Dr Paul Allen

John Piper Decades of Controversies Here’s part of the glimpse I gave them into my fifty-year history of dealing with unexpected issues. But let me say at the outset that I won’t focus on race and abortion as one of those issues because they’re pervasive.  For the last decades of my life, I have lived every decade with issues of race that need to be addressed and issues of abortion that need to be addressed. So, understand that those are huge issues, and the fact that I don’t mention them in the list doesn’t mean they’re absent. It means they’re everywhere. The 1960s: History and Criticism In the 1960s, I was coming to terms with the controversy surrounding fresh historical arguments for the factual resurrection of Jesus Christ. Daniel Fuller’s Easter Faith and History was published in 1965. Wolfhart Pannenberg was making waves with his 1968 book Revelation as History, where he argued that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was a historical event as real as your getting out of bed t

Reformers like John Calvin quoted Augustine more than any other author outside Scripture. They celebrated, among other qualities, how he championed the truth that God saves sinners not on the basis of their works but by his grace.   When it came to the doctrine of justification by faith, however, the Reformers did not find the clarity they wanted in the great church father.  Augustine never offers a systematic treatment of the meaning of justification, and a careful reading of his works reveals ambiguities in his treatment of the doctrine.   Nevertheless, he speaks of justification mainly in terms of God making sinners righteous rather than declaring sinners righteou s. To the Reformers, then, his way of expressing the doctrine obscured, even if it did not deny, Christ’s righteousness as the sole ground of a sinner’s justification before God. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) championed the truth that God saves sinners not on the basis of their works, but by his grace alone. Even faith in G

If you are in Christ, you have been justified — eternally, irreversibly, gloriously. God has spoken his everlasting sentence over your soul. Through faith alone (Romans 5:1), on the basis of the death and life of Jesus Christ alone (Romans 5:9), you are not guilty, but righteous; not hell-bound, but heaven-bound; not condemned, but justified. You need no longer wonder what judgment day holds. Though men, devils, and a disordered conscience may accuse, there is therefore now no condemnation for you (Romans 8:1). Let your soul sigh with relief: you have been justified. And yet, surprising though it may sound, you also will be justified. As the apostle of justification himself writes, “Through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness” (Galatians 5:5) — a statement that seems to suggest some future dimension to the righteousness God reckons to us in Christ. In him, we have righteousness, and we hope for righteousness; we have been justified, and we will be justif

Pope Francis announced that after five hundred years, Protestants and Catholics now “have the opportunity to mend a critical moment of our history by moving beyond the controversies and disagreements that have often prevented us from understanding one another.” From that, it sounds as if the Reformation was an unfortunate and unnecessary squabble over trifles, a childish outburst that we can all put behind us now that we have grown up. But tell that to Martin Luther, who felt such liberation and joy at his rediscovery of justification by faith alone that he wrote, “I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.” Tell that to William Tyndale, who found it such “merry, glad and joyful tidings” that it made him “sing, dance, and leap for joy.” Tell it to Thomas Bilney, who found it gave him “a marvellous comfort and quietness, insomuch that my bruised bones leapt for joy.” Clearly, those first Reformers didn’t think they were picking a juvenile

The gospel of Jesus Christ is always at risk of distortion. It became distorted in the centuries leading up to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. It became distorted at innumerable other points of church history, and it is often distorted today. This is why Martin Luther said the gospel must be defended in every generation. It is the centre point of attack by the forces of evil. They know that if they can get rid of the gospel, they can get rid of Christianity. There are two sides to the gospel, the good news of the New Testament: an objective side and a subjective side . The objective content of the gospel is the person and work of Jesus—who He is and what He accomplished in His life. The subjective side is the question of how the benefits of Christ’s work are appropriated to the believer. There the doctrine of justification comes to the fore. Many issues were involved in the Reformation. But the core matter, the material issue of the Reformation, was the g

Galatians 2:15-16 – We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. This is one of the most significant sentences in the history of the world and the Spirit in Paul has a lot to say about something called “justification”. To be justified is to be declared righteous in the sight of God. To be justified is the opposite of being condemned. The word “justify” is so important to Paul that he uses it some eight times in Galatians and some fifteen times in Romans. The issue of justification is a complex one. God is a perfect Person. Heaven is a perfect Place. But we are not perfect. As sinners, how can we be in the presence of a perfect and holy God? Human history has, generally speaking, sought to resolve this p

