Gospel Conversations podcast

This is the third in Ben Myer’s wonderful series on the thinking of the early church fathers. This talk examines their view on the burning question of discipleship - what does it mean to follow Christ in how we live particularly in the public square? Ben’s first talk covered their view of salvation - and how they did not have a ‘penal substitution’ model of redemption. His second talk covered their view of the inner life - how we live righteously in our souls and thoughts. So this talk moves to the vexed place of the public square - how do Christians participate in the ‘world’ (or not). This talk is in a sense ‘unfinished’ - as Ben says, they never got to a simple clear position and there were conflicting positions on this question. What I found illuminating and relevant to us, is that how they confronted this question varied according to the changing circumstances in which they found themselves. So our lesson would be that we have the same task - understand our circumstances and then work out how our faith should work out in today’s world. Ben finishes with St Augustine’s ‘City of God’ where Augustine developed the theory of our ‘double citizenship’ in two very different kingdoms. And Ben laments how later centuries turned some of this thinking into forms of ‘Christian nationalism’. Finding God or the echoes of the divine in the public square is a vital concern for us all - and particularly relevant as we realise the Christ is Lord of the cosmos not just individual lives. In fact, his Lordship was expressed in very political terms for the first century church - something that Edwin Judge and Mark Strom have stressed in previous talks. So this is challenging topic and one for which there are probably no easy answers. But Ben’s talk gives us a great perspective to think it through. This year we will be following a ‘so what’ theme in Gospel Conversations - ie what are the ‘so what's for the Creation Gospel so this talk is a great door opener for our year. Our next talk will address the question of evangelism and how we frame the ‘creation gospel’. I will give this talk and it will focus on our ‘theory of sin’ - a vital topic. I will critique the dominant mental model of sin (or at least the one I grew up with as an evangelical) and offer what I think is a much richer and more biblical model of what this critical thing called ‘sin’ means. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

What exactly does the word ‘harmatia’ (usually translated as ‘sin’) mean in the New Testament? This is where my conversation with David begins in this podcast. I asked him this question because when he was in Australia, David told me that he was uncomfortable using the modern word ‘sin’ to translate ‘harmatia’. This is obviously pretty important as the idea of ‘sin’ is at the foundation of the. gospel. What was going to be a limited conversation about translation soon developed into a fascinating tour through the thinking of the early church about the ‘gospel’ and what it means - all built on a very different understanding of the what ‘sin’ means. This conversation with David charts out a radical landscape for the word ‘sin’ as it is used in the New Testament and the early church. In the modern world we have a view of sin as a kind of transgression of a moral code. And the corollary of this is ‘original sin’ - the view that we are somehow infected by the Fall with a natural propensity for doing evil not good. So like a lot of ‘big’ concepts words, the word ‘sin’ sits in a large mental landscape for us - and David explains how far this modern landscape for ‘sin’ differs from the world of the early church. That is where we began, but it turned into a launching pad for a far ranging coverage of the conceptual landscape behind ‘sin’ and redemption in the early church. This is clearly very significant for us Christians to understand well because our gospel is framed as a redemption and ‘sin’ is normally presented as the ‘problem’ that the gospel solves. So we need to be clear and scriptural about exactly what that ‘problem’ space is. And this is the landscape that David maps out for us. As I look back on this conversation, it reminded me of my talks about a year ago, on the Exodus story as a framework for the gospel. My Exodus talks followed the series that Andrew Baartz led for us on the weaknesses of the Penal Substitution model of atonement. In essence, I explained how the Exodus story positions the ‘problem space’ the gospel confronts as slavery not judicial guilt. So David’s talk confirms this ‘Exodus’ orientation for the gospel. I will repost one of these talks soon. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

