Dr Paul Allen

One woman with cancer told me years ago, “I’m not a believer anymore—that doesn’t work for me. I can’t believe in a personal God who would do something like this to me.” Cancer killed her God. What would happen to me? I felt like a surgeon who was suddenly on the operating table. Would I be able to take my own advice? Facing such a serious diagnosis, Keller was forced to reexamine not only his “professed beliefs” but his “actual understanding of God.” He writes, Had [my ideas about God] been shaped by my culture? Had I been slipping unconsciously into the supposition that God lived for me rather than I for him, that life  should  go well for me, that I knew better than God does how things should go? The answer was yes—to some degree. I found that to embrace God’s greatness, to say “Thy will be done,” was painful at first and then, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly liberating. To assume that God is as small and finite as we are may  feel  freeing—but it offers no...

A few weeks ago Tim Challies set out on a series of articles to examine some of Christianity’s most notable false teachers and to examine the false doctrine each of them represents. Along the way we have visited such figures as  Joseph Smith  (Mormonism),  Ellen G. White  (Adventism),  Norman Vincent Peale  (Positive Thinking) and  Benny Hinn  (Faith Healing). Today we turn to a man who helped lead the Emerging Church and who was once named by  TIME  as one of the 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America. Brian  McLaren Brian McLaren (born in 1956) studied humanities at the University of Maryland and graduated with graduate and post-graduate degrees in English. Beginning in 1978, he taught college-level English, before founding Cedar Ridge Community Church in 1986. He served this church as its founding pastor until 2006, when he handed off the role so he could focus on writing and public speaking. In 1986 Zonde...