In the twenty-first century, there are many challenges to the doctrine of justification. In one sense, I envy the sixteenth-century Reformers—John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Luther—because as challenging as it was to defend justification in their day, the challenge was still somewhat obvious and straightforward. They were facing Rome—the church of the day—and the Council of Trent, who then responded to their theology. On the other side, they were facing some sporadic attacks—perhaps from more radical reformers than themselves. In the twenty-first century, though, we not only continue to face the challenge that the Reformers had with the Roman Catholic Church but also a bigger task: It’s not just Rome, it’s not just a few radical reformers—there are many different groups out there that have a very different conception of what it means to be right with the holy God. We not only have to know what Scripture says but we have to be able to think theologically. One of them th

The words justification and sanctification have largely fallen out of use in Western culture. Both terms lie at the heart of the biblical gospel. So, what does the Bible teach about justification and sanctification? How do they differ from one another? How do they help us understand better the believer's relationship with Jesus Christ? Justification is as simple as A-B-C-D . Justification is an act of God. It does not describe the way that God inwardly renews and changes a person. It is, rather, a legal declaration in which God pardons the sinner of all his sins and accepts and accounts for the sinner as righteous in His sight. God declares the sinner righteous at the very moment that the sinner puts his trust in Jesus Christ (Rom. 3:21-26, 5:16; 2 Cor. 5:21). What is the basis of this legal verdict? God justifies the sinner solely on the basis of the obedience and death of His Son, our representative, Jesus Christ. Christ's perfect obedience and full satisfaction for sin a

The doctrine of justification , the storm-center of the Reformation , was for Paul the heart of the gospel ( Rom. 1: 17; 3:21-5: 21; Gal. 2:15-5:1 ), shaping his message (Acts 13:38, 39) and his devotion (2 Cor. 5:13-21 ; Phil. 3:4-14). Though other New Testament writers affirm the same doctrine in substance, the terms in which Protestants have affirmed and defended it for almost five centuries are drawn primarily from Paul. Justification is God 's act of pardoning sinners and accepting them as righteous for  Christ 's sake. In it, God puts permanently right their previously estranged relationship with Himself. This justifying sentence is God's bestowal of a status of acceptance for Jesus' sake (2 Cor. 5:21 ). God's justifying judgment seems strange, for pronouncing sinners righteous may appear to be precisely the kind of unjust action by a judge that God's own law forbids ( Deut. 25: 1; Provo 17:15). Yet it is a just judgment, for its basis is the righteo

For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. ROMAN 5:10 It is not repentance that saves me; repentance is the sign that I realise what God has done in Christ Jesus . The danger is to put the emphasis on the effect instead of on the cause — “It is my obedience that puts me right with God, my consecration.” Never! I am put right with God because prior to all, Christ died. When I turn to God and by belief accept what God reveals I can accept, instantly the stupendous Atonement of Jesus Christ rushes me into a right relationship with God, and by the supernatural miracle of God’s grace I stand justified, not because I am sorry for my sin, not because I have repented, but because of what Jesus has done. The spirit of God brings it with a breaking, all-over light, and I know, though I do not know how, that I am saved. The salvation of God does not stand on human logic, it stands on the sac

This year, many people are celebrating the five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation . But not everyone is. Some have raised severe criticisms against the Reformers and their work. The Reformers, they allege, replaced the authority of the church with the authority of the autonomous individual. Moreover, the doctrine of justification by faith alone , these critics claim, cut the nerve of morality and, effectively, baptized licentious living. Martin Luther and John Calvin , they continue, opened Pandora’s box, releasing two forces that not only rent the church but also went on to define the modern age: radical individualism and antinomianism. Understood on these terms, the Reformation is cause for lamentation, not celebration. These criticisms rest on a profound misunderstanding of the Reformation and, specifically, a misunderstanding of two of the leading doctrines of the Reformation: sola scriptura ( Scripture alone ) and sola fide (faith alone). What were the