Dr Paul Allen

English: Stained glass window in St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne, depicting a scene from the Book of Acts with St. Paul, Porcius Festus, Agrippa and Berenice (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Do you attend the perfect church? No? Well, me neither. It’s definitely not news that Christians generally think  their  church isn’t exactly the model of the perfect church.  Everyone recognizes that there are a plethora of problems with their church, and for each problem there is a biblical solution that is both difficult and time consuming to implement, since churches are filled with people and every denomination has a joke about how many of their ilk it takes to “change a light bulb”. But, there’s one generic answer that always comes up and always sounds super spiritual: We need to be like the church in Acts! It seems like “getting back to Acts” is the standard generic answer for every question about church problems, church growth, church polity, etc.  It’...

St Paul's Cathedral (Photo credit: J.Salmoral ) There are four reasons why I think Hebrews should be left in anonymity: No one signed it. 1. Paul begins all thirteen of his letters with the same word — “Paul.” Every time . Without exception. Hebrews is the exception you say? This is possible, but I find it even more noteworthy that Paul explicitly states that he wrote all of his letters in the same way, so as to weed out any impostors ( 2 Thes. 3:17). If Paul wrote Hebrews, it seems likely that the evidence from the early church would be as overwhelming as it is for his other letters, but alas, it is not. In fact, some argue that Pauline authorship was only ascribed to Hebrews to make sure it was included in the canon of Scripture (It was not included in the Muratorion canon, 170 A.D.). 2. Hebrews 2:3-4 is inconsistent with Paul’s apostolic argumentation. The author of Hebrews places himself apart from those who received the gospel directly from Jesus and does not i...

English: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. Česky: Jákob zápasící s andělem. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Judges 2:1-5. Yahweh speaks because the people inquired of him (1:1, which we shall call oracular divine speech ). But now Yahweh speaks, via his intermediary, on his own initiative (which we shall call non-oracular divine speech, and which occurs again in Judges only in 2:20–21; 6:7–10; 10:11–14). As with other passages of Scripture, Yahweh and his angel/messenger are interchangeable: “Now the angel of the Lord … said, ‘I brought you up from Egypt .’ ” Compare, for example, the story of the angel/messenger finding Hagar in the wilderness (Gen. 16:7), the conversation that follows between the two (Gen. 16:8–12), and Hagar’s words, “So she named the Lord who spoke to her” (Gen. 16:13). Here is a case where God himself appeared in the form of a human being, one who could be seen by a mortal. One instance of oscillation between Yahweh and his angel/intermediary that includes an a...