How We Got Here — The Passageway

This book was not planned.

None of the three volumes were, in the conventional sense. Volume I and Volume II — Following Christ in the Battle and Knowing the King — were written in the furnace of personal experience, out of what a man learns when he actually lives the material, when the theological claims are not merely propositions but the ground beneath his feet during the hardest years.

Volume III began with a geopolitical argument.

It began with a question about why European NATO members were refusing to coordinate a response to the Iranian threat to the Strait of Hormuz — and the observation that 46 million Muslims living across European democracies might be part of the political calculation. That was the starting point: current events, military strategy, demographic arithmetic. A Facebook post. The kind of thing that takes twenty minutes to write and then sits in the news feed for a day before disappearing.

But something happened in the research. The geopolitics kept pulling toward a deeper question. The Strait of Hormuz pulled toward Iran. Iran pulled toward its 45-year record of terrorism and its nuclear ambitions. The nuclear ambitions pulled toward the theology that drives them — the apocalyptic Shia expectation of the Hidden Imam's return, which some strains of Iranian clerical thought believe can be hastened by creating the right conditions of crisis. And the theology pulled toward a question that no geopolitical analysis alone can answer: what is the relationship between Islam as a religion and the political movements that invoke it? What does Islam actually teach? Where does it agree with Christianity and where does it diverge — and why does the divergence matter, not just politically but eternally?

That question opened a passageway.

The systematic comparison of Christianity and the Quran across nine theological themes was the first room in the passageway. Then came the Fruit of the Spirit — how the vine-and-branches structure of Christian transformation differs from the law-compliance structure of Islamic formation. Then the conversion road map: how a Muslim who senses that something is missing finds the door. Then the Adversary's Memo — the attempt to write, in the tradition of C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, what Satan's strategy document for Islam might look like: the five surgical excisions, the cage made of gold, the near-truth that is more dangerous than an outright lie.

Then the Gospel of Nicodemus found us. Or we found it — the distinction is not entirely clear. Someone following the thread of the Adversary's Memo asked: if the cross was the trap and the descent into hell was the enforcement, where is that story told? And the answer turned out to be: in a document that has been circulating since the second century, that the Eastern Orthodox Church has preserved in its full liturgical power for two thousand years, that was written down at approximately the same time the Apostles' Creed was being formalized, and that the Western evangelical tradition has largely allowed to gather dust. The Gospel of Nicodemus — also known as the Acts of Pilate — contains some of the most extraordinary dramatic writing in the Christian tradition and almost no one has read it.

The Harrowing became a film treatment brief. A NotebookLM explainer was created. A Facebook post was written introducing it — connecting the line most congregations stumble over when reciting the Creed (he descended into hell), the dead walking in Jerusalem in Matthew 27:52–53, and the verdict Hades delivers to Satan in the Gospel of Nicodemus: Like a fool, you did not know what you were doing.

And then it became clear that all of this — the geopolitics, the systematic theology, the conversion road map, the Adversary's Memo, the Harrowing — was accumulating into something larger. It was not a series of disconnected posts. It was the preparation for a manual. The preparation for the disciple who finds themselves across the table from a Muslim friend, or a secular skeptic, or a spiritual seeker who knows something is missing and doesn't know what to call it.

This is that manual. It is Volume III not because it was planned as the third volume of a series, but because it is the third room in the passageway that opened when we turned over the rock of a geopolitics post.

The sequence matters. If you have not read Volumes I and II, this volume will still be useful — it is designed to stand alone as a field guide. But the disciple who has walked through the first two volumes will recognize in this one the fruit of a journey. The theological convictions, the experiential grounding, the certainty about who Jesus is and what He has done — all of that is the foundation on which a disciple stands when they have the conversations in the pages ahead.

Turn the rock over. Follow the passage. See where it goes.