Dr Paul Allen

Cover of Basic Christianity The love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized. I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God—to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity . There is a powerful tendency “to present God through characterizations of his inner states, with an emphasis on his emotions, which closely resemble those of human beings.…God is more likely to ‘feel’ than to ‘act,’ to ‘think’ than to ‘say.’ With such sentimentalizing of God multiplying in churches, it does not take much to see how difficult maintaining a biblical doctrine of the love of God can be. Some elements of the larger and still developing patterns of postmoderni...

Image via Wikipedia Lloyd-Jones could have been saying this for the 21st Century not the 20th. There really is nothing new under the sun: “All this modern preaching on the fact that God is love is an indication of the same attitude and spirit. We are told today that the old sermons that preached the law and talked about conviction of sin and called people to repentance were all wrong because they were legalistic . . . So it is said that we must return to the message of Jesus . We must get rid of all our theology, our argumentation and doctrine—it is all unnecessary. The business of preaching is to tell people that God is love. It does not matter what they are, or what they have been, or what they have done, or what they may do—God loves them. Nobody will ever be punished. There is no law; so there is no retribution and no hell . . . Dignitaries in the church tell us that what we need is a “religionless Christianity.” One of them has written a book in which he says that if y...