Dr Paul Allen

Let’s examine the five points of Calvinism. Are they still relevant today? 1. Dead in Total Depravity The issue is: At the point of my conversion, was I dead? Was I dead? Was I utterly incapable of seeing or savouring Jesus Christ as my supreme treasure? Answer: yes, I was . I was dead, blind, spiritually incapable of believing on Jesus. First Corinthians 2:14: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God.” No way. I’m stiff-arming them totally in my deadness and fallenness and blindness. They are folly to me. I’m not able to understand them. They are spiritually discerned, and I don’t have the Holy Spirit. I hate God, and I love myself, and I am in bondage. The question is not one of time . And the answer makes all the difference in the world about whether you praise yourself or praise your God in speechless wonder that you are now a lover of Jesus — that you can see the light of the glory of the gospel (2 Corinthians 4:4). John Piper now sees the l...

The question of God’s choice regarding those who will be saved is a major divide between Calvinism and Arminianism. Notice that the question is not “Does God choose those who will be saved?” The Bible clearly says God chooses, or elects, those who will be saved. For example, He chose [or, elected] us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.  Ephesians 1:4–5 Note that chose and predestined are essentially the same in meaning here. So we are contemplating the doctrine of predestination, a subcategory of the doctrine of divine providence. A common misconception is that Calvinists believe in divine election and predestination while Arminians do not. However, the Bible says God does indeed choose and predestine. The question is not does God elect? but how does God elect—on what basis?   Conditional Election Arminians ...

Myth 1: We don’t have free will. The Westminster Confession of Faith, the predominant confessional statement of Reformed theology in the English-speaking world, has a whole chapter called “Of Free Will.” Here is the first section of that chapter, in its entirety: WCF 9.1 God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that it is neither forced, nor, by any absolute necessity of nature, determined to good, or evil. The chapter on God’s providence likewise says that when God ordains what will come to pass, “neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes [a category that includes the human will] taken away, but rather established” (WCF 3.1). This myth arises from historical changes of language. Today, the phrase “free will” refers to moral responsibility. It means people are not just puppets of exterior natural forces like their heredity and environment. But in the sixteenth...

The doctrine that states that God is the one who chooses who will be saved is one of the most consternating and has resulted in incendiary discussions in church history. Emotions run very high in this debate, especially when people picture the non-elect as desperate puppies begging to be chosen but being left to starve by a feckless God who plays favorites and abandons his responsibility to millions of his hapless creatures. But the real issue is what the Bible says and how we are to understand it. Everyone who believes the Bible also believes in election. Ooh, them be fight’n words. Let me explain… The Greek word for elect means chosen or called out from a group. It is used seventeen times by six New Testament authors. Yes, even in the NIV. So it cannot be ignored or denied.  The debate pivots only on the matter of election being  conditional  or  unconditi onal. Arminians say ‘ I owe my electi...

In an age wherein the ground of theology has been saturated by the torrential downpour of existential thinking, it seems almost suicidal, like facing the open floodgates riding a raft made of balsa wood, to appeal to a seventeenth-century theologian to address a pressing theological issue. Nothing evokes more snorts from the snouts of anti-rational zealots than appeals to sages from the era of Protestant Scholasticism. “Scholasticism” is the pejorative term applied by so-called “ Neo-Orthodox ” (better spelled without the “e” in Neo), or “progressive” Reformed thinkers who embrace the “Spirit” of the Reformation while eschewing its “letter” to the seventeenth-century Reformed thinkers who codified the insights of their sixteenth-century magisterial forebears.  To the scoffers of this present age, Protestant Scholasticism is seen as a reification or calcification of the dynamic and liquid forms of earlier Reformed insight. It is viewed as a deformation from the lively,...

Nothing escapes God's notice; nothing oversteps the boundaries of His power. God is authoritative in all things. If I thought even for one moment that a single molecule were running loose in the universe outside the control and domain of almighty God , I wouldn't sleep tonight. My confidence in the future rests in my confidence in the God who controls history. But how does God exercise that control and manifest that authority? How does God bring to pass the things He sovereignly decrees? Augustine said that nothing happens in this universe apart from the will of God and that, in a certain sense, God ordains everything that happens. Augustine was not attempting to absolve men of responsibility for their actions, but his teaching raises a question: If God is sovereign over the actions and intents of men, why pray at all? A secondary concern revolves around the question, "Does prayer really change anything?""Let me answer the first question by stating that the s...

We have the New Testament largely because of the theological diseases that infected and afflicted the first-generation churches. The apostles wrote to clarify and remind early believers of things they had been taught and to correct false doctrines that were springing up. All of church history resembles the New Testament: remarkable outpourings of the Holy Spirit , gospel advances, churches planted, outbreaks of persecution and martyrdoms, doctrinal distortions and leadership abuses and all manner of sin causing churches to be, as the old hymn says , “by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed,” followed by Holy Spirit-empowered revival and reformation movements. Best to Know Your Bible To have knowledge of church history is good — really good. It helps us keep perspective. It helps us keep from being too euphoric and triumphalist in revival, too depressed and defeatist in tribulation, and too enamored of The Next Big Thing, the new method, strategy, or movement that promi...

More than 450 years ago, a request came to John Calvin to write on the character of and need for reform in the Church. The circumstances were quite different from those that inspired other writings of Calvin, and enable us to see other dimensions of his defense of the Reformation. The Emperor Charles V was calling the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire to meet in the city of Speyer in 1544. Martin Bucer, the great reformer of Strassburg, appealed to Calvin to draft a statement of the doctrines of and necessity for the Reformation. The result was remarkable. Theodore Beza, Calvin's friend and successor in Geneva, called "The Necessity for Reforming the Church" the most powerful work of his time. Calvin organizes the work into three large sections.   The first section is devoted to the evils in the church that required reformation.  The second details the particular remedies to those evils adopted by the reformers.  The third shows why reform could not be delayed, but r...