Dr Paul Allen

by Ted Peters Our church—evangelical, mainline, Catholic or Orthodox–seems like a sandcastle on an ocean beach. We can stand back and admire our craftsmanship. Then a wave washes up high, and a few grains of sand get eroded. Another wave erodes more of the castle. Wave after wave finally leaves the beach the way it had been before our architectural triumph. Wave after wave of cultural change is eroding our church under our very eyes. Silently and almost invisibly, the digital world is replacing the biblical world. The world of Bible study, hymn singing, praying in unison, and using God as the subject of sentences is becoming forgotten. What now absorbs our attention is a complex array of video gaming, net surfing, Instagramming, Zooming, texting, and sexting. The digital world is actually a disorganized composite of min-worlds. In only half an hour, any teenager can be introduced  to the worldviews of QAnon, Sufism, yoga, new age meditation, naturalism, spiritual-but-not-religious,...

Thanks to Carl Trueman’s bestsellers The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self and Strange New World, Christians are in a far better place to understand this bizarre cultural moment. How did we get to a place where humans with XY chromosomes—otherwise known as males—have risen to dominance in female sports, won acclaim as one of USA Today’s Women of the Year, and been hosted by the Smithsonian to perform interactive drag shows for young children? Trueman does a stellar job retracing the steps of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, and other thought leaders, through the sexual revolution, and up to our day. His analysis is spot on, so far as it goes. But what if there’s a far more ancient origin to the expressive individualism trending in our day? (Full disclosure: I had an on-air discussion with Trueman suggesting this very thesis, and he heartily agreed.) Maker’s Knowledge In Genesis 3 we behold the “Tree of Knowledge.” The serpent tempts humanity’s first couple with a pitch to be “like God, kno...

“Let not the foot of pride come against me, and let not the hand of the wicked remove me.” ( Psalm 36:11 ) The contrast in this psalm is not only between good and evil , but more specifically between the prideful man who lives without fear of God and the God in whom godly men trust. The description of the evil man (vv. 1-4) is an apt description of a modern-day humanist. He is convinced that God, if He exists, does not intervene in the affairs of men. He therefore sets himself up as an authority, deciding right and wrong on his own arbitrary scale. He has “no fear of God” (v. 1), and arrogantly he “flattereth himself in his own eyes” (v. 2), speaking “iniquity and deceit” (v. 3). He is foolish, and even his humanitarian deeds are not good, in the ultimate sense. Furthermore, the modern-day humanist “abhorreth not evil” (v. 4), insisting that such sins as promiscuity, homosexuality, witchcraft, abortion, brainwashing of children in pantheistic evolution, etc., are, in reality, to be...