Dr Paul Allen

One reason so many Christians suffer from spiritual malnutrition is that they live on a diet of junk food , as far as building spiritual character is concerned. Peter is well aware of this and that’s why he says:  “Therefore, laying aside all malice, all deceit , hypocrisy , envy , and all evil speaking” (1 Pet. 2:1).  The Greek word used for “laying aside” actually means to “strip off your clothes.” The same idea is expressed in Hebrews 12:1 where we are told to  “lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us.”  Peter talks about five specifics that we should strip out of our lives: malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander. Malice was the general word for wickedness . In Peter’s day it meant “heathen evil”—the characteristic evil of the world surrounding the young Christian church . Peter doesn’t advise laying aside some of it; he demands all of it to go. Today’s Christians are no different from those in the first century. M...

The Westminster Confession of Faith insists that Christians may be “certainly assured that they are in the state of grace” (18:1) and goes on to assert that this “infallible assurance of faith ” is “founded upon” three considerations: “the divine truth of the promises of salvation” “the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made” “the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are children of God ” (18:2). The possibility of “certain” and “infallible” assurance is set against the backdrop of medieval and post-Reformation Roman Catholic views that paralyzed the church with an “assurance” that was at best “conjectural” (wishful thinking), based as it was on rigorous participation in a sacramental treadmill. Few epitomized the contrast more starkly than Cardinal Bellarmine (1542–1621), the personal theologian to Pope Clement VIII and ablest leader of the Counter-Reformation, who called the Protestant doctrine of assuranc...

Looking around today it is quite difficult to find a couple who is dating wisely. Many people sleep together (even some within the church), and those who don’t, seem to get to the point where they are acting married soon after they begin their relationship. Some spend far more time together than most married couples do. They text each other dozens of times a day, they have most meals together and they spend full days together. They may call each other names of endearment, and talk about the kind of furniture they want to buy for their home together.  Maybe they refer to each other as “my guy” or “my girl” before there is any real commitment. And even if they are staying sexually pure there can still be areas that need to be re-evaluated within their relationship. Of course, there must be time spent together in order for them to get to know each other to determine whether they ought to marry. I don’t know your heart or situation, nor am I the Holy Spirit , all people in a...

Jesus is considered by scholars such as Weber to be an example of a charismatic religious leader. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In the face of the sexual revolution , the Christian church in the West now faces a set of moral challenges that exceeds anything it has experienced in the past. This is a revolution of ideas—one that is transforming the entire moral structure of meaning and life. These challenges would be vexing enough for any generation.  But the contours of our current challenge have to be understood over against the affecting reality for virtually everything on the American landscape, and furthermore in the West. This revolution, like all revolutions, takes few prisoners. In other words, it demands total acceptance of its revolutionary claims and the affirmation of its aims. This is the problem that now confronts Christians who are committed to faithfulness to the Bible as the Word of God and to the gospel as the only message of salvation. The scale and scope of...

Though Tertullian had provided the church with the formula that God is one substance, consisting in three persons, he had by no means given the world a complete understanding of the Trinity. Indeed, this doctrine has puzzled the greatest theologians. Early in the fourth century a pastor of Alexandria, Egypt — Arius —called himself a Christian. But Arius also accepted Greek theology, which taught that God is unique and unknowable .  According to such thought, He is so radically different that He cannot share His substance with anything: Only God can be God. In his book Thalia Arius proclaimed that Jesus was divine, but not God. Only God the Father , Arius said, could be immortal, so the Son had to be a created being. He was like the Father, but not truly God. Many former pagans felt comfortable with Arius’s views , because they could preserve the familiar idea of an unknowable God and see Jesus as a kind of divine superhero, not much different from the divine-human her...

We live in an age of narcissism. It is the era of self-actualization, the relentless race to perfect the self. Time  magazine reported in 2013 that “ Narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their twenties as for the generation that’s now 65 or older. . . . 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982.” As the West has become more narcissistic, so have the people in our churches. We see it on social media. We hear it over coffee. We see it when young people break away from living and breathing social groups to snap a selfie. We also see it in our evangelism. A decade or two ago our evangelism still pointed outward. We spoke of the existence of God , objective truth, and the historical reliability of the resurrection. Now, swaths of churches have moved on to leading with personal testimonies. This contextualization isn’t necessarily wrong. In a postmodern era, stories are often more powerful th...

English: Izbište-Eastern Orthodox Church Српски / Srpski: Православна Црква у Избишту (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The late Richard Weaver hated the title of his book Ideas Have Consequences . That is unfortunate, because the title is outstanding and carries a wealth of theology in three simple words. Ideas have very pointed consequences, and one of the best illustrations of this is the profound differences that have developed between the Western church and the Eastern church. Those differences are not merely “ doctrinal ,” but reveal two completely different mindsets, two different paradigms. Some years ago, some colleagues had occasion to criticize aspects of the Eastern Orthodox Church in print. Aside from all the expected disagreements and the back-and-forthing that goes on after such things, a remarkable thing became apparent in the exchanges we had—the Eastern Orthodox do not really know how to argue. By way of contrast, historic Protestants have deep and abiding differences...

English: The Pentecost Mosaic, in the center is the dove of the Holy Spirit with the twelve apostles below. This is one of the oldest mosaics in the church dating from 1125 AD. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The operation of the Holy Spirit after the day of Pentecost differed from that which from that which the prophets in their official capacity enjoyed. The Holy Spirit came upon the prophets as a supernatural power and worked upon them from without. His action on them was frequently repeated but was not continuous. The distinction between His activity and the mental activity of the prophets themselves was made to stand out rather clearly. On the day of Pentecost, however, He took up His abode in the hearts of the apostles and began to work upon them from within.  Since He made their hearts His permanent abode, His action on them was no more intermittent but continuous, but even in their case the supernatural work of inspiration was limited to those occasions on which ...