Dr Paul Allen

Throughout Scripture, signs and wonders represent God’s power unleashed first against Egypt during Israel’s deliverance and later through Jesus Christ to inaugurate salvation history.1 These phenomena carry consistent theological weight across both testaments, functioning as more than mere spectacle. A sign fundamentally directs people toward God2, while a wonder—derived from a Greek word related to “terror”—denotes something extraordinary that provokes amazement in observers.2 Where signs appeal to understanding, wonders engage the imagination.2 Though signs seek to generate belief, they don’t compel it.2 In the Old Testament, God’s saving actions in delivering Israel from Egypt became the focal point for divine self-revelation.1 The plagues against Egypt revealed God’s identity to the Egyptians themselves, establishing God’s reputation among the nations, not merely before Israel.1 These historical events carried implications extending far beyond their moment, shaping Israel’s ongoing...

The theological meaning of “fear of the Lord” encompasses both reverence and obedience rooted in a proper understanding of God’s character and authority. Rather than representing distrustful terror, this fear constitutes reverent awe and a worshipful response of faith to God as Creator, Saviour, and Judge.1 Luther’s distinction between servile fear and filial fear illuminates this concept: servile fear resembles a prisoner’s dread of a torturer, while filial fear mirrors a child’s respect and love for a parent—anxiety about displeasing someone beloved rather than anxiety about punishment.2  The biblical emphasis on fearing the Lord centres on a sense of awe and respect for God’s majesty.2 Though believers are invited to an intimate relationship with God as Father, this intimacy doesn’t eliminate the need to maintain healthy respect and adoration.2 Practically, fearing the Lord means ordering one’s life according to divine wisdom. To acknowledge God involves obeying the wisdom and k...

The first aspect of baptism in the Gospels we need to consider is the mindset of Judaism. When trying to understand the Gospels’ teaching on baptism, one might ask the question: Where did baptism come from? We don’t find anyone being baptized in the Old Testament, and we rarely find words relating to baptism used in the Old Testament. However, the first person we encounter in Mark’s Gospel is John the Baptist, who comes baptizing. How, then, would original readers of the Gospels have interpreted baptism? The first thing that would have shaped the thinking of the original audience would have been the meaning of the terms being used for baptism. The terms for baptism come from the Greek root bapto, which was used by ancient Greeks to denote a ship sinking into the water and being submerged. This word rarely appears in the Old Testament, only showing up twice in the canonical books of the LXX (Isaiah 21:4; 2 Kings 5:14), indicating the New Testament writers used a term to describe baptism...

Many Christians are surprised to discover that bonafide and respected Christians hold not only competing views on eternal conscious punishment but also outright alternatives to it. For example, N. T. Wright  argues that the damned will indeed suffer in hell forever but will become less and less human until they no longer bear the  image of God —something like the transformation of Sméagol into Gollum in Tolkien’s  The Lord of the Rings . 1 Shawn Bawulski  also affirms eternal torment, yet he maintains that the lost will in some sense be reconciled to God, submitting to him and ceasing to sin. 2 Others have reconsidered the doctrine more dramatically. Preston Sprinkle  recently abandoned eternal torment altogether after publishing a widely read defense of it only a few years earlier. 3 Around the same time,  Terrance Tiessen  also left the traditional view behind, despite having defended it not long before in a respected academic theological dictionary....