Space-Filling Thoughts

The Apostle Paul preaching at Athens. At this point in his gospel presentation, the apostle pauses to deal with some objections to what he has already said.  No doubt this is the result of many years of interacting with Jewish interlocutors in synagogues across the Roman Empire.  This, by the way, is one of the benefits of doing something like this over and over again.  As a former math teacher, I can attest to the benefit of teaching a class multiple times, one of the benefits being able to anticipate problems students will have.  It’s hard to do this without teaching experience.  Paul was an experienced teacher, and so he presents his reply to possible objections people (in particular his Jewish brethren) might raise. One of the immediate lessons we can glean from this is that there will always be objections to the Christian message, no matter how well we present it, no matter how engaging or compelling our presentation is.  The fact of the matter this is more than a debate on the in