Michael Allen > Quotes

“The various products and processes of church tradition are certainly fallible, and their existence and exercise are certainly accountable to their prophetic and apostolic foundation. Their weak and subordinate nature notwithstanding, these instruments do not stand as obstacles to a knowledge of God that can be gained more immediately through the reading of Scripture without them. They stand as divinely authorized instruments and divinely appointed aids to reading Scripture, part of the fullness of Christ’s gift that he has bestowed in and through his anointing upon the church. Having received this anointing, and the fruits of this anointing, the church and the church’s theology can do no better than to abide in the one who has given by abiding in the gifts he has given (1 John 2:27).”
― Michael Allen, Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation

“Indeed, sola Scriptura has served for some moderns as a banner for private judgment and against catholicity. In so doing, however, churches and Christians have turned from sola Scriptura to solo Scriptura, a bastard child nursed at the breast of modern rationalism and individualism. Even the Reformational doctrine of perspicuity has been transformed in much popular Christianity and some scholarly reflection as well to function as the theological equivalent of philosophical objectivity, namely, the belief that any honest observer can, by the use of appropriate measures, always gain the appropriate interpretation of a biblical text. Yet this is a far cry from the confession of Scripture’s clarity in the early Reformed movement or even in its expression by the post-Reformation dogmatics of the Reformed churches. On top of this type of mutation, we regularly encounter uses of the doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” that ignore or minimize the role of church officers as well as the principle of sola Scriptura to affirm a lived practice of “no creed but the Bible.”25 Right or not, then, many people embrace sola Scriptura, thinking that they are embracing individualism, anti-traditionalism, and/or rationalism. Similarly, right or not, many critique sola Scriptura as one or more of these three things.”
― Michael Allen, Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation

“We are by our nature caught up in the grandest mystery, our relationship to God, and also in the mystery most immediate to any of us, our own being.”
― Michael Allen, The Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology

“The central theological principle of the Bible [is] the rejection of idolatry.”
― Michael Allen, Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic

“manage the community outside of the CIA. An official observed, “The CIA director managed the CIA; it was the best job in the world. Managing the IC meant going out to the NRO and sitting through a three-hour meeting about satellite specifications. So it just was not done well.”3”
― Michael Allen, Blinking Red: Crisis and Compromise in American Intelligence after 9/11

“Theology does not come easily. Better put, faithful theology comes by grace or not at all, while idolatry comes quite naturally to those of us who make our bed east of Eden.”
― Michael Allen, Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic