Dr Paul Allen

Christians, non-Christians, and people of no faith are now particularly mindful of the possibility that the forms of living we have grown accustomed to may very soon come to an end, whether by runaway climate change or another virulent plague, or extreme acts of violence.  For so many, normal life, or whatever once passed for it, now appears irretrievably lost. To be fair, extreme dislocations of this kind are nothing new to human history. But there is something new within our peculiarly combustible cocktail of catastrophes.  We see it in the increasingly violent rhetoric and action taking over once-stable democracies, the frustration and desperation that grips even the most peaceful and hopeful social movements, and the chronic despair of a young generation who has given up on the idea that society will ever work for them.  There is, in all these things, a sense of hopelessness. It pervades all levels of society, from the highest institutions to the simplest human intera...

The Bible is a book about reality. And reality, as we know all too well, is often brutal and bloody. The Bible doesn’t sugarcoat this fact at all but describes reality with disturbing forthrightness. Much of Scripture was written during brutal, bloody times by embattled, distressed, weary, even depressed authors. And at the pinnacle of the Bible’s story, at the core of the Bible’s message, is the Son of God dying a bloody death on a brutal Roman cross. So, when we open our Bibles, rarely are we going to find a little light reading. Even in the book of Psalms, this collection of inspired spiritual poetry that has brought immeasurable comfort to an incalculable number of saints across the centuries, we are frequently faced with distressing themes. In numerous psalms, we read writers’ wrestlings over what it means to trust the God they treasure as they witness some brutal and bloody reality, a reality that challenges their understanding or expectations of God’s promises and purposes. Thes...