Dr Paul Allen

One of the realities we face as people living in a fallen world is that tragedy and sadness surround us. This seems especially true each Christmas, as we reflect on the many acts of violence that marked the past year—acts that reveal deep truths about our culture and the spiritual condition of our nation. No sooner does one tragedy fade than another begins. We open our phones to check the news and are bombarded with story after story: shootings, kidnappings, robberies, or arrests for heinous crimes. It’s gut-wrenching to realize that people have lost loved ones during what should be a joyous holiday season—all because of the wicked acts of wicked men. Yet the sad reality is that our world is not so different from the one into which Jesus was born. In Matthew’s Gospel, we read of a wicked ruler, Herod, who ordered the death of all male children two years old and under in and around Bethlehem (Matthew 2). He committed this atrocity out of fear of losing power, driven by his own ego and ...

Could there be a more profound opening to a book than the one to John’s Gospel? One could search through the great ideas of mankind, explore the thoughts of philosophers, and examine the poetry of artists, and still find no idea higher than God, nor a more concise—yet expressive—statement about Him than the one John makes at the beginning of his Gospel. John profoundly links his Gospel to the creation account in Genesis 1 with the words “In the beginning” (John 1:1a) before launching into the world’s most economical articulation of the everlasting relationship between God the Father and God the Son. The first statement of John’s Gospel is a bomb of meaning that goes off without warning, erupting suddenly, and the sublime and inexpressible, the infinite and unsearchable, and the personal and ineffable reality of God come exploding onto the consciousness of John’s audience in the words of John 1:1–5. Here, John proclaims the Word as God, through whom the world was made, in whom is life, ...

Jesus was born to Mary and Joseph less than nine months after they had been married. That was probably the basis for the Pharisees’ accusation against our Lord: “We were not born of sexual immorality” ( John 8:41 )—insinuating that Jesus was the result of an illicit union.  The real scandal, however, is that Jesus of Nazareth was not conceived by a sexual union at all, because He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary (cf. Matt. 1:18–25 ; Luke 1:26–38 ). God ordained that His Son would be produced in the womb of His mother, apart from the normal means of human procreation. Thus, by the Spirit, God worked the quietest miracle of all. The clear teachings of Scripture are usually among the first doctrines to be ridiculed by sceptics. This should not be surprising, for everything about “Christ crucified”—including the manner of His incarnation—is a stumbling block (Greek skandalon) to the mind of the flesh ( 1 Cor. 1:22–25 ). God’s wisdom, revealed in Christ, cap...

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...