. Not because I was raised to believe it, though I was. But because thirty years of testing it against the hardest material I know — broken leadership, structural evil, communities torn apart by race and poverty and mistrust, my own interior failures — has persuaded me that nothing else holds together with the same coherence, the same depth, the same refusal to domesticate complexity into comfort.

When Christ becomes your premise rather than your conclusion, the questions don't disappear. They multiply. They deepen. They become more interesting, not less. The difference is that you are no longer asking them in a vacuum. You are asking them from within a story that is large enough to hold them — a story of creation, fall, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and the ongoing, unfinished renewal of all things.

I have found that light to be trustworthy. I believe you will too. But I won't ask you to take my word for it. That is what the course is for.