This is the debate I did last week with Ted Ammon, a philosophy lecturer in Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi. It was very different from the Matt Dillahunty debate. In some ways I felt that Ted was not all that far from the kingdom….
further to the whole robust thing as well, I read the following this morning as I was preparing to preach – I thought it was more than co-incidental – “”I suspect that one of the complaints that Paul’s rivals had about his evangelistic style was that it was too blunt and confrontational. ‘That Paul!’ they were saying. ‘He presses Christianity on people too obviously. There’s no subtlety, no sophistication about his marketing techniques; he needs to go on a soft-sell training course. As it is, he puts off more people than he attracts. He has no discretion, no finesse!’ To use the world which I suspect they used (and which Paul mimics in verse11). ‘He persuades people’, they said – the Greek word sometimes has a pejorative tone; it can mean ‘cajoling’, ‘bullying’ or ‘browbeating’. And Paul in these verses says, ‘Maybe it is true; maybe I do ‘persuade’ people as you put it. But there is a reason for my uncompromising forthrightness. We must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ. Since then we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men.”