I think Mitchell, Vinnie and Christy as you quoted above, all said it well.
I DO think human experience is essential to our understanding of the world. Because of that (my human experience, that is) I am baffled at WLC’s perceived need to pull in concepts of time from physics and philosophy in order to support faith in Jesus, or back up the Kerygma. Is the listener simply to be dazzled or baffled (ya’ll know the saying about brilliance and b.s.)?
The questions that lead people to an interest in Jesus or more broadly in God rarely involve formal concepts of time, but the nitty-gritties of life. A parent with a sick child wants hope, not philosophy. People want meaning, perspective on suffering (as well as relief from it), love. And people want to know if they can trust their personal experience/sense that there is something beyond their “self.”
People outside the faith, looking in, want to know what the &&&& is wrong with the people on the inside, why we’re such a crowd of twisted, self-righteous, hypocritical prigs.
The Gospel is hard enough to get to today with the challenges to the texts we rely on, and the state of the church as we know it. We have more immediate issues to hand that have nothing to do with philosophy of time, concepts of infinity, types of uni-/multiverses.
We could begin to demonstrate an apologetic of life in Christ. Which brings me back to Penner and my summer reading review.