Dr Paul Allen

  “Who needs God? Man can make it on his own.” So claimed Reason, the philosophy that captured the imagination of seventeenth-century France. Its champions, Voltaire and Descartes, among others, tried to fashion a worldview ruled completely by reason. French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal, though raised in the heyday of Enlightenment thought, found reason inadequate: “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.” He concluded, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know at all”—a statement that soon became the chief critique of rationalism and the starting point for a defense of the Christian faith that still influences people today. Scientific prodigy Pascal’s mother died when he was 3, and his father moved the family from Clermont-Ferrand, France, to Paris, where he homeschooled Blaise and his sister. By age 10, Pascal was doing original experiments in mathematics and physical science. To help his fat...

A recent public debate between British Muslim polemicist Zakir Hussain and American Christian author Michael Brown helpfully illustrates the two most common Islamic approaches to the Bible. On the one hand, Muslims often argue that the Bible predicts the coming of Muhammad. On the other hand, they will often undermine the Bible’s accuracy and authority. For example, Hussain claimed Moses’s mention in Deuteronomy 18:15 of a future prophet to come was a prophecy about Muhammad. But when Brown carefully demonstrated that according to the verse, the prophet would need to come from Israel (“A prophet like me from among your own people,” NRSV), the debate shifted.  At that point, Hussain asserted the Masoretic Text had added the Hebrew word for “from your midst” to the verse, even specifying that the word wasn’t to be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The debate, accessible on Brown’s YouTube channel, points to the remarkable efforts some Muslims make to search the Bible’s text for claims a...

“It’s impossible to meet God with sunglasses on” —   Bono “Hope is optimism with a broken heart” —   Nick Cave Two rock music world’s most enduring frontmen have published long, exploratory memoirs in the lead-up to Christmas. Nick Cave’s  Faith, Hope and Carnage  record conversations with journalist Seán O’Hagan during the lockdown months of 2020. The epigraph to the book is a biblical quote from the Old Testament book of Isaiah: “A little child shall lead them.” Bono’s nearly 600-page book,  Surrender , is a reflective journey through his life in music, beginning and ending with his birth — in fact, the penultimate chapter is a poetic imagining of his own entry into the world. For these famous rockstars, both books read like adult Sunday school lessons. Both artists see their art and lives intertwined with the Christian faith's spirit, history, and eschatology. Both were “catechised” in different ways as teenagers, endured significant trauma in their personal ...

It didn’t take long, but we can now say that Aaron Renn and James Wood have been vindicated. Their recent analyses of our cultural moment and strategies for Christian cultural engagement have been proven right by recent events in Australia. I refer, here, to Andrew Thorburn and his rapid departure from a high-profile role at one of Australia’s most prestigious professional sporting clubs. This incident is a harbinger of the times and illustrates the wisdom of Wood’s and Renn’s claims about the church’s relationship to the culture.  Renn argues that we are in a “Negative World,” a cultural climate where Christianity is on-the-nose and increasingly marginal.  Conservative Christianity has a particularly bad brand in a world where traditional social mores are passé. Wood, by interacting with the example of Presbyterian minister Tim Keller, asserted that the age of “winsome” evangelical cultural engagement is over.  Whether or not Wood has properly framed Keller’s ministry st...

Why do people stop believing? Paul Chamberlain:   But your question, why do they leave? There are a number of patterns you begin to see. Some of them are just maybe old-fashioned ones: personal disappointment with Christians, the church, God Himself. Some people tell these stories, they're fairly deep. Maybe they've had a personal failure, in some cases coupled with the difficulty of finding acceptance later, and they feel like they're being now treated differently. People now doubt them, treat them like maybe some damaged goods, and this is all part of a complex, and it's just been sending them in a bit of a different direction. In some cases, I know there's simply what I would have to call unrealistic expectations from God, from the Christian faith. Maybe the teaching they received was not properly balanced. As one man said who had been a pastor, now he said, "I stopped believing in God altogether, because I ran out of excuses for God." As a pa...