Well … this interview was unexpected. David Artman runs a podcast (Grace Saves All) dedicated to the topic of universal salvation. But he is very disturbed by the rise of Trump and what he sees as the ‘first stage of facism’ taking root in his country. So he wanted to interview me - to get an international comment and also a ‘systems’ perspective on what is going on. I am not an expert in US politics but like all of us I am fascinated (horrified) by what is going on - and in particular the role of white evangelicals in supporting Trump. (David Hart has stressed that it is white evangelicals not African American evangelicals). So my perspective - one that has occupied my mind - is how did Christians get sucked in to this demagogue and is there anything intrinsic in the way evangelicals frame the gospel that made them susceptible to a manipulator like Trump. Frankly what has happened has made me question evangelicalism (whatever that means) deeply. As you might imagine this interview was quite a journey. It became a discussion about power, patriarchy and the cross. And I framed it within the overarching theme of ‘rule’ - which I see as the divine mandate for humanity on the earth - a mandate confirmed and affirmed in Christ and the cross/new creation. If you are interested in other views on this same topic, David interviewed Douglas Campbell the episode before me and Brian Zanhd the week after me. Both were really good according to my wife Anne who listened to them all. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

One of the main objections to universalism is that it opens the door for spiritual laziness. It is the easy way out. Why bother with the hard work of discipleship if everybody gets saved and there are no consequences for bad behaviour? Ilaria confronts this challenge in her final interview with Robin Parry. Of course this is the tip of a big iceberg - what do we mean by growth? How are human beings motivated to grow? As I have done before I bookend Ilaria’s talk with an introduction to give you the coat hanger to absorb her rather dense material, and then I add a postscript that builds on what she has said. Warning: There is an ‘R rated’ part of this talk - and that is my description of exactly what kind of torture Origen was subjected to as an old man - tortured on the rack ‘to four spaces’. Stomach churning. But what is more sickening is the comparison with the Emperor Justinian who eventually ‘condemned’ him in the anathemas. How on earth did the church prefer a dictatorial tyrant to an old man who defied torture for his faith??We are going to build on the topic of growth in upcoming interviews/talks with Ben Myers. He will explore the model of growth in Patristic theology: his first series was pretty exciting on the Patristic model of the Atonement. This next one will be the natural extension - the Patristic model of growth. Juicy stuff and likely to open up new perspectives on what ‘discipleship’ can mean today. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

If the scripture is like a land of hills and valleys, then 1 Corinthians 15: 22-28 was the Mount Everest of the terrain. Or so thought Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, according to Ilaria Ramelli. In this short nugget of a talk Ilaria explains with her typically profound mix of big picture and detail, just why the claim that in the end “God will be all and in all” was treated so seriously by Patristic theologians. It is no ordinary claim. By this I mean that it simply does not fit into our normal conceptual landscape of reality - it redraws the whole map of reality. That is how the great minds of the early church treated it - they allowed it to chart out a vision of the end of all things that draws a new map of reality - a map of reality forged and pioneered in the death and resurrection of Christ. Since Ilaria’s talk is so condensed, I have attached a beginning and end bookend to the talk. In the beginning I introduce and expand a couple of the new conceptual frameworks that Ilaria assumes and works with. One is what ‘submission’ means and the second is what she means by extending the term “logos” to the adjectival term '“logikon” - both of which are describing not just the qualities of the Son of God but also of his relationship with creation generally and humanity in particular. At the back end, I append a ten minute discussion of how a typical ‘evangelical’ reading tries to explain away the pretty obvious universalism in this text. I use the commentary notes in my English Standard Version as examples of the ‘yes-but- it doesn’t mean what it looks like’ interpretation of this passage that is quite typical of the struggles that traditional hell doctrines have with the persistent use of the word ‘all’. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

