Greystone Conversations

Imagine that leading Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians sit down at a table to discuss justification by faith. And imagine that those Protestants are not nominal liberals but are among the most celebrated, reliable, trustworthy, and representative theologians in history. Now imagine that this assembled group reaches an agreement on justification by faith. In 1541 leading Catholic and Protes...

What difference might it make to Reformed systematic theology if we were to recover and deploy the fundamental importance of the Trinity, the incarnation, the ascension, and especially the Church, rather than expend all our energy only on the (certainly indispensable) doctrines of justification by faith alone, epistemology and revelation, theological method, the cross, and the atonement? In the 19...

Can we speak properly of the repentance of Jesus Christ, the One whom the Scriptures say knew no sin nor was deceit ever found in his mouth? Can we hope in him as the faithful Israel of God without doing so? According to Deuteronomy 30:1-3, the only way for Israel to return from exile and enjoy renewed fellowship with Yahweh is for them to repent with all their heart and soul. But as Jeremiah demo...

How might the phenomenon of terroir --that feature of wine in which the wine truly communicates place--illuminate the task of theology, and with it the anti-modern core of faithful theological reflection and practice? In the 228 references to wine in Holy Scripture, wine is referred to as, on the one hand, a normal part of human culture, and on the other hand, as symbolic and instrumental of God&a...

Our ethical relationship to technology is not exhausted by the familiar issues of too much screen time, pornography, or the vulnerabilities of social media. Neither is it as simple as using or not using this or that technology. Tech ethics is an implicate of theological anthropology--an aspect and fruit of understanding who we are and what we are for. In various episodes of Greystone Conversations...

What does the Exodus event have to do with contemporary concerns with divorce, domestic violence, biblical law, and the identity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? And are these purely contemporary concerns? Precisely because there is so much heated rhetoric--culturally and ecclesiastically--over the issues of gender, domestic violence, abuse, and...

How will our love finally be perfected? And how will our perfected love relate directly to our final fullness of joy? Today's Greystone Conversations episode explores Anselm of Canterbury's work Proslogion. But in exploring this great work, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, Greystone President and Fellow of Scripture and Theology, seeks to highlight an often and routinely overlooked part of Anselm&apo...

What does the sacramental table have to do with the confession of Lord Jesus Christ, and what do these have to do with Reformed catholicity? Today we're featuring a lecture given in Waco Texas called “The Christ of Reformed Catholicity” by Dr. Mark A. Garcia. In this lecture, Dr. Garcia seeks to answer these questions and more by focusing on two aspects of the liturgical life of the church: t...

Is Paul's famous Areopagus speech in Acts 17 a model for the Church's engagement with other religions? How so, or how not?  Today's Episode of Greystone Conversations introduces our listeners to the Rev. Dr. Flavien Pardigon. Dr. Pardigon is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) who teaches at a variety of theological institutions on four different continents and is...

It is not enough to have a high view of Scripture if we do not also have a high use of Scripture. In fact, a failure in our use of Scripture can empty our high view of Scripture of any real value or importance. It is arguably the case that the confessional Reformed tradition has the most vested interest in ensuring that its famously high view of what Scripture is finds expression in the classroom...

Do we struggle against a downward tug when contemplating God’s perfect happiness or beatitude? Does it seem too human to speak of God as perfectly happy? How might we confess the perfection of God as blessed in a way that is both faithful and edifying? What blessings might be ours if we were to return to the realm of the perfectly happy God? The Christian tradition has a varied history of locating...

Evolution. Our reaction to this word may reflect the legacy of one or the other of two orthodox Reformed perspectives on what it is and how we approach it. Two of the greatest and most influential of American Presbyterian theologians, Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, weighed in on the new theories being propounded in their day by one Charles Darwin. Both Hodge and Warfield are justly famous for t...

“That biblical commands are not arbitrary decrees but correspond to the way the world is and will be is fully appreciable only as we inhabit the Bible’s narrative and appropriate its perspective on how the world is and will be. The point is important because it will by no means necessarily be evident within the worldviews of our society that biblical commands correspond to the way the world is. Th...

Might the wilderness experience of Israel, including its story of complaint in the midst of great blessing, mean more to us if we were to believe that, in a real sense, we were there? Might it help us to see (or hear) ways that we sometimes sound like we still are? One less we should take from Israel's story is that the shape of the Christian life--as a kind of retelling of that story--is one...

In what ways does the final vision of the Church’s identity and activity at the end of Scripture in Revelation help us to understand the beginning of Scripture in Genesis in light of Leviticus? And within that world, how does it help us to understand the meaning of male and female as vocation? In the last several episodes of Greystone Conversations, we have explored the concept of ritual as far mo...

How can the Church’s embrace of space within the biblical ritual world amount to a commitment to the visible gathered Church which proclaims the truth of belonging and home to a world struggling with a loss of place and with homesickness? How can the Church’s proclamation of the gospel meet neighbors who struggle with a kind of spiritual nostalgia echoing from the cavernous regions of our deep, th...

Our world is currently overwhelmed with cries for protests and resistance, and the confessional Reformed church often sits uneasily between a recognition of the place and need for certain cries of this sort and the equally important need to distance herself—for sound, biblical, and theological reasons—from many of them. Even when the world is effective in identifying specific ills, it is incapable...

How can a ritual vision of reality enrich and advance the confessional Reformed tradition? Does, or can, ritual have anything to do with being Reformed in the first place? Thoughtful critiques of evangelical Christianity have long complained of the Gnosticism infecting everything from church teaching to worship, including, especially, its often anemic grasp of the why and the what of the Sacrament...

The problem with Roman Catholicism is that it is insufficiently catholic. The problem with Protestantism, including confessional Reformed Christianity, is that it too is often insufficiently catholic. Roman Catholicism is insufficiently catholic because, by definition, it has no real place for the global church of every age. This includes the patristic and Late Antique era, not only the churches a...

Today’s Church is in great need of reimagining the nature of theological education; a reassessment of its purpose, not as merely the pursuit of a degree, but as education in the classical sense of formation. This view of education, measured by our understanding of the questions we should be asking rather than our grasp of what the answers are, will invariably influence the role that classic texts...

In what way should we understand the New Testament and the Church's proclamation of Lord Jesus Christ as a proclamation that takes place "according to the Scriptures"? This question focuses attention on how the Old Testament continues in Spiritual power to proclaim and commend the Son of God to the faith of his Church on its own terms. That is, the Church must not approach the Old T...

Does the Old Testament continue to function for the Church as Holy Scripture, and if so, how? This is a key question for the Church’s faith and life. Interest in the question among Evangelicals and Reformed Christians often quickly turns into the alleyways of debates over theonomy, the uses of the law, and other such topics. But there’s a far more fundamental, even elemental, theological reality t...

To what world do the most thoughtful and effective responses to racism belong? Perhaps it is the world in which attacking the roots of racism can look like picking up a shovel and honoring the Lord’s Day. Racism continues to be a very important and urgent matter being discussed in our population and in our part of the world, but it is also a question which invariably pushes us to consider the bigg...

What does the doctrine of God’s creating all things ex nihilo have to do with Christian discourse? The church has always confessed that God made everything and that there was nothing that was always alongside God. There is nothing beyond him, and so there is nothing he is every truly forced to do. Because He made all things and therefore needs nothing outside himself in order to be (or become) him...

The digital age has brought us face to face with the reminder that communication is invariably personal. There is no such thing as a purely abstracted, objective, informal communication. There is, however, another aspect of communication. According to Scripture, the communicative life we have as God's image-bearers is strategically and providentially ordered to the concerns of God's law....