Dr Paul Allen

Those born in the baby boomer generation are entering the longest phase of elderhood in history, full of potential but also fraught with challenges My friend Jeremy’s father has always taken pride in doing things himself. When Jeremy (whose name I have changed for his privacy) was a kid, he watched his dad, an architect, painstakingly renovate their entire family home – ripping up floorboards and laying tile. Today, Jeremy’s dad still insists on climbing up a ladder to clean out the gutters; he wants to fell deadwood with a pruning saw and move heavy furniture around the basement. But now 80 and living with Parkinson’s disease, his drive comes with higher stakes, every strenuous task increasing his risk of preventable harm. “My dad doesn’t know anything else,” Jeremy says. “He’s always been the person who fixes the hole in the roof.” Now he does it in spite of family members desperately trying to convince him to let them do it instead or pass those responsibilities to hired help. Being...

A few years ago, I received this unexpected request from one of my church members with multiple sclerosis: “When you have time, could you please do a Bible study on how to prepare for death?”  This person knew that her condition was incurable, and although death still seemed a reasonably long way off, she was anxious to receive advice on how to face it. I was taken aback by that request, but I should not have been.  This was a very sensible idea.  Why wouldn’t every church member be interested in such a Bible study? Yet, I could not remember when I preached or heard a sermon on that topic. The Bible is very upfront about the reality of death but also very clear that it is possible to die well.  It is perhaps significant that one of the best-known Hebrew words in the Old Testament, the word shalom, which we associate with peace and well-being, first appears in the context of death (Gen. 15:15). Knowing how we may die “in peace” should be an essential concern for us al...

In C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the character Mark describes his life as “the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places.” Along with his wife, Mark functions as a personification of modernity, and his beliefs represent many secular people today. Yet through the events of the plot, Mark becomes awakened to transcendence. While imprisoned and subjected to psychological torture, he has a profound moral experience: There rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked, some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else—something he vaguely called the “Normal”—apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was—solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. In m...

Some people have pointed to two texts that may shed light on the age of Jesus at the time of his baptism. We are told in Luke 3:23 that Jesus “was about thirty years old” when he began his public ministry. Some have suggested that perhaps Luke used the round number thirty in order to draw a parallel between Jesus and David, whose kingship began at that age (2 Sam. 5:3–4; cf. also Joseph in Gen. 41:46 and Ezekiel in Ezek. 1:1). In John 8:57 we read that the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Stein points out that “this should not be taken as an exact reference by Jesus’ opponents to his actual age. The statement seeks rather to emphasize the difference between Jesus’ age and the time of Abraham more than fifteen centuries earlier. How could Jesus and Abraham have known each other, as Jesus claimed (Jn. 8:56)? Fifty years is most probably a generous exaggeration of Jesus’ age for the sake of argument. Even if Jesus was attributed an age old...