Dr Paul Allen

“Without the Spirit we can neither love God, nor keep His commandments.”   The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is like any other mainline doctrine, both saturated with variety and overflowing with controversies. The Holy Spirit, being God, makes a rather unruly subject matter in that He is too incomprehensibly vast for us to tackle with full authority, especially in the brevity of this paper. As Clark Pinnock writes, In fact, of the themes of theology, the Spirit may be the most elusive of all. How does one speak at all of the power that enables us to know God? How can one put the Spirit-breath into a conceptual bottle? Yet, the graciously given presence of the Spirit is surely the most wonderful thing one experiences and that which brings God unspeakably close.  Yet scripture provides both a reasonable description of what the Holy Spirit’s interaction with His creation is, and what we might have as a standard expectation for our own understanding and teaching.  Regardin...

What was the ark of the covenant? You’ve heard of it. You’ve read of it. Maybe you even saw it in Raiders of the Lost  Ark,  but  what was it really? What did it look like? And why was it so important? In the desert, after the Exodus from Egypt, the Lord told Moses to make a ceremonial ark or aron – a wooden chest – as a sign of the covenant made at Mount Sinai.[1] The ark was made of acacia wood—a box within a box within a box—a metre long, and overlaid with gold.[2] On top was a solid-gold cover called the kapporet , where two golden keruvim or ‘cherubim’ faced each other, wing-tips touching. WHAT IS A KERUV? The keruv or cherub is a being whose general type is well known to us from ancient eastern iconography. It was not a winged man; much less a little flying putto or baby boy . Rather it was a being combining human characteristics with those of fierce animals and birds, and representing a solar or stellar deity. The best-known example is the great man-headed lion t...