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 father,

“God chose us in Him…” This statement from Ephesians 1 is personal, not impersonal.  The us refers to Paul and his audience, and the ‘in Him’ refers to Christ.   Christ is the locus of the choice, not apart from him, not in the abstract, not merely in the mind of God but ‘in Christ’.  Now what exactly does that mean?  If the choice is personal and of person, and in the context of a person namely Christ, who exactly existed before the creation of the universe to be chosen?  Only Christ.   He was there, and even participated in the creation of the universe.  We were certainly not there.  Paul does not believe in the notion of pre-existent or immortal souls or a well of souls in heaven that at some point are placed into human bodies.   Election happens ‘in Christ’ because he is the Chosen of God, as the recent movie series’ title suggests.   Now since it is Christ who has been chosen to redeem humanity, it should be obvious that election is one thing, and salvation another.  Christ himsel

Dr. Rodney Stark has written nearly 40 books on a wide range of topics, incuding a number of recent books on the history of Christianity, monotheism, Christianity in China, and the roots of modernity. After beginning as a newspaper reporter and spending time in the Army, Stark received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. He later was Professor of Sociology and of Comparative Religion at the University of Washington; he has been at Baylor University since 2004. Stark is past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and he has won a number of national and international awards for distinguished scholarship. Raised as a Lutheran, he has identified himself as an agnostic but has, more recently, called himself an “independent Christian”. His most recent book

Image via Wikipedia Image via Wikipedia Image via Wikipedia One of the most important principles of Christian thinking is the recognition that there is no stance of intellectual neutrality. No human being is capable of achieving a process of thought that requires no presuppositions, assumptions, or inherited intellectual components. All human thinking requires some presupposed framework that defines reality and explains, in the first place, how it is possible that we can know anything at all. The process of human cogitation and intellectual activity has been, in itself, the focus of intense intellectual concern. In philosophy, the field of study that is directed toward the possibility of human knowledge is epistemology. The ancient philosophers were concerned with the problem of knowledge, but this problem becomes all the more complex and acute in a world of intellectual diversity. In the aftermath of the Enlightenment , the problem of epistemology moved to the very center of philos