Gospel Conversations podcast

Here is the second conversation with Mark Strom on Faith, Hope and Love as ‘ways of knowing’. Mark is on fire in this conversation.  He takes on a roller coaster ride beginning with the famous Pauline talk to the Romans on Mars Hill right through to the ‘mount Everest’ of Christ centred thinking in the hymn of Philippians 2.  Throughout this journey Mark develops a grand theme; that every human ma...

We are excited to welcome back to Gospel Conversations one of our old friends, Mark Strom. Mark has blessed all of us over the years with his unique grasp of big picture holistic thinking coupled with his easy accessible way of explaining all of that: in particular Mark has been a leader in taking the gospel out of its religious box and putting it into the whole framework of reality – particularly...

The modern battleground for the soul is not in fact religion - it is the field of computer science. This is because we have created the aura of 'artificial intelligence' and the end of that road seems to be that machines can think better than humans can.... if that is true (and the computer Deep Blue' did in fact beat Garry Kasparov at chess) then that implies that our mind is a machine after all....

The modern battleground for the soul is not in fact religion - it is the field of computer science. This is because we have created the aura of 'artificial intelligence' and the end of that road seems to be that machines can think better than humans can.... if that is true (and the computer Deep Blue' did in fact beat Garry Kasparov at chess) then that implies that our mind is a machine after all....

Welcome to a special guest for Gospel Conversations – Dr Esther Meek. Esther will be front-lining our next conference in 2021 so we decided to give us all a foretaste of her wisdom and she did not disappoint!  She explains her lifelong story as to how she began a quest for truth and reality – as a 13 year old girl in a conservative Christian family. At first she thought her deep questions were sin...

In their second discussion John and Tony explore the theme of ‘order’ in more depth. They agree that ‘order’ is a bigger paradigm than the ‘sin/salvation’ paradigm – and that it cannot be separated from the presence of God.  Anyone who tastes or yearns for ‘order’ is in fact tasting and yearning for God himself. John then develops order into three manifestations; rest, peace and coherence.  In Joh...

Tony interviews John Walton about his theory that ‘order’ not ‘sin’ is the dominant theme of the early chapters of Genesis – and that we have in fact ‘over emphasised’ sin as the major problem that the Bible and Genesis confront.  In this free ranging conversation, Tony and John explore this new idea in some depth.  John explains how the concept of ‘order’ is anchored in Ancient Near Eastern cosmo...

Part one I charted the wider landscape that Creation theology gives us – a wider landscape I argued, than what I called the ‘Redemption’ gospel.  I want to stress that the key theme was not either or choice between the two – we obviously need ‘redeeming’ or ‘saving’ and any thinking person who denies that is deceiving themselves as if humanity has no problem or blood on our collective hands…. No,...

Rev Dr Brad Jersak explores Christian knowing through Plato, Plantinga, and Paul the Apostle. This is an incredibly important topic for Christians today as most of us feel caught between the conservative ‘Biblical’ view that dominates Sydney evangelicalism, and a more liberal humanist view that seems to threaten the pillars of faith. Brad has a rich mind and insightful perspectives, including a de...

How broad are God's plans? Tony shares his life story: from his childhood in Fiji to becoming a teacher and then, to everyone's surprise, a strategy consultant to some of Australia's largest corporations. He began to see God working everywhere and this led him to ultimately discover Christ's Cosmic Redemption—which is good news for the entire cosmos! Video: https://youtu.be/8fq7xvqQoHQ Slides: htt...

Brad Jersak (Feb 14th), Esther Lightcap Meek, Rikk Watts, Tony Golsby-Smith, Ron Winestock, & Leisa Aitken will help us explore "Knowing and Mystery"—2020 theme. Talks will include: —Is Design the new theology? —What is the Gospel's offer of hope to a postmodern world? —Will Artificial Intelligence save humanity or make us obsolete? —Loving to Know —Mystery in the Quantum world —What were Maximus...

Gerard Manley Hopkins only lived a short life and he never published a single poem during his lifetime. However, this intense and brilliant Jesuit priest revolutionised forever how poetry was written and laid the foundations for twentieth-century poetry. He is arguably the greatest religious poet of all time, and yet some psychiatrists also believe that nobody wrote about depression with such pene...

