Dr Paul Allen

Five hundred years later some Christians seem almost embarrassed about the Reformation . Not me. The Reformation must continue, as it still has work to do. Its cry is essential ‘back to the Bible ’ and ‘away with man-made rules and traditions‘. As such it is a cry that must be heard in every denomination, and every church, in every generation. It is understood that it was the 31st October 1517 when the monk Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses to the door and unleashed a revolution that continues to this day. These theses could each have been a tweet, and they were deliberately intended to spark a debate. They undermined the idea that the Pope was the sole source of authoritative teaching, and encouraged the ordinary man to re-examine official Church teachings. That idea still holds power today and must continue to exert its effects. Just as the printing press enabled the ideas of the Reformation to spread, so the Internet allows the Reformation to continue today. May articles such...

This year, many people are celebrating the five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation . But not everyone is. Some have raised severe criticisms against the Reformers and their work. The Reformers, they allege, replaced the authority of the church with the authority of the autonomous individual. Moreover, the doctrine of justification by faith alone , these critics claim, cut the nerve of morality and, effectively, baptized licentious living. Martin Luther and John Calvin , they continue, opened Pandora’s box, releasing two forces that not only rent the church but also went on to define the modern age: radical individualism and antinomianism. Understood on these terms, the Reformation is cause for lamentation, not celebration. These criticisms rest on a profound misunderstanding of the Reformation and, specifically, a misunderstanding of two of the leading doctrines of the Reformation: sola scriptura ( Scripture alone ) and sola fide (faith alone). What were the ...

Yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness. ROMANS 6:13-22 I cannot save and sanctify myself; I cannot atone for sin; I cannot redeem the world; I can not make right what is wrong, pure what is impure, holy what is unholy. That is all the sovereign work of God.  Have I faith in what Jesus Christ has done? He has made a perfect Atonement, am I in the habit of constantly realizing it? The great need is not to do things, but to believe things.  The Redemption of Christ is not an experience, it is the great act of God which He has performed through Christ, and I have to build my faith upon it. If I construct my faith on my experience, I produce that most unscriptural type, an isolated life, my eyes fixed on my own whiteness. Beware of the piety that has no presupposition in the Atonement of the Lord. It is of no use for anything but a sequestered life; it is useless to God and a nuisance to man. Measure every type of experience by our Lord Himself. We c...

Five hundred years ago, a lowly German priest walked up to the church door in Wittenberg and posted a document that altered the course of history. It has now been five centuries since Martin Luther stood up and confronted Roman Catholicism. The kindling had been laid over decades, and Luther’s little, almost accidental spark soon set all of Europe ablaze. In time, this lowly monk proved he had what it took to hold his ground against the Church and the world — and under God, he became the tip of the spear for massive reform. In one especially memorable scene, he stood before the emperor and declared courageously, risking his own life, “Here I stand. I can do no other. So help me, God.” But Luther did not stand alone. The Reformation was not about one or two big names — Luther, Calvin, Zwingli — but about a massive movement of Christian conviction, boldness, and joy that cost many men and women their lives — and scattered the seeds that are still bearing fruit in the twenty-first cent...

Gemälde Katharina von Bora /Öl auf Eichenholz (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Martin Luther, author of the text of Christ lag in Todes Banden, and who, with Johann Walter, also wrote the melody (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The fourteenth century was a bad time for the papacy. For a period, there were two rival popes and the papacy was under pressure from the French monarchy. It wasn’t a good time for the city of Rome either—seven successive popes abandoned Rome in favor of Avignon in France. Rome was sidelined and Saint Peter’s Basilica fell into disrepair. The popes returned to Rome in 1377 and then sorted out their divisions in 1417. A hundred years on, things were looking up: in 1505, Pope Julius II had decided to knock down the old St Peter’s and start again. He had big plans for his own tomb and wanted a basilica to match. It was time to make Rome magnificent once again. But that didn’t come cheap, so the church embarked on a fundraising campaign. It was this campaign that br...

Next Saturday will be the 498th anniversary of Martin Luther famously nailing his 95 Theses to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Germany, and kick-starting the Protestant Reformation as a result. Because of that, there will likely be many posts in the Christian blogosphere celebrating the recovery of the biblical Gospel from the perversions of Roman Catholic theology. And because of that, there will likely be many Romanist sympathizers who chide us Protestants as divisive, overly-narrow, unity-destroying, and judgmental. They’ll say something like this : This is what drives me nutty about Christianity. We all believe in the Bible, Jesus Christ, the road to salvation and the Resurrection. Do I believe exactly as you do? I’m sure I don’t, but I don’t believe you’re any less Christian than I am. We need to understand that there’s more that unites us than divides us. The problem, of course, is that Protestants and Catholics don’t all believe the same things about the most foundati...