Dr Paul Allen

What will it mean, when God is dead? Australia is about to become an atheist nation. The census shows us that barely half the population identifies as Christian while nearly a third nominates no religion. The numbers of believers will be bolstered by immigration but the trend is unmistakable. The old beliefs are dying out. Our trek to radical unbelief follows much of western Europe. The same trends are evident in the US . Though religious belief is stronger there, it has lost the elites and over time elite opinion leads public opinion. The eclipse of Christianity will be like the eclipse of the sun. Darkness will be the result. Will it be a temporary darkness or a long night of the Western soul? In abandoning God, we are about to embark on one of the most radical social experiments in Western history. It is nothing short of the reordering of human nature. Short of war, nothing is as consequential. Human beings create themselves inside a culture. A culture without God wi...

When God first created the world, only two descriptors applied to all that he made — “good” and “very good.” But in his mysterious providence, he made the man and woman capable of rejecting his benevolence and disobeying his command. Our forefather Adam ate the forbidden fruit, and the world hasn’t been the same since. Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and that death has spread to all people (Romans 5:12). The biblical teaching that Adam’s sin has been passed down to all people like a terminal spiritual disease is called “total depravity” (Romans 3:10–2, 23). Extensive, Not Intensive The depth of mankind’s sin nature is commonly misunderstood. Human beings are not as bad as they possibly could be. To be absolutely sinful means that a person's every thought, word, and deed is malicious. But this isn’t our experience. People demonstrate benevolence all the time. They donate money and clothes to help the poor. They become teachers to inspire young p...

Quadruple combination opened to the Book of Isaiah - note the cross references between Biblical and Latter-day Saint scripture in the footnotes (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The subject at hand is the inerrancy of Scripture. We are fighting a war on two fronts. On the one hand, we are called to defend the trustworthiness of the Bible before an unbelieving world. To defend the Bible in that arena involves a certain set of challenges. The other arena is within the church itself. That should not be the case, but since the advent of higher criticism, there has been an avalanche of attacks against the trustworthiness of the Bible (both from without and from within). This session will primarily deal with defending the doctrine of the Bible to the church. There have been many methods of defense with respect to the Scriptures. The confessional method takes statements about the Scripture simply on faith. A second approach is known as presuppositionalism. This approach defends Scripture on t...

To answer our question from a historical standpoint, we must first determine what facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth can be credibly established on the basis of the evidence and second consider what the best explanation of those facts is. At least four facts about the fate of the historical Jesus are widely accepted by NT historians today. Fact 1: After His crucifixion, Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb. This fact is highly significant because it means that the location of Jesus’ tomb was known in Jerusalem to Jews and Christians alike. New Testament scholars have established the fact of Jesus’ entombment on the basis of evidence such as the following:    Jesus’ burial is attested in the information (from before A.D. 36) that was handed on by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5.    The burial story is independently attested in the source material that was used by Mark in writing his Gospel.     Given the understandable ...

Icon Apocalypse (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In the garden of Eden , the man and the woman were naked but without shame until sin came into their lives. The very first psychological self-awareness of guilt and shame was an uncomfortable awareness of nudity. Since then, human beings have been the only creatures who have adorned and covered themselves with artificial garments , because it is built into our fallen humanity to equate shame and humiliation with nakedness. Throughout the pages of Scripture, when God speaks of bringing judgment against the guilty, He does it by exposing their sin and stripping them of their clothes. A prime example of this comes from the book of the prophet Amos. Amos gives the Lord's list of transgressions by Moab , Judah, Israel , and so on, then gives God's response: " Behold , I am weighed down by you, as a cart full of sheaves is weighed down." This is God's rebuke of His people. He then says: "Therefore flight shall peri...