Dr Paul Allen

THE WALLS OF JERICHO So the people shouted when the priests blew the trumpets. And it happened when the people heard the trumpet sound, and the people shouted with a great shout that the wall fell flat. Then the people went into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.  Joshua 6:20 It is one of the most dramatic events chronicled in the Old Testament, but for generations, scholars have debated whether the Israelites’ assault on Jericho was fact or myth. Over the past three decades, the consensus has gone against the biblical version. The late British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon established in the 1950s that while the ancient city was indeed destroyed, it happened around 1550 B.C., some 150 years before Joshua could have shown up. However, archaeologist Bryant Wood, who wrote in the March/April issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, claims that Kenyon was wrong. Based on a re-evaluation of her research, published in detail only recently, Wood says that the city’

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

John Oates This is a follow-up to a question about supposed contradictions in Mark 16 about Mary Magdalene and the resurrection accounts. I establish that all the gospels agree Mary Magdalene was the first to see that the resurrection had happened.) I agree that every account aside from the Mark account states that Mary M was one of the first, if not the first, to see the empty tomb. However, the scribe that writes the ending of Mark states that she was the first to see Jesus, whereas if you read the other gospels, it seems highly unlikely that she was the first to see Jesus. In John, she is one of the first women to see the empty tomb, so she runs to Peter and the rest of the disciples and tells them that the body is not there and she doesn’t know where it’s at.  Luke states that all the women, including Mary M, told the disciples that the tomb was empty. And in Matthew says that as the women were running back, they saw Jesus.  I assume that the women who were running back don’t inclu

John Piper Decades of Controversies Here’s part of the glimpse I gave them into my fifty-year history of dealing with unexpected issues. But let me say at the outset that I won’t focus on race and abortion as one of those issues because they’re pervasive.  For the last decades of my life, I have lived every decade with issues of race that need to be addressed and issues of abortion that need to be addressed. So, understand that those are huge issues, and the fact that I don’t mention them in the list doesn’t mean they’re absent. It means they’re everywhere. The 1960s: History and Criticism In the 1960s, I was coming to terms with the controversy surrounding fresh historical arguments for the factual resurrection of Jesus Christ. Daniel Fuller’s Easter Faith and History was published in 1965. Wolfhart Pannenberg was making waves with his 1968 book Revelation as History, where he argued that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was a historical event as real as your getting out of bed t

The sick love of controversy — or the “unhealthy craving for controversy,” as Paul calls it in 1 Timothy 6:4 . The question is from a podcast listener named Brett. “Pastor John, hello! We live in an age of controversy. And that controversy-loving spirit has come into the church.  The Apostle Paul clearly warns us against people in the church who have a ‘diseased’ (nosōn) or ‘unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.’ That’s 1 Timothy 6:4–5 . I wonder if you can lay out principles for what this ‘diseased craving for controversy’ looks like in the church today.” I’ll try to do that in just a moment — namely, lay out some principles to try to avoid what Paul’s denouncing in these verses. But first, let me say a word about what Brett calls our “age of controversy.” He’s right, of c

When we consider this Baptist giant, when we read his stirring sermons, when we remember that his life’s work rivalled that of one hundred men, when we read of the revival and the winning of countless souls to Christ, we can imagine the Prince of Preachers encountering little but unbroken success. Compared with so many of our ministries, he seemed to soar high in the clouds. We rarely consider, as Iain Murray contends, The Forgotten Spurgeon — the Spurgeon who needed Matthew 5:11–12 hanging on his wall. Forgotten Prince The forgotten Spurgeon stood among the tornadoes of several great controversies in his day. His protestation against Arminianism, his disgust at baptismal regeneration, and his resistance to an evangelical unity founded upon fragments of Christian doctrine (known as the Downgrade Controversy) made him the target for many arrows. This Spurgeon, especially at the beginning and end of his ministry, had reason to reckon himself as “the scum of the earth” (24–25).

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