Dr Paul Allen

I’ve sometimes asked my students what comes to mind when they hear the phrase “The God of the Old Testament.” Words like wrath, anger, violence, judgement, and even hate are often shared.  To be sure, some also associate God with mercy and salvation, but the imbalance toward the “negative” attributes is telling. This image of an angry and violent God features prominently in the intro to Christianity Today’s podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, where Mark Driscoll expresses his desire to “go Old Testament” on a few members of his church—an overt reference to violence.  Many would baulk at the idea of equating the Old Testament with violence. But what of the many texts that show God acting violently or commending violence within Israel? Isn’t the idea of God drowning 99.999% of his creatures in the Flood, or commanding the destruction of the Canaanites, inimical to the teachings of Jesus? The rush to resolve this perceived disconnect between the violence of God in the Old Tes...

A young adult ministry leader from a Texas megachurch recently shared five ways believers can battle against the temptation of “secret” sexual sins, such as porn, lust, and masturbation.  JD Rodgers of Watermark Community Church in Dallas, Texas, who serves as the young adults' creative director of The Porch Ministry, warned a primarily young adult audience about the perils of sexual freedom, labeling it “one of the biggest rip-offs or scams that the world sells us.”  In a sermon titled “Battling Sexual Sin,” Rodgers began by reminding the audience that they were instructed in last week’s sermon to write on a card the thing that makes them most shameful and to submit it to the ministry. Rodgers recalled how when The Porch leaders reviewed the "thousands upon thousands" of cards, a lot of them mentioned struggles with lust, pornography addiction, homosexuality and "past sexual perversion."  He then listed five steps that all start with the letter “R” that young a...

One of the most difficult episodes for us to handle as people who live on this side of the New Testament are the Old Testament records of what is called the herem . This is where God calls Israel to embark in what we could call a holy war against the Canaanites . He tells them to go in there and wipe out everyone—men, women, and children. They were forbidden to take prisoners and were to utterly destroy and put the ban, or curse, upon this land before they occupied it for themselves. When we look at that, we shrink in horror at the degree of violence that is not only tolerated but seemingly commanded by God in that circumstance. Critical scholars in the twentieth century have pointed to that kind of story in the Old Testament as a clear example that this couldn’t be the revealed Word of God. They say that this is the case where some bloodthirsty, ancient, seminomadic Hebrews tried to appeal to their deity to sanction their violent acts and that we have to reject that as not be...