Dr Paul Allen

90 Minutes in Heaven  by Don Piper It is not often that a book races to the top of the bestseller charts and opens up the way for a whole new genre of Christian literature . But such is the case with Don Piper’s  90 Minutes in Heaven , a book that spurred an entire genre of what I refer to as “Heaven Tourism” books. Don Piper was involved in radio and television ministry when he determined that he had been called to be a pastor. In 1985 he was ordained as a Baptist minister and was soon serving in Houston as a minister of education and single adults. It was shortly thereafter, in 1989, that he had an experience that would forever change his life and ministry. Fifteen years later, in 2004, he would team with Cecil Murphey and Baker Publishers to release  90 Minutes in Heaven , the book in which he described his experience. On January 18, 1989, Piper was driving through rural Texas, returning from a Christian conference that had ended a little bit e...

Image via Wikipedia This phrase (Lat. ordo salutis) appears to have been brought into theological usage in 1737 by Jakob Karpov, a Lutheran .  But the doctrine is of much greater antiquity.  Necessarily, there is a wide divergence between the Roman Catholic and the Reformed view in this connection, for although they both agree that there can be no salvation apart from the work of Jesus Christ , the Roman Catholic Church teaches that it is the divinely appointed dispenser of saving grace through the sacraments, which, of themselves, convey grace to the recipients.  The stages of Rome’s order of salvation may be taken as marked by its sacraments of  (1) baptism, in which the soul is regenerated;  (2) confirmation, in which baptized persons receive the gift of the Holy Ghost ; (3) the Eucharist, in which they partake of the very body and blood of Christ in the transubstantiated wafer;  (4) penance, by which the benefit of Christ’s death is a...