Dr Paul Allen

The Bible is not, overall, a piece of coded literature written in an elaborately allegorical manner with all sorts of hidden meanings, which needs to be decoded to be understood.  Thank goodness.  Just to be clear what allegory is– it is a story that has a surface meaning within the story, but in fact, those story elements refer primarily to things outside the story.   Typical allegories are the Christian example Pilgrim’s Progress or the literary example Spencer’s The Fairy Queen.  One has to be able to distinguish between a straight-up allegory where so very many of the elements in the story are symbolic and refer to something outside the story, or an allegorizing of a non-allegory, which is what we find in Philo in various of his books, or once in Paul in Galatians where he allegorizes the story of Sarah and Hagar, and finally, there can be a few allegorical elements in a non-allegory, for example in a parable. Perhaps the most classic example of the over-allegori...

There is a science in theology and in biblical studies that we call hermeneutics. It is the science of biblical interpretation. It teaches objective principles and rules that govern our treatment of the text, lest we turn the Bible into a piece of clay that we can shape and form for our own desires, as the Pharisees did. At the heart of the science of hermeneutics in Reformed theology is the regula fidei, or “the law of faith,” which says that no portion of Scripture must ever be set against another portion of Scripture.  The first assumption here is that all of Scripture is the Word of God . The second assumption is that God does not speak with a forked tongue , that what He reveals in His Word is always consistent. It is sometimes said consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. If that adage is true, we have to say that the tiniest mind to be found is the mind of God. However, I believe consistency is the sign of clarity of truth, and God’s Word is consistent wit...