Sarah will extend our series on Poetry and Faith by taking us into the world of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great philosopher and poet of Romanticism, who lived at the tumultuous time of the French Revolution abroad and the Industrial Revolution at home. In the face of this tumult, Coleridge and the Romantics championed humanity, the imagination and the mystery of Nature as the source of all mean...

Robin's final talk in our series explores perhaps the most significant question of all: "How does a belief in universal salvation influence my life and service in the world—including things like evangelism, counselling, and taking funerals?" Robin is a pastor as well as a theologian, and he brings a wealth of practical experience to this huge question. Does universal salvation mute the gospel and...

In this third talk of our Hope and Hell conference, Robin paints a sweeping picture of the story of salvation beginning with creation and ending with the eschaton. He then poses the significant question—which fits best into this picture—hell or universal salvation? This talk is quite awe-inspiring—not because it advocates universal salvation (which it does) but even more because it stretches our h...

Universal salvation raises the critically important question of how we read the Bible—or ‘hermeneutics’. That is what Robin covers in this talk. He sweeps us through a big landscape in three succinct waves—each bigger than the one before. Firstly he confronts the foreground question of biblical texts—and he makes the point that everybody has problems here. How do we reconcile God’s love with his o...

Tony introduces Rev Dr Robin Parry by explaining what Gospel Conversations is all about—expanding our view of God and that means inquiring into mystery. One of the best ways to inquire is to map out the landscape of a debate—and that is exactly what Robin does in this marvellous talk. He gives us a birds-eye view of the long debate over universalism. But he goes further—and he gives us a map to na...

Sarah’s talk is a celebration of the glory in the mundane. That is the theme of the two wondrous Gwen Harwood poems that Sarah takes us through. But this leads naturally onto a view of the incarnation—the ultimate revealing of glory in the mundane. And Gwen Harwood pursued this glory in the mundane as a woman and mother—which leads her (and Sarah) to advocate a distinctly feminine view of incarnat...

Anyone who is not shocked by Quantum Theory has not understood it. —Niels Bohr, father of Quantum Theory Ron gives us a crash course in Quantum Theory and explains why it has profound implications for our understanding of reality and Creation's everlasting significance. Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/gospelconversations/how-to-design-an-eternal-universequantum-theory-implications   Video: http...

This is the second talk on the incarnation in which Tony develops the expansive picture of how the incarnation defines and secures the ultimate destiny of humanity. This expansive vision only makes sense in a big picture of the cosmos so that is where Tony begins. He finishes with a summary of probably the most sophisticated framework of the incarnation that the church has developed—Irenaeus' theo...

Tony’s latest series of talks will position Ron’s talks on Mind over Matter in a biblical context. Ron’s talks have humanised creation and reintroduced mystery to nature. In this talk, Tony's asks how does this apply to our theology of:  Creation? The relationship between man and God? God and the natural world? All of these questions come to a head in our view of the Incarnation—was it a ‘detour’...

In this talk, Ron puts humanity back at the centre of the cosmos. He begins by admitting that the cosmos seems to dwarf us human beings. We are intimidated by the scale of the universe and thus we can feel small. The universe’s immensity is framed by space and time: these are the dimensions that make the cosmos ‘big’ and us humans ‘small’. But then Ron explains how Einstein’s theory of relativity...

Ron takes the debate over to mind vs. matter into language—which is where the mystery of mind is best revealed. He gives us a crash course in philosophy in ten minutes—and uses the colour 'red' to reveal the immense complexity in simply naming the world. The highlight though belongs to his one-year-old grandson, Levi—and he uses Levi's early experiments with words to celebrate the wonders of the m...

Is the mind a machine, or is it a soul? This is the fast emerging modern debate—which began slowly with the materialist world view but has accelerated in the era of Artificial Intelligence. At the end of this road, lies Jesus - who has set the archetype for what it means to be human—fully human. It is immensely helpful to consider this debate over the course of its history—and in this talk, this h...

This short talk climaxes our investigation of apokatastasis from a very unusual source—the book of James. James is not noted for his audacity or profundity as. theologian compared to Paul or John, but here we find possibly the most succinct summary of both the doctrine—and its consequences. Tony connects the passage to our psychology—and he does this by telling a story of his visit to the dark his...