Dr Paul Allen

1.   Dr. Brown opens the chapter with a story about James Robison and how he used to be judgmental, until Billy Graham told him to “spend time with other believers you’ve been taught to avoid” (Kindle Location 3482), which transformed him and those whom he reached out to.  Dr. Brown makes the subtle insinuation that John MacArthur avoids other believers because he doesn’t think they are other believers.  Dr. Brown then quotes himself in saying that Heaven will be “a great eye-opener and a great mouth-closer. You will be surprised to see many people there, and many people will be surprised to see you there”  (Kindle Locations 3486-3487), and comments about how people like Bill Johnson and Mike Bickle get condemned by some and praised by others. Dr. Brown proves that MacArthur doesn’t believe charismatics are believers by pointing to this now infamous tweet: "We're not trying to divide the body of Christ with this conference. We're trying to identify the body o

English: A diagram showing the Monophysite view of Christ: One nature, which is neither fully human, nor fully divine. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In the year 451, the church convened the great Council of Chalcedon , one of the most important ecumenical councils of all time. It was called to combat several heresies, the most significant of which was the Monophysite heresy . The term monophysite has a prefix and a root. The prefix, mono, means "one," and the root, phusis, is translated as "nature." So monophusis or monophysite simply means "one nature." The Monophysites claimed that Jesus did not have two natures, a divine nature and a human nature , but only one nature. That one nature was neither completely divine nor completely human. It was, depending on how one looked at it, a deified human nature or a humanized divine nature. This heresy was very serious for two reasons. It denied, on the one hand, the full deity of Christ . On the other hand,

Jesus image (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Long before there was a human nature, there was a second person of the Trinity . Here the second person of the Trinity, very God of very God, God himself, was able to take upon himself a human nature. No human being could reverse the process and take upon himself a divine nature. I cannot add deity to my humanity. It’s not as if Christ changed from deity into humanity. That’s what I hear all the time. I hear that there was this great eternal God who suddenly stopped being God and became a man. That’s not what the Bible teaches. The divine person took upon himself a human nature. We really can’t understand the mystery of how this happened. But it is conceivable, certainly, that God, with his power, can add to himself a human nature and do it in such a way as to unite two natures in one person. The most important council about this in the history of the church, whose decision has stood for centuries as the model of Christian orthodoxy and is