Dr Paul Allen

English: An image of Psalm 23 (King James' Version), frontispiece to the 1880 omnibus printing of The Sunday at Home. Scanned at 800 dpi. Français : Illustration du Psaume 23 (version autorisée par le roi Jacques), en frontispice de l'édition omnibus du Sunday at home. Version numérisée à 800 dpi. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) “Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God , ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator -God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so.” —D. A. Carson,  Worship by the Book Tim Challies says: "If you do a word search in the  ESV  for  worship , you’ll find almost 200 occurrences of some form of the word. Scan through these and you’ll soon learn what the biblical authors meant by  worship .  Here are the most common aspects of worship: 1) Worship is about giving glory to God by responding to his self-revelation. “All the nations you have made shall come and  wors...

English: Israel's Escape from Egypt, illustration from a Bible card published 1907 by the Providence Lithograph Company (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Biblical Theology is the practice of developing one’s theology by studying the Bible ’s progressive revelation, and seeing how truths were revealed chronologically, throughout redemptive history. It means more than deriving theology from a certain book of the Bible, but rather stresses the importance of reading the Bible in chronological order, and seeing how God ’s revelation progresses through time. This approach to theology is different from systematic theology, which develops theology by building principals across scripture, without regard to what revelation was in existence at the time. In Biblical Theology, one starts reading at the book of Genesis and traces the story of God’s revelation until Revelation. This means that the Bible points forward in history, usually finding its fulfillment in the person of Jesus Chr...

Image via Wikipedia In a society obsessed with tolerance, we are actually not tolerant at all. It’s all a big lie, a big fiction, and we’re all playing along. In order to claim  tolerance  we’ve had to rewrite the definition of the term and in so doing we’ve put ourselves on dangerous ground.  Tolerance has become part of the Western “plausability structure”—a stance that is assumed and is not to be questioned. We are to be tolerant at all times. Well, almost all times, that is.  Tolerance presupposes disagreement. That’s the beauty of being tolerant—one person expresses disagreement with another but still tolerates him, accepting that differing views exists even while holding fast to his own. He puts up with another person even though they do not believe the same thing. But over time there has been a subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle shift in the word’s meaning. Today’s version of tolerance actually accepts all differing views.  We’ve gone fr...

I don't think you can tell it from reading on the internet, but among many younger leaders with Reformed and evangelical convictions there may be a slow convergence coming on the subject of the mission of the church and the relationship of Christ and culture. On the surface, the Reformed and evangelical world seems divided between "Cultural Transformationists" and the " Two Kingdoms " views. Transformationists fall into fairly different camps, including the neo- Calvinists who follow Abraham Kuyper , the Christian Right , and the theonomists. Though different in significant ways, they all believe Christians should be about redeeming and changing the culture along Christian lines. On the other hand, the Two Kingdoms view believes essentially the opposite---that neither the church nor individual Christians should be in the business of changing the world or society. Again, there are very different camps within this stance. The Reformed and Lutheran propone...