I can imagine a number of Christians have encountered this criticism or something similar. 'Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2:4 that we should focus on God's power not wise and persuasive word's of human wisdom to share the gospel, so apologetics isn't biblical'.So what does Paul actually say in 1 Corinthians 2:4 ...and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,...
Some problems with this argument
So on first appearances this does seem like a problem for using apologetics in our evangelism, however, you would have to do a few things to conclude that apologetics should not be used in our evangelism. One, ignore all the places in the New Testament where Paul, who wrote 1 Corinthians seems to ignore his own alleged advice, such as Acts 17:1-4,16-34, 18:4, 20:7, 26:24-29 and 2 Cor 10:3-5. Secondly, you would have to ignore the cultural context of which Paul is writing, in Greek culture trained orators were a spectacle, the equivalent to the popularity of our modern comedians in the West. Thirdly, that Paul was encouraging Christian's to use bad arguments, poor reasoning and logic when they share the gospel. It's generally a good idea never to take one verse out of its surrounding literary and cultural context and build a doctrine upon it, this is a common ploy of the cults who use a number of proof-texts to create false doctrine.
