My Dad and I were two among ten thousand – mostly men – gathering at the new KFC Yum center in downtown Louisville. Tightly elbowing our way through the milling crowds we found our seats in a vast garden of Tulips gently swaying in the sovereign winds blowing from Mt Calvin, the distant realm of the Dark Knight, -the legion of evil in a religious thriller I am writing.

I wondered deeply how I had managed to come to the very axis of Calvanist dogma, except that, of course, in this garden of tulips, everyone’s bathroom schedule is printed in advance of Creation itself.

In my book, (The Daughter’s Blood, and how the World Began), Robert Malcolm was the the chief antagonist. The bad guy. He was the President Of The Southern Baptist Theological Alliance. I’m not sure if I was even aware that the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary existed. I just needed a theological organization that sounded bad enough to play the role in my story.

Now, don’t get me wrong, never in my story is Robert or the SBTA purposely evil, rather they are innocent pawns in the hands of something much darker and sinister, The Dark Knight.

The Dark Knight – in my story at least – is as old as Creation. They have been plotting how to overthrow the Son’s kingdom from the beginning of time. After successfully killing the Son on a pagan cross, the minions of evil sat back and wondered at how easy it all had been. Until the first day of the week and the beginning of a horrific nightmare for Satan.

After shedding rivers of blood trying to blot out the epic of the Passion and Easter, Satan stopped because his own servants, such as Saul, were being seeded with the Gospel by the blood splatters from their own knives.

The Gospel story was too compelling, too romantic. Death had no power over the story, in fact, death itself burnished it deeper into the hearts and minds of the spectators.

Then someone working for the Dark Knight brought new depths to the term “Genius”. It was the Kingdom of Darkness’ greatest “Eureka” moment. A plan so novel and compelling, it just had to work.

Rome quit killing Christians. Instead the Emperor himself adopted the Christian Faith and ventured forth to dominate the world through the Cross of Christ.

Under his strategic and well funded hand he designed and moderated the first of history’s greatest Christian conferences, The Nicean Counsel.

This marked a turning period in Christianity. A time when the devil first settled into the details of this precious faith. By cleverly turning the attention from the Gospel narrative to the question of orthodoxy, The Dark Knight managed – at last- to unfasten the church’s gaze from the bleeding Messiah and focus instead on the nails that held the cross together.

But back to Dad and I at the KFC Yum center. The music stopped and a guy got up to introduce the moderator for the two day event, non other than Albert Mohler, the bad guy in my book. I was stunned and totally unprepared for what followed in the next two days.