Dr Paul Allen

It started with a hijab during Advent, and ends with a foundational lesson in the Trinity. Larycia Hawkins, a professor of Politics and International Relations at Wheaton, decided to wear a hijab to her classes. She explained on Facebook that she did this as part of her “advent worship” in order to demonstrate that she: “Stand[s] solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” In addition to her strange identification of Christians as “people of the book” (which is an Islamic category), her expression of solidarity with Muslims was poorly timed, to say the least. For many Middle Eastern Christians, the hijab represents the brutal oppression of women by Muslims. Moreover, in much of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Libya, this was the first Christmas season in 2000 years without Christians to celebrate it. Islamic terrorists (who require women to wear a hijab by law) have essentially eliminat...

John Piper - take one (Photo credit: Micah_68 ) Here are some other resources: Richard Baxter, “The Right Method for a Settled Peace of Conscience and Spiritual Comfort,” in  The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter  (23 vols.; London: Duncan, 1830), 9:1–287. Andy Farmer, “Peace and Anxiety,” ch. 5 in  Real Peace: What We Long for and Where to Find It  (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 79–93. Robert W. Kellemen,  Anxiety: Anatomy and Cure  (The Gospel for Real Life; Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2012). 42 pp. John MacArthur,  Anxiety Attacked  (Wheaton: Victor, 1993). Wayne A. Mack and Joshua Mack,  Courage: Fighting Fear with Fear  (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2002). J. P. Moreland and Klaus Issler, “Defeating Two Hardships of Life: Anxiety and Depression,” ch. 7 in  The Lost Virtue of Happiness: Discovering the Disciplines of the Good Life  (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2006),...

Cover of Basic Christianity The love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized. I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God—to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity . There is a powerful tendency “to present God through characterizations of his inner states, with an emphasis on his emotions, which closely resemble those of human beings.…God is more likely to ‘feel’ than to ‘act,’ to ‘think’ than to ‘say.’ With such sentimentalizing of God multiplying in churches, it does not take much to see how difficult maintaining a biblical doctrine of the love of God can be. Some elements of the larger and still developing patterns of postmoderni...