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...

Welcome to the fascinating world of applying Scripture. Here we encounter the complexities and challenges of moving from words on a page to actually living out the text within our lives. Our mandate is to figure out which statements from the Bible in their “on the page” wording you and I should continue to follow in our contemporary setting. In order to do this, we must determine whether we should apply a particular biblical statement in the exact form articulated on the page or whether we should apply only some expression of its underlying principle(s).  Learn more by enrolling at www.hopecollege.com In this respect, the objective is not to uncover the meaning of the words of the text in their dictionary sense. Commentaries spend much of their time doing this. Rather, our task is one of applying the ancient text in our modern context. So, assuming that a plausible or reasonable understanding of the text’s original meaning can be attained, we will put our efforts into grap...

Some time ago Cripplegate wrote an as-condensed-as-possible version of the great story of redemption , tracing God’s gracious promise to provide the seed of the woman to crush the head of the serpent through the Old Testament. We examined how that promise narrowed from the seed of the woman, to the seed of Abraham, to the nation of Israel, and to the line of David. We saw how Israel’s repeated failure to be faithful to the covenants Yahweh established with them all pointed to the One who would exemplify covenant faithfulness and fulfill all righteousness on behalf of His people. To put it another way, contrary to what some believe about dispensationalists and the Old Testament, we observed how the whole of the Old Testament finds its climax and fulfillment in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, the seed of the woman, the seed of Abraham, the Israelite par-excellence, and the Son of David. If you’ve not read that post, I’d encourage you to do so. I mentioned in that post that a g...