Dr Paul Allen

A little over ten years ago, the book "The Shack" became an unexpected bestseller, sparking debate and garnering appreciation from across the evangelical landscape. Although the author originally wrote the book for his children and had it copied at Kinko’s, it reached number one on the New York Times fiction best-seller list after its release. In 2017, a major motion picture based on the book returned to the top spot once again. The themes of the book are heavy, at times harrowing, and inescapably theological, though they are presented in such a way that the reader can forget it is indeed a work of theology. The theological themes touched on include the character of the church, the problem of evil (theodicy), the nature of revelation, the depiction of God, and our understanding of the Trinity. I want to speak to an element of this last theme because the novel assumes something we are all tempted to assume: in reference to God, ”Father” is ultimately a metaphor and, as such, c...

Five years ago, the Oxford City Council in England cancelled me from giving an academic lecture on transgenderism, complaining that it breached the city’s diversity policy. The organizers had timed my address to coincide with Oxford University’s Hilary Term so students could attend; at my lecture, they would hear an alternative to the dogmas of intersectionality they usually encounter in university courses. My lecture was titled: “Feminism Was Women’s Great Enemy — Until Transgenderism Came Along.” That alone was guaranteed to trigger feminists and transgender people in the city of dreaming spires. So, last week, when I saw that Paris City Hall had cancelled two feminists for their book Transmania: enquête sur les dérives de l’idéologie transgenre (Transmania: An Investigation into the Abuses of Transgender Ideology), I felt a rare sense of solidarity with the sisterhood and asked the authors to send me a copy of their 400-page bombshell book. The Kafkaesque World of Transmania Transge...

IS GOD A MALE? If I were to guess, I’d say many Christians’ vision of God the Father is a grandfatherly figure with a beard who lives in the sky. Or maybe he has a deep, soothing voice like Morgan Freeman. We remember that God the Father sent his Son to the earth. Jesus the Son was born as a Jewish man. All these “pictures” of God make us think, maybe implicitly, that God is male or he privileges males. Maybe Christianity even has a masculine feel that tends to exclude females. Amy Peeler, professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, argues in her new book Women and the Gender of God that God is not male. And she argues even more––God doesn’t have certain “male qualities.” Peeler affirms that while orthodox Christians have sustained God is beyond gender, his “maleness has always existed alongside its denial,” creating what some have called a “masculine feel” to Christianity (3). Considering the Incarnation Peeler begins with a discussion of God as male. God isn’t sexualized even in t...

Eva was in a church luncheon when she got an email from her 12-year-old daughter Grace. (Their names have been changed.) “Mom and Dad, I need to tell you I’m not actually a girl,” she read. “My pronouns are they/them.” Eva couldn’t breathe. She felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She hadn’t seen this coming—in fact, a few months before, Grace had shared on social media her belief that God created people male and female. Back then, Eva was sure that statement was going to earn Grace—who attended a progressive public school—some social problems. Instead, it seemed to blow over right away. “I would’ve gotten bullied,” said Grace, who is now 16. “Instead, they decided to reeducate me. I got invited to groups where all they wanted to talk about was the transgender stuff. Over the course of a few months, I decided I was going to be an agender. And then I ended up deciding I was a boy.” Grace was experiencing what is often called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” in which friendship groups...

The recent refusal of now-confirmed Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to answer the question, “what is a woman?” is just one symptom that is part of a much larger disease infecting our society. In the same way, I tell men who struggle with a porn addiction that porn isn’t their true problem, the what is a woman/transgender debate is just one small manifestation of a bigger thing.    At its root, the foundational ailment producing our multiple higher-level maladies is a rejection of God and His true reality for one that is a self-created and false actuality. The willful king of the bedroom Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes our current situation as a battle between the mimesis and poiesis worldviews. The first sees reality as having a purposeful order and design (teleology), which provides meaning and thus sees humans as needing to discover that meaning and conform to it. The second sees the world as nothing more than undirected raw material out of which st...

One of the hottest controversies today about God concerns the traditional exclusive use of the pronoun he. Nearly all Christians admit that (1) God is not literally male, since he has no biological body, and (2) women are not essentially inferior to men. Those are red herrings. There are, however, two reasons for defending the exclusive use of masculine pronouns and imagery for God. One issue is whether we have the authority to change the names of God used by Christ, the Bible, and the Church.  The traditional defense of masculine imagery for God rests on the premise that the Bible is divine revelation, not culturally relative, negotiable, and changeable. As C. S. Lewis put it, “Christians believe God himself has told us how to speak of him.” The other reason for calling God “he” is historical. Except for Judaism, all other known ancient religions had goddesses as well as gods. The Jewish revelation was distinctive in its exclusively masculine pronoun because it was distinctive in ...

Paul’s final greetings to the Roman Church seem typical. We might just skim over the list of names without a second thought. But one name within that list has become the focus of controversy and heated debate: Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners. They are well known among the apostles, and they were in Christ before me. (Rom 16:7) Junia is most likely the name of a woman. When you read the phrase “among the apostles,” you understand how a simple salutation has become a prooftext in the debate over the role of women in ministry. The evidence that Junia is a woman is compelling. It's Greek spelling (Iounian) could point to either a man or a woman. However, the addition of an accent mark would specify gender—depending on what mark was chosen (Greek has several) and on which syllable the accent mark was placed. The earliest manuscripts of the New Testament were written in an uppercase Greek script (uncial) that did not include accents. But copies...

With the recent launch of  The Shack  movie, we are reminded of a whole mix of theological questions raised by the novel, and the problems of projecting the divine onto a screen. One of the lead characters in the book, for example, is a woman named Papa, who plays the role of God the Father , and her character reignites questions over divine identity and gender language. “I am neither male nor female,” Papa self-discloses in the novel, “even though both genders are derived from my nature. If I choose to  appear  to you as a man or woman, it’s because I love you. For me to appear to you as a woman and suggest you call me Papa is simply to mix metaphors, to help you keep from falling so easily back into your religious conditioning.” Religious conditioning in this context points a finger at the default of using predominantly male metaphors for God. When it comes to the divine titles for God, should we be more inclusive and gender-blended? Coincidentally, a s...