Gospel Conversations podcast

Ilaria Ramelli is a formidable pocket rocket of a thinker. She famously wrote the breakthrough defence of the doctrine of ‘apokatastasis’ or universal salvation in her massive 900 page tome ‘The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis’. Her book was a breakthrough because she exploded the myth that most of us grew up with - that the belief in universal salvation (I prefer ‘cosmic redemption’) was alwa...

We have all been waiting for Ben to continue our journey into the amazing Patristic model of the atonement. Here it is. The single phrase that struck me most in this discussion was the ‘friendly God’ - or the ‘philanthropic God’ as the church fathers named their view of God. This is such a contrast to the dark dead end that penal substitution takes us into. I recently heard a sermon where the prea...

This is a talk that I have wanted to bring to Gospel Conversations for ages. Ben Myers is the Director of the Graduate Research School at Alpha Crucis - the large Pentecostal college/university in Sydney. He has a deep background in literature (his PhD was on Milton) and also a rich grasp of the Patristic era. About ten years ago he gave a wonderful talk at a major evangelical conference in Los An...

This Camino talk captures a great conversation on our walk that began with a great question. Great questions are often the pathway to growth – and this is because they usually lift the lid on a topic that we really don’t understand, but skip over with cliches to cover our ignorance up. Anne is not the kind of person who happily just skips over things… I can remember many years ago when she asked M...

Here is the second part of my talk on Jesus as the Two way Door.  The first talk opened up the whole landscape of reality that the Christian message opens up – not just the ‘religious’ experience but the whole experience of how we approach life. I went back to Maximus and his picture of how reality is framed by the mind of God, and within the treaty, now the Logos was and is the architect and inde...

We are starting up a new series in Breakfast with Jesus based on conversations that Anne and I enjoyed as we walked some of the famous El Camino trail recently. Let me say that I do not use the word ‘conversation’ lightly. Anne has been my thought partner all our lives together – and in a really productive way. I mean that she brings intuition and experience and truth-telling to our talks – and I...

Here is the second part of my conversation with John Walton on how order not sin frames the book of Genesis – including the Fall. In this talk John gets more specific about the order spectrum of order, non-order and disorder. ‘Sin’ is obviously an important word, and central to the Christian doctrine. But it is also a loaded word, and one that works like a sinkhole to suck in streams of meaning –...

We continue our reposting of some gems from our past library of talks. This episode is highly significant partly because of the big idea but also because it is John Walton who espouses it. John as you know is a legendary Bible scholar and author, and is the major voice for putting the OT back into the worldview of the Ancient Near East. That gives a fair bit of weight to the rather innovative idea...

In this final talk, I summarise five profound ways that the Exodus narrative reframes and stretches the traditional gospel of Penal Substitution. My aim was to leave us with a metaphor that can rival the evocative power of the Penal model not just critique it systematically.  In my experience, the Exodus story does this and that is what i want to share in this talk. One thing that the Exodus story...

Here is the third talk in our journey through Exodus as an analogy of redemption. In this talk we explore Exodus through the lens of drama.  Of course, the whole Bible is in essence a drama in that it is a narrative or story grounded in events rather than abstract ideas. So we have to discern the ideas that the story generates. And in a way that is not a closed book – simply because the ideas are...

Welcome back to Gospel Conversations. So on with the Exodus journey as we 'cross the river and start to generate some new paradigms for the gospel. I like the term 'paradigm' as it does explain what we are trying to do rather well. A paradigm is a way of looking at something or a way of arranging it in our minds. So it is a 'pattern'. In a sense it is very different from 'content. It is much more...

Welcome to a new series called ‘What is the Gospel?’   It builds on the ‘Cross and Creation’ talks that Andrew and I gave. Those talks explored difficulties in the traditional ‘Penal Substitution Model’ but in a sense they left us with a void – what alternative image(s) can replace the Penal model. This is what we now move onto with the ‘What is the gospel’ series. First cab off the rank is “The G...

