Dr Paul Allen

I had a friend who served as a pastor, and he was very religious. He had so many rules! One day he told me, “I don’t think Christians should be involved in anything with a pagan origin.” He wanted to argue about Christmas, Easter, and Halloween.  I surprised him when I responded, “What kind of car do you drive?” (I already knew the answer). He said, “I drive a Volkswagen.” I replied, “Do you know that Adolf Hitler invented the Volkswagen? He created a cult called Nazi Germany, and he was worshipped as a demonic counterfeit of Jesus and a false God. He was a mass murderer, and not only was he probably demon-possessed, but he was likely Satan-possessed as well. You need to get rid of your car.”  Much of our engineering in the Western world comes from Germany, specifically during the Nazi era.  If you genuinely believe you should never associate with anything of a pagan origin, you can never drive a Volkswagen again. On the other hand, you could redeem them—you could drive ...

Devil or fool? Several churches in Germany have stained-glass windows portraying Adolf Hitler. Who were the artists and what are the artworks all about?  Weil der Stadt is a town of about 20,000 people in southwestern Germany, west of Stuttgart. At the Catholic church of St. Peter and Paul, pastor Anton Gruber has been welcoming his congregation as well as many curious visitors for the past 11 years. Some people stop by the church because it is right on a popular bike path, while others have come to peer at one particular stained-glass window. They often say "the features of Hitler are recognizable," Gruber told DW. "Most people are simply curious, no more and no less," the clergyman says about the pane that dates from 1939/40. Personified evil It is part of a larger window of nine panels depicting scenes from the life of Jesus. The pane on the far upper right depicts temptation, with the devil testing Jesus' faith — and the artist JoKarl Huber has clearly given...

English: Lucas Cranach the Elder: Law and Grace, Gotha version, 1529, Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha, Germany (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) There's been a bit of a hubbub of late on God's law . Which is odd, isn't it, since neither it, nor He has changed in some time. It is true enough that there are plenty of ways to get His law wrong. Just ask Paul. But here are five positive things about the law that I am positive about. 1. It restrains evil .  I find myself often frustrated at our overly polite assessment of the human condition. We relegate monsters to history, like the Nazi 's, or to the fringes, like serial killers, all to keep the monster at bay. But we have met the monster, and we are them. We're the kind of people who get more upset at being cut off in traffic than the horrible truth that our neighbors are cutting their babies to pieces down the street. I am ever eager to get us to a deeper understanding of how bad we are. But, I also want us to ...

Christology is by nature bound up with the doctrine of _________ ? This sentence comes from lectures given by Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the University of Berlin in 1932. After that year, the Nazis would rise to power in Germany. Bonhoeffer would lose his license to teach and eventually become the director of one of five underground seminaries to serve the Confessing Church —a church that rose up against the German Lutheran Church , which had embraced and endorsed the Nazi party . Now back to the quiz. Here's Bonhoeffer's answer: "Christology is by nature bound up with the doctrine of justification." This sentence comes from his lectures on twentieth-century systematic theology. He began the last lecture, which he entitled, "Preaching," with a simple but urgent and ultimate question, "What should we preach?" We must preach Christ , he declares. Preaching Christ means nothing other than preaching the gospel. Preaching the gospel means, and only can ...