Dr Paul Allen

Haman Begging the Mercy of Esther, by Rembrandt (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Jesus speaks of himself saying, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth”(Matt 12:40). But Jesus was not in the tomb three days and three nights? If you were a 1st century Jew and heard someone utter the phrase “three days and three nights” you would never expect precisely seventy-two hours. Remember that you would have no wrist-mounted method of measuring hours after sunset anyway. The correct way to interpret Scripture is to employ the historical-grammatical hermeneutic. That just means we interpret the Bible by understanding the language the Bible writers used in their own historical context. Two thousand years from now sociologists will examine flat screen relics from the 21st century and will ponder why people all over the Western world referred to Saturday and Sunday...

While busyness is categorically the norm for the vast majority of people in the Western world , the solution is never about having more time. We know this, but still we forget such an essential truth. People often say to me (and I’m guilty of saying it as well), “I wish there were more hours in the day; if only I had more time!” And why do we want more time? What would we do with it? We want more time to do the important things that aren’t getting done. This list might include time to rest, time to spend with God , or simply time to enjoy our families and loved ones. But let’s be honest with ourselves. What if God suddenly said, “I’m giving you one extra hour a day? You now have twenty-five hours in a day?” Or better yet, what if he decided to give us an eighth day of the week — which amounts to over three extra hours each day? How would you spend that time? Would you use it for an afternoon nap or to get caught up on last month’s expense report at the office? Would you use it for a...

Image via Wikipedia I have just ordered my copy of "The Unintended Reformation: How a religious revolution secularized society" by Brad Gregory. Before the Protestant Reformation , Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West .  Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief ; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile lib...

Image via Wikipedia For years, the entertainment industry has laughed off warnings from Christians and others about the link between depictions of sex, violence, and nihilism in the media and what happens in the real world. They dismiss critics like you and me by saying young people make their own choices and can clearly distinguish between what they see on screen with what goes on in their own lives. But common sense, experience, and studies show this isn’t necessarily the case. For instance, news outlets for years have voluntarily adhered to strict reporting standards concerning suicide, because the evidence of copycat suicides is so clear and uncontroversial. One academic stu dy spoke of “the need to actively restrain reporting of suicides to decrease the imitation effect.” Well, what about when suicide is dramatized on television or the silver screen? Here, the evidence has been less clear, but according to a new report by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of ...

When an institution so central to human experience suddenly changes shape in the space of a generation or two, it’s worth trying to figure out why.” Belinda Luscombe of  TIME  magazine made that observation in the course of reporting on a major study of marriage undertaken by  TIME  and the Pew Research Center .  In the cover story for the magazine’s November 29, 2010 edition, Luscombe summarizes their findings with a blunt statement: “What we found is that marriage, whatever its social, spiritual, or symbolic appeal, is in purely practical terms just not as necessary as it used to be.” Without doubt, marriage has been utterly transformed in the modern world. In Western nations , the concept of marriage as a sacred covenant has given way to the idea that marriage is merely a legal contract. The limitation of sexual intercourse to marriage went the way of the Sexual Revolution , even as the ideal of permanence gave way to no-fault divorce and serial monogamy . An...

When an institution so central to human experience suddenly changes shape in the space of a generation or two, it’s worth trying to figure out why.” Belinda Luscombe of  TIME  magazine made that observation in the course of reporting on a major study of marriage undertaken by  TIME  and the Pew Research Center .  In the cover story for the magazine’s November 29, 2010 edition, Luscombe summarizes their findings with a blunt statement: “What we found is that marriage, whatever its social, spiritual, or symbolic appeal, is in purely practical terms just not as necessary as it used to be.” Without doubt, marriage has been utterly transformed in the modern world. In Western nations , the concept of marriage as a sacred covenant has given way to the idea that marriage is merely a legal contract. The limitation of sexual intercourse to marriage went the way of the Sexual Revolution , even as the ideal of permanence gave way to no-fault divorce and serial monogamy . An...