Dr Paul Allen

In almost any Higher Education Theological course of study, students are required to learn something of the original biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek. They are taught to look at the historical background of the text, and they learn basic principles of interpretation. These are all important and valuable skills for being good stewards of the Word of God.  However, the main reason why errors in biblical interpretation occur is not that the reader lacks knowledge of Hebrew or of the situation in which the biblical book was written. The number one cause for misunderstanding the Scriptures is making illegitimate inferences from the text.  It is my firm belief that these faulty inferences would be less likely if biblical interpreters were more skilled in basic principles of logic. Let me give an example of the kind of faulty inferences I have in mind. I doubt I have ever had a discussion on the question of God's sovereign election without someone quoting John 3:16 and saying, "B...

WHAT IS THEOLOGY? Theology is God-talk (in the best and highest sense)—thinking and speaking about God in a coherent, logical way. And for the Christian believer, that means a theology rooted in and expressive of the revelation God has given. There is therefore a right sense in which we are called to have a “theology of everything” because in one way or another the entire cosmos—the unfolding of history, the discoveries we make—are all part and parcel of the unfolding of God’s self-revelation in creation, providence, redemption, and consummation. As Abraham Kuyper noted, nothing in the cosmos is atheistic in the absolute sense. Or to cite a higher authority, “From him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). This is why omnes sumus theologi—all are theologians—whether we are nuclear physicists, astronauts, literature-lovers, gardeners, trash collectors, or even for that matter “theologians.” This is the privilege, the challenge, the romance of our lives—in every conceiv...

In his famous essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner wrote that the correspondence between pure mathematics and the natural world was “something bordering on the mysterious.” “There is,” he said “no rational explanation for it.” It makes sense to say that basic mathematics was developed to describe things in the everyday world. We can understand the origin of things like counting and addition and how to calculate area. However, as Wigner goes on to argue, this simple explanation fails to account for so much of what we see. The work of professional mathematicians often involves incredible ingenuity and extraordinary feats of logic. Some theorems and proofs take years to work out. And yet, astonishingly, many of the most brilliant and insanely abstract concepts turn out to model real-world phenomena perfectly. They fit like a lock and key. Consider for a moment just how extraordinary thi...