Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Foundations of Christian Doctrine Part 1.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Well, today is a landmark day because we begin a new Defender's curriculum.

So for the next four years or so, we're going

to be studying together the entire range of Christian doctrine, from doctrine of Revelation

to doctrine of the last things. And today we begin anew. So I want to welcome all of you

who are joining us via live stream,

both individual persons as well as Sunday school classes, which will now be part of our

wider Defender's family. The purpose of our Defender's class is threefold. And I want

to remind us of what these purposes are as we begin anew.

The first and primary purpose of this class is to train Christians to understand, articulate,

and defend basic Christian truths. To train Christians to understand, articulate, and defend basic Christian

truths.

And each of those verbs is important.

This is not just lawyer speak where you pile up a number of verbs in a sentence.

First of all, we want to train Christians to understand Christian truths, to understand what we as Christians believe.

Secondly, we want to help you to articulate what you believe so that you can explain it to

others when they ask you exactly what it is that you as a Christian believe.

And then thirdly, we want to help you to defend what you believe

when you are asked for a reason as to why you believe as you do.

Our class verse is 1 Peter 315, which says always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you to give a reason

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