Dr Paul Allen

IRENAEUS (C. AD 130–202) Some might express surprise at Irenaeus's choice. He is best known for writing Against Heresies, a work that relentlessly dismantles early Gnosticism. Granted, the first two books of this lengthy work are often tedious because they recount and describe all the gnostic myths and errors. Sadly, however, many readers have failed to reach books 3–5 because they gave up before getting to these sections of the works. James Payton has done every student of the early church a favour by editing a condensed version of Against Heresies under the title Irenaeus on the Christian Faith. This work allows readers to focus on books 3–5, where Irenaeus provides a positive exposition of Christian teaching. ANTHANASIUS (c. ad 296 -373 Athanasius is one of the most significant fathers of the early church, primarily because of his contribution to the Trinitarian debates and his refutation of various forms of Arianism. His defenceIncarnation of orthodoxy led to his being exiled m...

Godly Leaders and Fallen Leaders In today's episode, David Mathis discusses the topic of spiritual authority—what it is, who has it, and how we should respond when that authority is abused. Matt Tully You open your book by noting something that I’m sure many of our listeners have noticed themselves—maybe they even feel it themselves—and it’s that we live in an age that is increasingly cynical and sceptical about the idea of leadership. You say that some of that cynicism is for good reasons, and some of it has maybe more to do with just the mood of our times. So I’d love for you to unpack both of those things for us, maybe starting with the good reasons. What are some of the good reasons for our ambivalence about leadership today? David Mathis Matt, you know we got access to a lot of stories these days through social media, through our various media, and the tide has changed on if there’s a bad leader story, whether the social pressure is to suppress it or whether the social pressur...

In this article, we’re going to take the long film reel of the church’s history since the apostles and zoom in on four key scenes that illumine the whole film. We will look at the early church first, at the great Augustine second, at the Reformers third, and finally at two giants in modern theology. Scene 1: The Early Church Let’s start in the first centuries after the apostles, where perhaps the dominating issue was this question: Who exactly is Jesus? The orthodox church had to fight for the truth that Jesus is truly God — and that he truly became human. And that was a fight for the fact that we truly see the glory of God in the face of Christ — and that his birth is good news of great joy. Truly Human Consider, first, the fight to uphold Jesus’s true humanity. In the early days after the New Testament, there were some who just could not believe that God himself could have become truly human. So they dismissed the very possibility and said that Christ must only have seemed ...