Dr Paul Allen

Rev. Jonathan Edwards, a leader of the Great Awakening, is still remembered for his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Why is God so eager to pour his eternal blessing on simple people like you and me? It’s a question too many of us don’t ask at all. Life often seems hard and bleak and stressful, and we grow blind to God’s present blessings and the cause for future hopes. God’s people, stuck in Babylonian exile , could relate. Their precious city, Jerusalem , was now a heap of smashed stones. Their temple, burned and trashed ( Isaiah 64:11–12). In the rubble, the hopes and dreams of God’s exiled people probably never got much higher above imagining a return home for a chance to rebuild and restore their home. Isaiah 60 But into the crumbled-down world of God’s covenant people, Isaiah 60 paints a stunning picture of God’s promises and future blessing. Where God’s exiled people may have simply been happy with new walls around old J...

Rev. Jonathan Edwards, a leader of the Great Awakening, is still remembered for his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In the 1730s and 40s, New England and others of the colonies were in the midst of that great dispensation of God ’s grace that we call The Great Awakening . Through the itinerant preaching of George Whitefield and the theological ministry of Jonathan Edwards , large numbers were coming under the conviction of sin and turning to God in repentance and faith in Christ . Yet in the thick of these revivals many of those who professed Christ would be so caught up with themselves emotionally that the display of “affections” became to be the marker of spiritual maturity. If you were powerfully affected by the truth of spiritual things, you could be assured that your state before God was acceptable. In response to this, others began to become suspicious of such displays of religious affections , recognizing that they can b...

English: Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University. Photo by C. Szabla. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Universities sprang up in Medieval Christendom. Nothing like them had been seen in history, for not only did they concentrate teachers, they embraced the idea of set coursework whose requirements must be fulfilled before a specific degree was awarded. Students were periodically tested before being certified in their chosen subjects. Universities were modeled on guilds which trained and rated apprentices and journeymen and gathered members for mutual protection. The Christian ideal often tends to clump people together for mutual support in a body. Puritans, many of them university educated in England , brought the idea of a university to New England . "After God had carried us safe to New England, and wee had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, rear'd convenient places for Gods worship and setled the Civill Government: One of the next things we longed f...

Image via Wikipedia How did America's great Christian colleges come to abandon their faith and become the secular institutions they are today? When Harvard College was founded by the Puritans in 1636, they knew well what they wanted from their school. "Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life, John 17:3, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all found knowledge and Learning..." The great school was intended to produce a godly clergy. In less than a hundred years, that high ideal faltered. Liberals won control of the school.  On this day, January 24, 1722,  they appointed Edward Wigglesworth to fill the newly created Thomas Hollis chair at Harvard College. This made Mr. Wigglesworth the first divinity professor commissioned in the American colonies, but what should have been cause for rejoicing was actually...