Dr Paul Allen

One of the earliest challenges to the commonly recognized collection of books that the churches used as Scripture came from a man named Marcion. He was a wealthy and prominent church leader who lived in the early second century AD in a coastal in of northern Asia Minor (today this is in the country of Turkey). He was passionate about the writings of the apostle Paul but had a very skewed idea of what they taught. Ultimately, he advocated that only ten letters of the apostle Paul should be accepted as Scripture as well as the Gospel of Luke; all other Scriptures should be rejected (including the Old Testament). Because of his wealth and influence, the churches of the Mediterranean world had to respond. This challenge became a huge motivation for the churches to declare formally and publicly what books they had already been using as Scripture. The Early Church’s Recognition of God’s Word So, as early as the second century AD, the church began developing the concept of the cano...

Christians have often been troubled by the question, How do we rightly read the Old Testament? Thankfully, the book of Hebrews provides us with important directions on how to interpret the Old Testament rightly, now that Christ has fulfilled all things. However, the history of theology and the history of the church demonstrate that there are disastrously wrong ways to read the Old Testament. The first major error made in approaching the Old Testament comes down to reading it as if it is a book that does not belong to the church.  This way of reading the Bible assumes that the Old Testament belongs to the Jews, whereas the New Testament belongs to the church. Sometimes the way we describe our congregations can unintentionally lend to this type of understanding. For example, Protestants are very concerned about ordering their church life so that they are legitimately a “New Testament church.”  By this, we mean that we are seeking to follow the ecclesiology modeled ...

The heat was on. The Smyrna police hunted for Polycarp , the revered bishop of that city. Already they had put other Christians to death in the arena; now a mob cried for the leader. Polycarp had left the city and was hiding out at the farm of some friends. As the soldiers moved in, he fled to another farm. Though the aged churchman felt no fear of death and had wanted to stay in the city, his friends had urged him to hide, perhaps fearing that his death would demoralize the church. If so, they were quite wrong. When the police reached the first farm, they tortured a slave boy to learn Polycarp’s whereabouts. Then they rushed, fully armed, to apprehend the bishop. Though Polycarp had time to escape, he refused. “God’s will be done,” he resolved. Instead, he welcomed his captors as guests, offered them food and asked for an hour alone to pray. He took two hours. Some of the captors seemed sorry to be arresting such a nice old man . On the way back to Smyrna, the police chief ...