Well, we have finished the trilogy of Iain Provan’s talks on creation and it provides a nice foundation for all of our thinking in Gospel Conversations. In this next podcast I pick up the Breakfast with Jesus journey through Ezekiel that Anne and I enjoyed so much. You will see a lot of resonances with Iain’s talks. In this talk I ask a question that might seem obvious but in fact is not – ‘What i...

Here is the third and final of our reboots from Iain Provan’s epic 2011 series on the Old Testament Reloaded – “What is Creation?”. In this talk Iain concludes his magnificent trilogy of talks positioning the vast Mosaic vision of God and reality in contrast to the prevailing Ancient Near Eastern worldviews. It is so important to grasp the fact that this was a contest of worldviews – not religions...

This episode is a repost of a talk by Iain Provan from his epic series on the ‘Old Testament Reloaded’ in 2011.  Originally titled ‘Who is God?’ we have renamed it ‘Was Dawkins right about the angry God?’ because that is fundamentally what Iain concentrates on. It is a wonderful talk that is foundational for any Christian’s faith. With his characteristic understated Scottish style, Iain brilliantl...

Tadionally we treat salvation as an individual event, but Ezekiel has a far wider scope. He sees the object of salvation is the whole cosmos not just individuals, and he sees the cosmos as the temple of God. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

 Welcome to Gospel Conversations   We have an amazing backlog of great talks from great speakers and thinkers going back over a decade.  So we've decided to republish some of them to supplement our ongoing offerings.  We're going to begin with some seminal talks by Ian Proven.  Ian is one of the leading Old Testament scholars in the world. And he gave a wonderful series for us on Genesis in 2011....

Did Paul have an introspective conscience over sin?  The answer is “no”’according to a classic article and Tony explains the reasoning in this podcast. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the next installment in the Breakfast with Jesus series. There's been a long pause since I did Ezekiel chapter one. Ezekiel is such an important book and, the more I think about Ezekiel, the more it frames a lot of the gospel.  Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

In our last talk Andrew took us deeper into various metaphors for atonement – and asked which best fits scripture and gospel.  In this talk, Tony supplements that deep dive by zooming back out and asking, ‘what is the real question, for which the cross and salvation is the answer?’  He concludes that Penal Substitution is the answer to the wrong question and explains why.  He then refines the bett...

In this episode of our Cross and Creation series, Andrew continues his summarising of the metaphors for the atonement.  He argues that every metaphor has its limits and cannot be pushed universally. But he argues that the adoption/sonship model of the atonement offers the best fit for the various metaphors, and that the alternative wrath of God/judicial model narrows and even distorts the grand sw...

In this talk Tony amplifies the intriguing phrase ‘Circle of Glory’ which David Bentley Hart mentioned in his final talk in our recent GC series. The phrase was coined by Gregory of Nyssa and Tony explores the extraordinary vision of the Trinity bound up in the term – and how it reveals our participation in the ‘circle of glory’. Tony does this by a detailed commentary on the original treatise of...

Session 5 - What is humanity’s destiny and purpose? Is heaven more like a marriage or a motel visit? In this final talk, David advocates the age-old vision of the Patristics that ‘God became human in order that humanity may become God’. This breathtaking vision is at once completely orthodox, but almost sounds blasphemous. Together Tony and David explore this vision of ‘deification’ through the wo...

Session 4 - Is the Incarnation a master plan or a rescue plan? David builds on his epic book ‘YOU ARE GODS’ in this session, and widens our view of the incarnation from being a one-off rescue plan, to the master plan for all humanity. Clearly this is an intriguing thought, but it takes some deep conceptual shifts to absorb and that is what Tony and David dive into in the latter half of this fascin...

Session 3 - Has the ‘supernatural/natural’ dualism messed up our view of creation?  David explains how both religious and secular thinking share a common dualism that distorts our view of reality. For the religious mind, the supernatural God becomes totally separate from the world of nature which it sees as material and fallen. So David and Tony turn to the mesmerising thought of Maximus the Confe...