Dr Paul Allen

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. [Col. 2:13–14] Nineteenth-century liberal theology treated Jesus as a mere man with some good ideas. Liberal theology is a form of religious humanism that encourages people to be good and follow the example of their mythical Jesus. Shortly after World War I , a theologian in Switzerland named Karl Barth launched an attack on liberalism. Barth claimed to be returning to orthodoxy and purifying it in the process. In truth, Barth was simply inventing one more pseudo- Christian religion , another form of Gnosticism. The “neo-orthodoxy” of Barth and his associate Emil Brunner said that the Bible is not an infallible book. Rather, the Bible is a book that, if we read it with a spiritual frame of m...

Even in heresy there is “nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9 NIV) The false teachings that spring up in and around the church remain much the same. Instead of turning to Christ ’s atoning works, many have sought to save themselves by discovering some secret knowledge. In the early church, it appeared in a group of heresies called Gnosticism (gnosis is a Greek word meaning “knowledge”). Before the founding of the church, some form of Gnosticism apparently existed. When John wrote his first epistle, he struck a blow at this false teaching. Yet it still had a following in the second century. We know little about Irenaeus , the man who opposed Gnosticism in the latter part of the second century. He was probably born in Asia Minor in about 125. Active trading between Asia Minor and Gaul had allowed Christians to bring their faith to Gaul, where they had established a vigorous church in the chief city, Lyons. While he served as an elder in Lyons, Irenaeus lived up to ...

PRAYING FOR PEOPLE Establishing an accurate definition of what constitutes a miracle is difficult in view of the prevailing influence of Deism among Christians. God is continually and directly in control of everything that occurs! In light of this, several inadequate definitions of miracles need to be rejected. E.g., Some define a miracle as a direct intervention of God into the world. But “intervention … into” implies that God is outside the world and only occasionally intrudes. Some define a miracle as God working in the world apart from means to bring about the desired result. But God often uses “means” or “instruments” in performing the miraculous, as in the case of Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000. Others define a miracle as God acting contrary to natural law. But this implies there are forces (“ natural laws ”) which operate independently of God, forces or laws that God must violate or override to perform a miracle. God is the author and providential Lord over all nat...

St Mary Coptic Orthodox Church (Photo credit: Christopher Chan ) When it comes to Jesus , the gullibility of the religious academy and its media know no bounds. This past Easter , the U.S. media buzzed with excitement over the announcement of an ancient Coptic (Egyptian) papyrus fragment with the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife….’” One more footnote for the story of how a powerful ecclesiastical elite suppressed the diversity of Christian voices and made its own variation “orthodoxy.” Harvard Divinity School has long been a place where “alternative Christianities”—especially Gnosticism —are defended with “fundamentalist” zeal. Karen L. King , Hollis Professor of Divinity , has been a distinguished evangelist for this “other Christianity.” Properly skeptical journalists might have paused before rushing to the keyboards and cameras. Not with this story. I saw headlines with words like “Certain,” “Confident,” and “Proved.” No question about it: the fragment is authentic and de...

English: Rudolf_Bultmann Deutsch: Rudolf_Bultmann (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Colossians 1:24–29 “I became a minister…to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints” ( vv. 25–26 ). The liberal theology that emerged from the nineteenth century and still plagues the church even today was not only influenced by the radical immanentism of Hegel and the radical subjectivism of Schleiermacher. Naturalism, a view that holds nothing exists except the physical universe, also had a profound impact on liberalism. The result was a crop of liberal theologians who did not believe in the miraculous. Some of them even denied the existence of the personal God altogether. These men tried to explain away the many supernatural references in the Gospels , viewing the miracles purely in materialistic terms. The feeding of the five thousand, for example, was not a supernatural multiplication of a few loaves and fishes. Instead, Jesus w...

Holy Spirit painting (Photo credit: hickory hardscrabble ) “If you love me, you will obey what I command” (John 14:15). The word antinomian comes from the Greek words anti (against) and nomos (law). Antinomianism is the opposite of legalism. Where the legalist distorts the concept of law, the antinomian is opposed to all law. There are several forms of antinomianism today. Some people simply believe they are free from God’s law altogether because they have been saved by Christ . A more common form of antinomianism is “situation ethics.” A kind of antinomianism that is found all too often in evangelical circles is sometimes called “gnostic spiritualism.” In the early centuries of the church, one of the worst heresies was gnosticism. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge. The gnostics believed they had access to special knowledge and insight into God’s will that went beyond what “ordinary” Christians had. This special knowledge was not found in the Bible, which was a publi...

Image via Wikipedia Mention “ Christmas ” and “controversy” together in the same sentence, and most evangelicals will assume you’re talking about Santa Claus , Christmas trees , or the secularization of the winter holiday season . But, from a historical perspective, a much more significant controversy surrounded Christmas for the first five centuries of church history; and its effects still linger in some circles today. It centered on the very essence of Jesus’ birth  – the doctrine of His incarnation. There is, of course, an element of mystery in the incarnation. After all, how can one person be both fully God and fully man at the same time? Yet, that is precisely the miraculous truth that the Scriptures affirm regarding the Person of Jesus Christ . Nonetheless, despite the clarity of biblical revelation, the doctrine of Christ ’s incarnation came under attack from the very beginning. The Ebionites , a legalistic first- and second-century ...

No. Cremation , however, may have something to say about the Bible . The proper handling of human bodies after death is not something the Bible expressly deals with.  There are sundry ceremonial laws in the Old Covenant about touching dead bodies , but no instruction on what to do with these bodies. As such we need to be careful not to condemn what the Bible does not condemn. How though, could cremation speak to the Bible? Cremation, strange as it may sound, is a form of liturgy.  It is a form for dealing with matters of eternal consequence. As a form it in turn communicates a message. That message, it seems, does speak against the Bible’s understanding of death.  Cremation, however subtly, suggests that our bodies are of no significance or import, that they are simply so much trash that must be burned.  It is implicitly a Gnostic practice, a denial of the goodness of the creation in general and the human body in particular. Burial, on the other hand, ...