Like revivals, there are some poor examples out there.
Acts 2:14-36 isn’t a dumb defense
…but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.
1 Corinthians 1:23
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And when you start preaching how the Father made a mockery of Jesus on the cross, you can really make the hairs stand up on the back of the religious folk.
I question both of your reading comprehension. The only people preaching on this thread are the two of you. The rest of us are trying to discus literature. And if your exegesis of Acts 2 is “of course Christians should sound dumb defending the gospel,” I can’t help you.
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My reading? I didn’t say anything and you inferred from context, which is your privilege. Nor did the citations say anything untrue.
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For anyone following my discussion of methodological naturalism they would think I am smarter than I actually am. I am like a blind squirrel that providentially finds a golden nut from time to time.
I can also understand how someone could infer my apologetics is overly simplistic, ie. dumb, by selectively reading my comments.
Who thinks that? 
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“No matter where you go, there you are.”
- Buckaroo Banzai
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I was struck by this quote from Diogenes Allen in Steven Chase’s Nature as Spiritual Practice (2011):
Since the time of Kant, philosophers and theologians have all too often assumed that because we cannot conclusively prove God’s existence from nature, the natural world itself cannot increase our understanding and love for God. But . … the proof of God’s creation from nature (natural theology) and contemplation of nature are not the same thing.
Contemplation of nature can often be viewed with suspicion in evangelical* circles. Yet, as I have been learning from Chase, and from my own experience, the richest devotional at my disposal is nature itself.
—-
*using evangelical here in it’s global context not US context.
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Well, of course, I love this, because he describes what I think and have experienced. Recognizing this difference has freed me to worship God, when I’m in nature, and go where the Spirit moves, rather than worry about how to formulate an argument based on the waterfall (like these Presque Isle River Waterfalls Loop Trail - Lake Superior Circle Tour) I am viewing.
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I figured my conversation partner did when I answered what non-Duhemian science is and compelled her to admit methodological naturalism doesn’t work in certain areas of science.
This was transcribed from the audio recording so please excuse the punctuation.
“Just be faithful day to day and what you’re supposed to do and you can trust that however God does it whenever he does it individually or collectively God is there and God’s Spirit is among us and we can trust that God will answer our prayers for the work of his Spirit among us.”
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- I chuckled over Keener’s “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Has he never been to a Catholic Charismatic Renewal prayer meeting. CCR flared up in San Francisco in the early 1970s and eventually received official blessing after several years of skepticism.
- On a positive note, I find it reassuring that “revival” can still blossom on a religious university’s campus and there’s color among the “revived”, whether it grows or not.
- Will it have consequences? No doubt in my mind that it will. May they be constructive consequences. Will there be prayer in tongues and prophecies? No predictions from me.
- “There is nothing new under the sun.”
- As a Protestant among Catholics, my own experience threatened members of my immediate family, unfortunately. But the wheel turns …
- Will I be one of the “pilgrims” to Asbury? Not likely; not that I’m averse to group prayer and song, or teaching and testimony from the pews. But Asbury is a long way from Los Angeles.
I have been enjoying my frequently-interrupted crawl through Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard. It’s a very strange book. I don’t recommend it, if you don’t like strange books. His sarcastic sense of humor, though, is nearly unbeatable. I found this paragraph priceless, where his narrator, Johannes de silentio, imagines how it would play out, if a parishioner took the priest’s sermon on Abraham sacrificing Isaac at face value.
