Dr Paul Allen

The Gospel of Mark is understood by some as having a low Christology . This is understandable, to some extent, in light of the very human aspects of Jesus in the Gospel:  He displays a range of emotions (Mark 1:41; 8:12; 3:5; 6:6);  He doesn’t know everything God the Father knows (Mark 13:32; Edwards 2002, 13);  He is occasionally unable to perform miracles (6:5);  His question to the rich man—“Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Mk. 10:18)—could be interpreted as a direct denial of divinity. Mark’s use of the Old Testament, however, reveals a Christology that is “enigmatic and paradoxical” (Strauss 2014, 734), full of the reality of Jesus’ humanity and yet pointing to his divinity. Jesus is the Davidic Messiah , and yet a suffering servant. He is the Danielic Son of Man who, at his lowest point, claims the highest authority (Mark 14:62). More than that, whether by direct quotation or by allusion, Jesus is revealed as the God ...

The fundamental distinction between Christian and Islamic theology centers on how God’s nature is understood. The God revealed progressively through Scripture—Yahweh in the Old Testament and continuing through Christ and the apostles—differs fundamentally from Allah as presented in Islamic teaching. 1 The most significant theological divergence involves the Trinity . Christians affirm God as triune—one in essence yet three in person—where the distinctions between Father, Son, and Spirit do not create three separate deities. 1 While both faiths claim monotheism, Islam understands “one” to mean Allah is a singular spiritual being without internal plurality, and Muslims explicitly deny the Trinity as implying polytheism. 2 The Qur’an categorically rejects any notion of threeness in God, treating the Trinitarian confession as blasphemy. 3 This doctrinal disagreement extends to Christology and redemption . Islam denies both the incarnation of a second person of the Trinity who accomplishe...

  Read 1 Peter 5:5-11. ‘ Casting all your care upon him; for he cares for you’ is a golden text in every way. God would not have us careless, vv. 8–9; the constant prowling of our adversary calls for constant vigilance on our part. But God would have us carefree, v. 7. Peter’s readers had every cause for anxiety. They faced numerous challenges. In the present, they suffered simply because they were Christians, 4:16. Prospects for the future were even worse; in rather ominous words, Peter warned them that the time had come ‘that judgment must begin at the house of God’, 4:17. The storm clouds were gathering. Recognising that his readers had every reason to be alarmed, Peter alludes to the Greek Old Testament translation of Psalm 55:22, ‘Cast your care upon the Lord’. To stifle any remaining doubts on their part, however, he adds the precious word, ‘all’. They do not need to bear any anxieties themselves; instead, they can cast 'all' their concerns on Him. Peter had concluded cha...

  JESUS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT Even though there’s a large amount of supporting evidence for the existence of Jesus in non-Christian sources, the best evidence is found in the New Testament. The New Testament is made up of twenty-seven different documents (ancient biographies, letters, apocalyptic writings), all written in the first century. You might be thinking, What about the writers’ prejudices and impartialities? Yes, the New Testament is biased because Christians composed it, but every text is biased. Bias does not necessarily equal unreliability; if this were the case, every ancient (and modern) text would be considered unreliable. So why do historians believe that the New Testament is the best evidence for the existence of Jesus? The strongest argument is that before and during the time of Jesus, Jews did not believe that the Messiah (or Christ) was going to die.  They believed that the Messiah was going to rise up and conquer the Romans, taking back Jerusalem, where the...

THIS ARTICLE CLEARLY DEMONSTRATES HOW PRESBYTERIANS ARGUE AGAINST ANY FORM OF THE SUPERNATURAL ACTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT TODAY USING THE HUMAN CATEGORY ARGUMENT TO JUSTIFY THIER POSITION ARTICLE AUTHOR:  R ev . Nicholas T. Batzig  Western society has turned the idea of the miraculous into a mere literary tool—an idiom to capture any extraordinary (i.e., a rare, unexpected, or unlikely) happening. “It was a miracle that we made it on time,” a couple exclaims at a dinner party after getting caught in heavy traffic. “He was a miracle worker,” a woman tells her friend as she explains how her counsellor helped turn her marriage around. “It was a miracle that she made it through,” a man says about his mother’s risky surgery. These are a few common ways that our culture has appropriated the word miracle over the past century. At the very least, this tendency reveals that most people label rare, extraordinary, and unlikely providences as miracles. At the same time, many professing belie...