Dr Paul Allen

The Holy Spirit depicted as a dove, surrounded by angels, by Giaquinto, 1750s. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit , whom the Father will send in my name,  he  will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” The  Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal  (volume 16, 2011) includes an article written by Andrew David Naselli and Philip R. Gons titled “Prooftexting the Personality of the Holy Spirit: An Analysis of the Masculine Demonstrative Pronouns in John 14:26, 15:26, and 16:13-14.” Sounds like a journal article title doesn’t it? The article is an update by Gons of a paper that Naselli presented at an ETS ( Evangelical Theological Society ) conference in 2010. A standard argument for the personality of the Holy Spirit has been that John (the writer of the Gospel of John ) uses a masculine pronoun when referring to the Holy Spirit which goes against the grammar of the Greek. The word for  spirit  in Greek is neuter so a p

Jesus’ death on the cross constitutes God ’s judgment on the sin of the world. This judgment is effective for sinners who repent and believe in Jesus as Israel ’s Messiah and Savior of the world . The day of judgment on which God will judge all human beings will take place at Jesus’ second coming. Jesus, Paul, and John agree on this “date” of the day of judgment. John’s description is complex. While he leaves no doubt that Jesus’ coming as Judge brings God’s judgment on the unrepentant, he refers to the judgment of the righteous only in connection with Jesus’ return and the one-thousand-year period in which the resurrected saints reign with Jesus Christ . John describes two judgment scenes, which are best interpreted as two different judgments: the judgment of the unrepentant on the day of judgment at Jesus’ second coming (Rev. 19:11–21) and the judgment of the dead before God’s great white throne at the end of the millennium (20:11–15). The unrepentant dead are judged again beca