Dr Paul Allen

In his recent essay, Tim Keller has entered his bit into a persistent dialogue regarding how Christians should speak in public. The players in this dialogue, including James Wood, Aaron Renn, and Simon Kennedy, are working to determine how Christians should speak outside the church. At odds is not sermonic form or structure, but what it should sound like when Christians are called to “give an answer” (1 Peter 3:5). Keep in mind that the content of the answer is, for the most part, not up for debate. “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor 1:23), they all say. But the authors of this piece are not so sure. Keller has settled on account of “persuasion” as the form Christian speech should take in the negative world. Though we are no more satisfied with Wood’s account of a more confrontational approach, Keller’s account of persuasion falls flat in the negative world. Indeed at the heart of persuasion, what should be called apologetics, is a functional agreement between the speaker and the audi...

Watching David Koch skewer evangelical pastor Guy Mason on Australia’s morning show Sunrise was an excruciating experience.[1] Andrew Thorburn had been dismissed for his association with the City on a Hill church just a couple of days after being appointed chief executive of a professional Australian football club.  The reason given was that the church held to traditional Christian positions on abortion and homosexuality. These beliefs were now declared beyond the pale for someone prominent in Australian public life. Thorburn would not discuss his beliefs with the media, so Sunrise invited the pastor of Thorburn’s church, Guy Mason, to be interviewed instead. I could not be more sympathetic to Mason because I have been through many media interviews and you always, always come home thinking of things you should have said. It is easy for the rest of us to watch the recording and imagine from the tranquillity of our easy chairs better responses to the interviewer. I am more interested...

I asked the cofounder of The Gospel Coalition why forgiving is so hard, whether it undermines justice, what lessons he’s learned from his marriage to Kathy, and more. (You can also listen to Keller’s Gospelbound interview.) How does our therapeutic age make forgiveness more difficult? It changes the motive. The therapeutic reason for forgiveness is self-interest and self-actualization. You do it strictly for your own mental health, your own “freedom,” and your own peace of mind. Now, true Christian forgiveness can bring you all those things—but as by-products. The ground motive of biblical forgiveness is, first, to honour God—to forgive as he has forgiven you—and, second, to bring about change for the common good. You should want the wrongdoer to repent for his or her sake, for God’s sake, and for the sake of possible future victims. The therapeutic motive of self-interest won’t really work. If forgiveness is all about making you happier—well, lots of people find that nursing a grudge ...