Gospel Conversations podcast

A recent (Christian) book puts up the white flag of surrender before the insurgent world of Artificial Intelligence; ‘Intelligence is no longer a quality that marks out human beings from the rest of the world…’ So - machines can think and think better than us? Or can they? And what does this say about what it means to be a human being and what the vast Christian vision of being ‘made in the image...

Nothing is more foundational to the traditional gospel than a ‘theory of sin’. But for most of us, it is a messy topic that we have not thought about enough. Hence Christianity has all too often suggested a dark anthropology that defines humanity as ‘totally depraved’ or incapable of ‘any good thing’. This is not exactly a good place to start an evangelistic conversation! So we need a better model...

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 thei...

Welcome to our final conversation with John Behr on Maximus. Alongside this episode you’ll find the handouts John distributed — well worth having open as you listen, as he works through them closely and the text repays careful attention. If you haven’t already, we’d also recommend starting with the recent introductory episode , where the grand themes of this series are laid out. Gospel Conversatio...

If you are about to embark on an important meal, it is nice to begin with some antipasto. Well this talk is my ‘antipasto’ for John Behr’s final talk on Maximus, the third of the great Church Fathers whose theology he has summarised for us. This talk is about thirty minutes long, and is my attempt to offer a ‘Plain English’ paraphrase of both John and Maximus. Make no mistake - we have two great m...

In this talk I give an overview of our upcoming topics for the year. The ‘creation gospel’ is exciting - but what are the ‘so what's’? This is the theme we want to explore together in 2026, and in this short talk I give a snapshot of our agenda and topics. The monthly talks will come in ‘couplets’ - one at the St James Institute in the city of Sydney, and the second one more intimately at our home...

Welcome to 2026 and as promised here is John Behr’s talk on Gregory of Nyssa and his view of what it means to be a human being. I gave an extended introduction to this talk at the end of year, and sorry there has been a lapse of time between that and this talk I was introducing…. a thing called ‘Christmas’ intervened. Anyway, to refresh our minds. This is the third talk John gave at our Gospel Con...

This is an introduction that became a stand alone little talk. Why? Because John’s talk on Gregory at our conference was mind- bending - but hard to follow. No fault of John’s - he was trying to condense two profound thinkers (Plato and Gregory) into a one hour talk! So I worked hard to crystallise the main themes in ‘simple Plain English’ terms - so that it can provide a runway for you into John’...

This is our second talk in John Behr’s series on the Church Fathers. This talk outlines the ‘wild’ world of how Irenaeus of Lyon (around 170 AD) saw the Gospel - not as a rescue mission but as a plan for humanity to share in the ‘uncreated’ life of God. In case you don’t know already, Irenaeus was Bishop of Lyons in France, just after it suffered terrible persecutions. He was a disciple of Polycar...

I can remember lots of times when Christians have speculated about whether salvation means returning to the ‘perfect’ state of Adam before the Fall - or do we go one better and somehow improve on the first Adam? This talk by John Behr demolishes that whole worldview…. It is the first in a series of four talks that John Behr gave at our recent Gospel Conversations conference. In this talk John intr...

As promised here is the concluding section of my conversation with David exploring the meaning of the word ‘sin’. In this conclusion we do a deep dive into the text of Romans 5:12 - a pivotal verse for the concept of ‘original sin’ - and David explains how his completely different translation changes the traditional meaning significantly. The traditional meaning is that we all sinned ‘in Adam’ and...

“Original sin” is - apparently - one of the bedrock doctrines of Christianity. But what exactly does it mean? This is how I began this discussion with David. Our main focus was Romans 5 and in particular verse 12 - the main ‘proof text’ for the doctrine of original sin. But before we got down into the details of that verse - we started with the big picture. What does ‘original sin’ mean? And in pa...

One of the critiques of Christian theology is that it has been largely framed by men - and thus is susceptible to masculine views of God and humanity. I can only speculate on this, but I have often privately thought that behind the Cappadocian Fathers’ generous theology lay the influence of women. It began with their grandmother, who was a martyr and continued through their wealthy but pious paren...

Fr John Behr’s visit to Australia is just over a month away. I interviewed him recently to get a foretaste of what he will be talking to us about. John is clearly a major thought leader in modern theology. I got a taste of this recently from a post I read by Brad Jersak. Brad had just been to a retreat on the remote Scottish island of Iona led by Rowan Williams and John Behr (made me jealous!!). H...

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. go...

Ben’s talks on the Patristic model of atonement led to the obvious question - what about their views on growth ? This is the first of two talks by Ben on this topic. In this talk he focuses on the individual and morality and in the next talk he focuses on society and politics and how they viewed Christian contributions there. Patristic views on growth are built on their views of atonement; and tha...

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 polit...

As promised here is the talk that I gave last Sunday at the St James Institute in Sydney. It was well received, and I was surprised by the audience and their reaction. Most were older people - not young radicals - and they were clearly bothered by this doctrine of hell but had no alternative ways to think about it. So for many the talk was a relief that there was a viable alternative to having to...

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 being...

The answer is ‘yes’ - hell was a concept deeply ingrained in the pagan mind. And that is the surprising landscape that Ilaria opens up for us in this next episode in Robin Parry’s interviews with her on apokatastasis. In this interview, Robin asks her about a recent accusation that belief in '‘apokatastasis” was actually a pagan idea that crept into Christianity. Of course, that kind of accusation...

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...

After a slow start we are ready to get going in Gospel Conversations for 2026. We will kick off with this fascinating interview I did with Robin Parry about his personal journal to universal salvation. Robin has led the vanguard for universal salvation since the publication of his landmark book in 2006 “The Evangelical Universalist” which probably did what no other book had quite done in the moder...

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/104758846 In this piece, Sarah reflects on her year of teaching and finds in that experience...

Welcome to our next Gospel Conversations podcast and apologies that there has been a bit of a lag. We try to keep up a regular feed but life intervenes as I am sure you all would know… grandparenting and sickness etc. Anyway here we are. This is a little unplanned diversion from our Ilaria Ramelli series - but a pretty connected one. On our last episode Ilaria explained her half of the twin books...

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 stunni...