Dr Paul Allen

There are more significant questions beneath this question, making this an essential issue to many. As we move toward an answer, here are three pivotal concerns behind the question that can help us understand why this gnaws at many people’s hearts. 1. What do we mean when we talk about heaven? Generally, when people think about heaven, they refer to what theologians more appropriately call “the intermediate state.” When a believer in Christ dies, their soul leaves the earth, and they go into the presence of Jesus until the second coming of Christ. Here, we are liberated from physical pain, sin, the presence of evil, and all effects of the fall. We shall see the face of Jesus and experience unfettered communion with him. We will be, ideally, euphorically and eternally happy. The intermediate state, though, is temporary. At the second coming of Christ, we will descend with Jesus to the earth, where heaven will become a place on earth. At that point, the resurrection of the dead will occu...

I have been writing about the alarming Bible passages in which God commands the destruction of the older peoples of the land of Canaan, ordering what by any common sense understanding we would call genocide. Early Christians were not too troubled by such texts, because they mainly saw them as allegorical, and they saw no need to confront the moral dilemmas in their own writings, particularly in the New Testament. But here is one exception, and a significant one. It appears in a devious and quite sneaky way in the Gospel of Matthew. Am I allowed to call gospels sneaky? The genocide commands are explicit. In Deuteronomy 7, God orders that When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations ….  and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. The word for “destroy totally” is herem, Greek anathema, and...

Have you ever been a bit unsettled by Jesus’ reference to the Canaanite woman as a “dog.”  To understand why Jesus called the Canaanite woman a dog, you need to know a little about Tyre and Messianic expectations. There was an expectation of the Messiah . When he comes he is going to go into places like Tyre—the very embodiment of paganism—and destroy them. You expect a Messiah to go to such a wicked place, call them all dogs, and leave—maybe lighting a match on his way out. But the Gospel of Mark is painting a different picture of the Messiah . He’s just spoken to the Pharisees about what defiles a person. It’s not what is on the outside but it’s the stuff of the inside. That kind of talk would lead a Messiah into Tyre to provide redemption instead of wrathful rebuke. But then when Jesus gets into Tyre he sounds more like a soldier Messiah than the type of Messiah of the Gospel of Mark.  Now some will say that Jesus is testing this woman’s faith. Others will p...

Next Saturday will be the 498th anniversary of Martin Luther famously nailing his 95 Theses to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Germany, and kick-starting the Protestant Reformation as a result. Because of that, there will likely be many posts in the Christian blogosphere celebrating the recovery of the biblical Gospel from the perversions of Roman Catholic theology. And because of that, there will likely be many Romanist sympathizers who chide us Protestants as divisive, overly-narrow, unity-destroying, and judgmental. They’ll say something like this : This is what drives me nutty about Christianity. We all believe in the Bible, Jesus Christ, the road to salvation and the Resurrection. Do I believe exactly as you do? I’m sure I don’t, but I don’t believe you’re any less Christian than I am. We need to understand that there’s more that unites us than divides us. The problem, of course, is that Protestants and Catholics don’t all believe the same things about the most foundati...