The story of Abraham has the remarkable property that it always remains splendid, however poorly one understands it, though here again what counts is whether one is willing to labor and be heavy laden. But people do not want to labor and nonetheless want to understand the story. People honor Abraham with their words, but how? People express the whole affair quite generally: “What was great was that he loved God in such a way that he was willing to sacrifice to him the best he had.” This is very true, but the “best” is a vague expression. In the course of their thinking and talking, people quite confidently identify Isaac with the best, and the meditator can surely smoke his pipe while meditating, and the listener can very well stretch out his legs in comfort. If that rich young man whom Christ met along the way had sold all his possessions and given the money to the poor, we would praise him, as with everything that is great, although we would not understand him without working. But nevertheless, even if he had sacrificed what was his best, he would not have become an Abraham. What people omit from Abraham’s story is the anxiety, for I have no ethical obligation to money, but a father has the highest and holiest obligation to a son. Anxiety, however, is a perilous matter for the faint of heart, so people put it out of mind, yet they nevertheless want to talk about Abraham. Someone speaks of it, then, and in the course of time uses the terms “Isaac” and “the best” interchangeably—everything goes splendidly. If, however, it happened that among the listeners there was a man who suffered from insomnia, then the most frightful, the most profound, tragic, and comic misunderstanding would lay very close at hand. He went home. He wanted to do precisely as Abraham had done, for, after all, his son was the best. If that speaker learned of it, he would perhaps go to the man, he would summon up all his clerical dignity and shout: “Loathsome man, scum of society, what devil has possessed you thus, that you want to murder your son.” And the priest, who had not noticed any trace of warmth or perspiration while preaching on Abraham, was surprised at himself over the earnest wrath with which he thundered against that poor man; he was pleased with himself, for he had never spoken with such forceful zeal. He said to himself and his wife: “I am an orator. What I have lacked was the occasion—when I spoke about Abraham last Sunday, I did not feel the least bit carried away.” If that same speaker had possessed an extra bit of rationality to spare, I think he would have lost it if the sinner had replied, in calm and dignified fashion: “It was of course what you yourself preached about last Sunday.” How could the priest get something of this sort into his head? And yet it was of course true, and the error lay simply in the fact that he had not known what he was saying. Alas, that there is no poet who could choose to prefer situations such as this to the stuff and nonsense that fill up comedies and novels! Here, the comic and the tragic touch upon each other in absolute infinity. In itself, the priest’s discourse was perhaps ridiculous enough, but in its effect it became infinitely ridiculous, yet this was entirely natural. Or suppose the sinner, without actually making any objection, had been converted by the severity of the priest’s lecture—suppose that zealous cleric had gone home happy, happy in the consciousness that not only had he been effective from the pulpit, but, above all, as a spiritual counselor with irresistible powers: for on Sunday, he inspired the congregation, while on Monday, like a cherub with a flaming sword, ix he confronted the person who would put to shame the old adage that in the world things do not happen in the way the priest preaches.
If, on the other hand, the sinner was not convinced, then his situation is truly tragic. Then he will presumably be executed or sent to the madhouse—in short he would have become unhappy in relation to so-called actuality; in another sense, I indeed think that Abraham made him happy, for the person who works does not perish.
–Johannes de silentio
“Getting Something Off My Chest” from Problemata. Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
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How the priest should perhaps have prefaced his sermon that day:
“Today brothers and sisters we turn our attention to that ancient Jew whose earnest faith so impressed God as to inspire the covenant between God and Abraham’s tribe and so eventually even unto those of us who worship the son and lamb of God. But take note, the covenant has already been made and God’s sacrifice of His son also has been made so that today there is no need to make the sacrifice Abraham had been called to. So don’t try this at home.”
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I like your style.
And warning.
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Or flash a warning on the Jumbotron: “Events in this sermon were performed by professional Old Testament patriarchs. Do not try this at home. No rams were injured in this re-enactment.”
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Since I’m reading the Chronicles of Narnia to my kids, I’ve been re-reading “Planet Narnia” by Michael Ward. I was struck by these references to Lewis’s respect for paganism and the role it played in him losing his faith and (eventually) regaining it. (The first block quotes from a letter he wrote.)
As a boy he [Lewis] had been told by his schoolmasters that Christianity was 100 percent correct and every other religion, including the pagan myths of ancient Greece and Rome, was 100 percent wrong. He found that this statement, rather than bolstering the Christian claim, undermined it and he abandoned his childhood faith ‘largely under the influence of classical education.’ It was to this experience that he owed his ‘firm conviction that the only possible basis for Christian apologetics is a proper respect for Paganism.’
…
Lewis’s religion was not a upas tree in whose shadow nothing else could grow. If paganism could be shown to have something in common with Christianity, Lewis concluded ‘so much the better for paganism,’ not ‘so much the worse for Christianity.’
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