Dr Paul Allen

Keith A. Mathison Why in the world should I care about theology?  All I need is the Bible.  I can follow Jesus without having to learn all kinds of obscure words. Have you ever heard another Christian say something like these statements? Have you ever said something like that yourself? Ever thought of such things? If so, you’re not alone.  The vast majority of professing Christians have little to no interest in theology. In the minds of many Christians, there is no necessary connection between theology and their everyday Christian life. Theology, they believe, is irrelevant. The disconnect between theology and the church and between theology and the Christian has had disastrous results. One need only look at recent polls examining the level of theological knowledge among professing Christians to know that something has gone awry.  When large numbers of professing Christians start telling their friends and family, “You just have to read The Shack! I learned so much ab...

If you’re a Christian, no doubt you highly value God’s faithfulness, the precious reality “that what God [has] promised, he [is] able to perform” (Romans 4:21 NASB). You believe that Christ upholds the entire cosmos “by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). Therefore, all of reality, not to mention your eternal future, literally depends on God being true to his word. True to your word. That is a concise, clear definition of what it means to be a faithful person. There is consistency between what you say and what you do, between what you believe and how you behave, between what you promise and what you perform. “A faithful person keeps the faith of those who put their trust in him.” When we (and the Bible) describe someone as “faithful,” we’re almost never referring to how much faith that person possesses, but to how much faith others can place in that person — how much others can trust him to perform what he promises. A faithful person keeps (cherishes, maintains, guards) the faith of ...