This is our last podcast for the year and it is almost Christmas. It is a short piece by our daughter Sarah which has just been published on the ABC website - in the Religion and Ethics section. Here is the link https://www.abc.net.au/religion/sarah-golsby-smith-teaching-incarnation-christmas-end-of-school/104758846In this piece, Sarah reflects on her year of teaching and finds in that experience a touch of wonder - wonder at the privilege of helping young human beings flourish. She sees these young students as vessels of grace, made in God’s image and at Christmas, as echoes of the ultimate image of God - Christ. Sarah’s experience is a great example for us all - to find the wonder in quotidian moments as we walk the earth. I call these ‘burning bush’ experiences where we see the inner light of some part of creation burst forth and reveal itself. And of course, where greater to see that than in the experience of watching a child learn and grow. Of course, Sarah is hinting at a far broader concept of ‘incarnation’ than just Christ’s brief sojourn on earth - begun at his birth and concluded at his resurrection. She is working with a bigger view that sees Christ’s incarnation as a synecdoche or crystallisation for all the created order. In this view, all of creation is templated after the image of God, and continues to be ‘created’ in that image. And as we see, like Moses, the inner glory of burning bushes, we participate in this living ongoing touch of God in the creation. The great 7th-century mystic, Isaac of Nineveh, saw this as the pinnacle of spiritual growth - he called it a ‘state of wonder’ at the mysteries of God’s involvement, his incarnation, in the created order. Enjoy this talk, look it up and read it on the ABC website. In the New Year we will resume our series on Ilaria Ramelli and Robin Parry with an interview I did recently with Robin on his journey to a belief in cosmic redemption. Of course, Christmas means the incarnation, the core of the Christian faith and the stunning message of God’s participation in our world. But just what does the incarnation mean? Typically it means the 33 year episode of Christ’s life on earth as a discreet event: it has an entry point at his birth and an exit at his resurrection. But great theologians see it more broadly than that. They see the incarnation as beginning with creation, and they see the divine imprint holding all the creation together like gravity might be holding all of our mobility and earthly experience together. So in a sense, this latent divinity in creation was always ready to erupt - and this it did notably in the Burning Bush experience of Moses. But finally, climactically it erupted in the only way possible - by God himself presencing himself with us. This wider view Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

This is the second of our tapes of Robin Parry’s interviews with Ilaria Ramelli in 2019 on behalf of Gospel Conversations. It focuses on the book that she had just then published, “A Larger Hope;Universal Salvation from Christian Beginnings to Julian of Norwich.” She does not summarise the book in a blow by blow way but rather gives us the big themes, which is really interesting. One of her stunning themes is that the whole Patristic theology was built on the foundation of Origen - without him, she says, Patristic thought would have collapsed. This does not mean they agreed with him wholeheartedly, anymore than great philosophers agreed with everything Aristotle said - but it does mean that Origen did for theology what Aristotle did for philosophy; he built a coherent foundation for it on which others could build. I have appended an introduction to help digest her arguments, and I also did something else in the intro - I read out some of the opening comments in the Foreword by Richard Bauckham. I think that this Foreword is pretty significant and a sign of the times because Bauckham, as far as I know is not a Universalist, but he is one of the most notable Biblical scholars in the world. Clearly he admires Ilaria a lot for her academic and intellectual credibility, and clearly he does not consider universal salvation a heresy, but rather a topic deserving of inquiry and one that is growing in interest rapidly. That is one of my major contentions - not so much that ‘universal salvation’ is ‘right’ (which I think it is) but rather that the Christian church has become increasingly dogmatic on too many topics that are consequences of our core beliefs not intrinsic to them. As a result a lot of Christian cultures are not very attractive to seeking people - or doubting and inquiring Christians. Dogmatism paints everything into black and white categories, so it does not leave any grey space for ambiguity and discussion. Actually let me go further - the ‘grey’ space is where we grow. Dogma gives us the landscape and the borders of our inquiry, but inquiry into grey space is where we go deeper into the forest of our faith and start to see the depth, texture and nuances. So I applaud the open mindedness of Bauckham and really sense that people like him are opening up the grey space for us all. I also finish off Ilaria’s talk with a postscript in which I announce that - quite concidentally - I have stumbled across a great talk by Robin recently which he has give us permission to post on Gospel Conversations. We will post it next. Robin’s talk is really instructive on the topic of grey space because he traces the different pathways that led some significant evangelical thought leaders of the last few centuries to embrace Universal Salvation. Like all of Robin’s material, it is a delightful mix of erudition and calm intellect all expressed in accessible language. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe