Dr Paul Allen

The coronation of King Charles III went off as planned, with pomp and ceremony designed to invoke a thousand years of history, tradition, national identity, and royal majesty. Observers might be forgiven for wondering just how the elaborate ceremony in Westminster Abbey might be described as “slimmed down” from earlier traditions. Still, it was cut down a bit from the coronation of the king’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, 70 years earlier. The king did take the title “Defender of the Faith” because the law concerning the monarchy required it, but no one took the new king as very serious about defending the Christian faith. He had proposed changing the monarch’s title to ‘Defender of Faith” rather than “Defender of the Faith,” but that was a step too far for the British. The king did arrange to have representatives of several religions participate in the ceremony. Still, the traditional language of the British monarchy and the Church of England prevailed, with many readings based on the B...

SAMUEL G. PARKISON “It’s a shame he was an adulterous and unfaithful husband, but he sure was a great theologian and a gift to the church.” Is this sentence intelligible? Might it be regarded as capturing the complex reality of indwelling and ongoing sin for theologians, or is it simply oxymoronic? Part of how we answer the question depends on additional information. Was this adultery a single occasion or a persistent reality? Does this theologian out himself in broken and contrite confession and repentance, or does he justify his actions and remain habitually unrepentant? I’d imagine most of us would instinctively conclude that if the “theologian” in our thought experiment engaged in high-handed and unrepentant habitual adultery, the descriptor “adulterous and unfaithful husband but splendid theologian” is nothing more than an oxymoron. And we haven’t been thinking about a hypothetical figure; we’ve been thinking about Karl Barth, who is regarded by many as one of the most important t...

Bathsheba was ‘raped’ by King David — a violation that went against her will. Most Bible scholars, leave this situation vaguer and simply say David committed adultery with her, leaving her volition ambiguous, maybe even suggesting that she was a willing participant in the sin.  Is there any evidence in the Bible of whether Bathsheba was willing or unwilling?   David's power as a male king over her, a subject, would immediately classify this as a rape, even if she put up no resistance. Are there any pointers for us in the text itself?” There are pointers that David exerted a kind of pressure on her to warrant the accusation of rape. The act couldn’t be consensual given the power dynamics at play. It is possible for a woman to be sinfully complicit in committing adultery with a very powerful man. There is no evidence for that in this text. He Took Her There are two indications that David threw his weight around — threw his power, his influence, his position — in such a way as t...

IS THIS POSSIBLE? Communist Party officials in China have rewritten one of the Bible’s most powerful accounts of Jesus Christ’s grace and divinity by blasphemously claiming the Saviour stoned to death the woman caught in adultery.  Barnabas Fund reports that the well-known New Testament account in John’s Gospel (8:3-11) is completely altered to depict Jesus Christ as a devious murderer, and self-proclaimed “sinner”, in a “professional ethics and law” textbook used in Chinese vocational secondary schools. The textbook’s amended version of the account states,  “The crowd wanted to stone the woman to death as per their law. But Jesus said, ‘Let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone.’ Hearing this, they slipped away one by one. When the crowd disappeared, Jesus stoned the sinner to death saying, ‘I too am a sinner. But if the law could only be executed by men without blemish, the law would be dead.’” The Biblical account describes how the scribes and Pharisees attempt...

Adultery or Rape? What happened between David and Bathsheba? I’ve been looking at a number of different scholarly works on this question over the last few days, and I have found a great deal of help in an article written by Alexander Abasili titled “Was It Rape?: The David and Bathsheba Pericope Re-Examined.” This article gets pretty deep into the weeds. Abisili is doing careful work in the Hebrew and Greek texts, so those trained in biblical languages are probably in the best position to benefit from Abasili’s work. In this article, Abasili argues that much of the debate among commentators is due to varying definitions of the term “rape.” He argues that modern definitions of rape differ from that found in the Old Testament. He writes: Some of the opposing views of exegetes are caused by the imposition of today’s definition of rape upon the narrative of 2 Sam 11-12. [pp. 2-3] In the Hebrew Bible, the concept of coerced sexual relationships is not as wide and all-e...

Dear Husband, If you value your life, if you cherish your manliness and honor, if you love your family and your God, listen to his voice. As she whispers in your ear, as her lips yield the sweetest honey, as her speech soothes and excites, listen to his words instead. Drown her lies in wisdom. She entices, “Come, let us take our fill of love till morning; let us delight ourselves with love” ( Proverbs 7:18 ). She says that she can satisfy your longings. She says that no one will know. She makes you feel desired, dominant. She crowns you a king. And she can provide some of the promised pleasure — for a time. But mark these three words: in the end. “In the end she is bitter as wormwood.” In the end she is “sharp as a two-edged sword” ( Proverbs 5:4 ). In the end it would have been better to sleep every night embracing a Japanese Katana or a motion sensor grenade. In the end you will realize that what you mistook as harmless pleasure, as “true love,” as the path to lifelong satisfactio...

If your conscience is not strengthened to repel sexual temptations after you have read what they have written, how will anything that I add make a difference? You can begin to see adultery for what it is by grasping how antithetical it is to faith. The sin of adultery screams out to the world that you don’t really believe God . Perhaps it will be helpful to make this clear. If you are contemplating adultery, consider at least four probing questions about what you believe. 1. Do you believe God sees all? You don’t really believe God when he declares that you may “be sure your sin will find you out” ( Numbers 32:23 ). If you think you can get away with it, just because you succeed (at least for a while) in hiding it from your contemporaries, as David did, you are acting as if God doesn’t exist, or doesn’t mean what he says. Whether in this life, or on the last day, your sin will be exposed. To act as if that is not the truth is to disbelieve God Almighty. “No creature is hidden ...

Sitting across from me at the kitchen table this afternoon, you poured out your heart. When you married your high school sweetheart at 19, you never once suspected you would be in this place. Now, at 39, after twenty years of marriage, you call yourself gay. In tears, you tell me that you have “come out,” and that you’re not looking back. You haven’t had an affair. Yet. But there is this woman you met at the gym. You work out with her every morning, and you text with her throughout the day. Even though you are a covenant member of a faithful church, sit under solid preaching, and put up a good front for the children, you have been inwardly despising your husband for some time now. Hearing him read the Bible makes you cringe. You haven’t been intimate with him for over a year now. You tell me you can’t bear it. Is Gay Good? You tell me that leaving your husband for a woman is not an act of unfaithfulness. You tell me that you are being faithful to who you really are, and...