Dr Paul Allen

I know the premise may sound crazy – gender role theology as a slippery slope to LGBTQ+?!? – but bear with me, and I’ll try not to disappoint. In evangelical patriarchy/hierarchalism/complementarianism, it is often assumed that gender role equality in the church is a slippery slope to acceptance of LGBTQ+ ideology.  The argument goes something like this:  when a woman exercises spiritual authority over men in a church, she rejects her divinely ordained sexual nature as man’s subordinate. This permissiveness paves the way for the takeover of liberal theology, in which God’s intention for sexual activity between a man and a woman, and the sacredness of one’s created gender, are similarly subverted. Many evangelical egalitarians have demonstrated how this argument is beset both by a causal fallacy and a misunderstanding of gender differences. I will briefly summarize their counterarguments and present a new idea, namely, that the exclusion of women from church leadership as “God’...

Unless you are an evangelical you cannot go to Heaven. That’s a pretty radical statement, isn’t it ? Some might find it hateful, others ignorant, but you need to know that it is absolutely true. Now that I have your attention it is important to define what an evangelical is. Merriam-Webster defines evangelical in three ways. The first is: as someone who is in agreement with the Christian gospel especially as it is presented in the four Gospels.  The second simply: as someone who claims to be protestant.   And the third: as someone who emphasizes salvation by faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ through personal conversion, the authority of Scripture, and the importance of preaching as contrasted with ritual. Sadly, the world has hijacked the term .  As they have done with many other terms that we have always taken for granted, such as marriage, male or female amongst many others, they have done so with the term evangelical. Many associate the word with politics...

Evangelicalism is a movement in Protestant Christianity that began in the twentieth century as a response to changes in the beliefs, or doctrines, of some Protestant churches, especially with regard to the Bible ’s authority. Modernism, and more recently postmodernism, have influenced the thinking of many and cast doubt in their minds about some scriptural teachings. While there is a broad range of belief within Protestantism, some see the Bible as an ancient, error-filled human record of religious experience rather than a divinely inspired revelation from God. As a result, they reject one or more foundational doctrines of the Christian faith. For example, some dismiss “ Jesus as the only way to salvation” as arrogance. Some consider the need for salvation at all from “God’s wrath” to be an abhorrent myth. They might say Jesus is a remarkable human teacher, but not the divine-human Son of God. They deny his miracles and his resurrection and, in the extreme, question whether he a...

Logo of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In any discussion about the future of religion in America , especially as it relates to stalled growth in churches and denominations, those outside our religious communities find one theory especially compelling. This is the idea: that young Evangelicals are frustrated with Christian orthodoxy ’s strict standards of sexual morality. We’re told that these young Evangelicals will soon revolutionize our churches with liberalized views on same-sex marriage, premarital sex, gender identity, and so on. But a new study by a University of Texas sociologist finds that Evangelical Christians ages 18 to 39 are resisting liberalizing trends in the culture. The suggestion of a shift in attitudes does sound plausible. Indeed, one of us has warned for years that conservative Evangelicals are often “slow-motion sexual revolutionaries,” adjusting to the ambient culture on, for instance, divorce in ways that have h...