It is from Luke’s record of the ever-extending reign of the risen and exalted Christ, that we are given a clear picture of how the Apostle Paul sought both to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ and defend the Christian truth claim (2).  Paul does so not only in the synagogues of the major cities of Greece and Asia Minor–before Jews and “God-fearing” Gentile proselytes–but also before civil magistrates as well as in the marketplaces of those Roman and Greek cities where little or nothing was known of the God of Israel and the inspired texts of the Old Testament.

I am willing to acknowledge that the contemporary debate over apologetic methodology between “evidentialists” and “presuppositionalists,” however unpleasant, can be a vital and healthy exercise.  I think it important to have a biblically based and carefully honed apologetic methodology in place before confronting both the learned and not so learned paganism of our age.  In those instances when this is the goal of the evidentialist-presuppositionalist debate, it ought to be greatly encouraged.

I am perplexed that the parties to this in-house debate spend very little time analyzing the Apostle Paul’s apologetic speeches in the Book of Acts (1).  It is from Luke’s record of the ever-extending reign of the risen and exalted Christ, that we are given a clear picture of how the Apostle Paul sought both to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ and defend the Christian truth claim (2).  Paul does so not only in the synagogues of the major cities of Greece and Asia Minor–before Jews and “God-fearing” Gentile proselytes–but also before civil magistrates as well as in the marketplaces of those Roman and Greek cities where little or nothing was known of the God of Israel and the inspired texts of the Old Testament.  In Paul’s various encounters with Jews and God-fearing Gentiles in cities such as Psidion Antioch (Acts 13:13-52), Thessalonica and Berea (Acts 17:1-15), with superstitious pagans in Lystra (Acts 14:8-19) and sophisticated Epicurean and Stoic philosophers of the Athenian Areopagus (Acts 16:-34), or Gentile rulers such as Felix (Acts 24:10-27); and even a member of Israel’s ruling family, Herod Agrippa (Acts 26:1-32), we get a sense of the Apostle’s approach to confronting divergent forms of unbelief in specific historical contexts.

All Things to All Men For the Sake of the Gospel

As Luke recounts elements of the apologetic speeches of Paul for us in Acts, it is apparent that Paul is putting into practice his own stated philosophy of ministry, expressed in some detail in his first Letter to the Corinthian Christians:

For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them.  To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law.  To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law.  To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.  I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings (1 Corinthians 9:19–23).

It is clear from these comments that Paul had thought very carefully about his unique calling as the Apostle to the Gentiles and his role as a loyal son of Israel, who’s heartfelt prayer for his people was “that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.  For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh” Romans 9:2-3).  To win his own Jewish brothers and sisters to Christ, Paul became as “one under the law” (1 Corinthians 9:20), though he was free in Christ.  To the Gentiles who knew not Moses, the law, or Israel’s God, Paul instead become a man subject only to the law of Christ, so that those who were at one time “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world,” might be won to Israel’s Messiah (Ephesians 2:12).

Let us be careful to note that Paul was no mere pragmatist, adopting in chameleon-like fashion, the ideology of whatever group he happened to be facing at any given moment.  Paul was not concerned with demographics or success in the modern American sense of church planting.  He was concerned with being faithful to the commission given him by Jesus Christ.  As Pauline scholarship has pointed out, perhaps it is best that we think of Paul neither exclusively as systematic theologian, nor, on the contrary, as a theological  innovator.   Instead we should view Paul as a man called to be an apostle by Jesus Christ, who in turn applied his core beliefs of an unchanging gospel of free grace to very specific, yet very dynamic situations, which, in turn, became the occasion for a number of the Epistles of Paul which appear in our New Testament canon (3).  Throughout the various apologetic speeches in Acts, we see Paul proclaim one gospel to diverse audiences who stand poles apart from one another in terms of both their respective intellectual and cultural backgrounds and their interpretive “world and life” view.  How does the Apostle bridge this wide intellectual gap?

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