Centre for Christian Living

It’s been a year of “Reformation”—of remembering, celebrating and learning afresh from Reformers like Luther, Calvin, Cranmer and Tyndale.

But among the lesser known Reformers was Matthew Zell, an admirable, courageous and extraordinary man who was one of the leading Reformation pastors in Strasbourg.

However, this episode of the CCL podcast is not about Matthew Zell and what we might learn from him about the Christian life; it’s about the equally admirable, courageous and extraordinary woman who was married to him.

In episode 11 of the CCL podcast, Jane Tooher introduces us to the extraordinary Katherine Zell.

Of the many insults and accusations that were flung at Martin Luther and the other Reformers, one of the most common (and stinging) was that their “gospel of grace” de-motivated people from actually living a godly life. If heaven came free without works, what was the point of trying to be good?

And it wasn’t just in the Reformation: Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously wrote in the early 20th century about the deadly effect of “cheap grace”—the idea that someone could accept the grace and forgiveness of Christ as a cheap gift requiring no response from us.

Does the Reformation gospel—the one that evangelicals still believe—cut off repentance and living a new life from the good news of Christ? Just what is the relationship between the gospel and the good life?

That’s the subject we’ll be discussing in Episode 10 with our guest, theologian and church historian Marty Foord.

Dan Wu grew up with one foot in an Asian “honour/shame culture” and the other foot in a Western “guilt culture”. So he was more than a little interested when he read that the Bible was supposedly a “shame culture” book and that we Westerners misread it from our “guilt culture” perspective. The result was a fascinating journey of scholarship into the meaning of honour, shame and guilt in the Bible.

In this episode of the CCL podcast, we talk to Dan about “honour”, “shame” and “guilt”, and how a fresh understanding of these three closely related ideas helps us understand not only the whole story of the Bible, but whole story of our Christian lives—whichever culture we happen to be from.

What do you feel when you hear the claim that one in four Australian women have experienced domestic violence? Are you shocked (or even sceptical) that it could that many? Do you feel anger, abhorrence, or a sickening lurch of recognition?

Whatever we feel, it cannot be indifference. As painful and as difficult as the subject is, domestic violence (DV) is a reality that we must understand and respond to.

That’s what we’re aiming to at least begin to do within the brief confines of this episode of the CCL podcast. Our guest is Kara Hartley, a member of the Sydney Anglican Domestic Violence Taskforce, and our conversation ranges over the nature of domestic violence, how widespread it is, how we can understand its causes, and how we can respond as Christians.

The Reformation was a revolution in the lives of ordinary everyday people. It changed family life and work life. It radically altered daily spiritual devotion and the weekly experience of going to church. Tony Payne speaks to Carl Trueman about this "everyday Reformation".

Tony Payne talks with Andrew Shead about how the extraordinary collection of poems we call ‘Psalms’ can shape and form our Christian lives.

There are two Bible verses that capture the tension this episode explores: on the one hand, there is Ecclesiastes 2:24: “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God …”. On the other, there is a verse like Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

So which is to be? Love the good life that God has given you and enjoy it to the full? Or hate your life, pick up your cross and follow Christ?

Mikey Lynch is intrigued by this tension, and is writing a book about it. He dropped into the plush CCL studios here at Moore College (i.e. a table in a corner of the morning tea area) to talk about it.

Spurgeon famously said that defending the Bible was as necessary as defending a lion. But if the Bible is where the powerful Lion of Judah speaks to us, challenges us, comforts us, changes us, why do we so often find it difficult to slow down and actually listen—even in “Bible study groups” that most of us meet in each week—groups that are supposed to be specifically for this purpose?

In this episode, Tony Payne and David Höhne talk about the challenges of reading the Bible with one another in small groups—in particular, the difficulty of being patient enough to listen closely and humbly to the Word itself, rather than just skipping quickly to familiar answers and applications we already know.

The underlying issue is authority: does it lie in the traditions and common truths we hold in common—even good evangelical traditions and truths—or is it in the Scripture, from which those traditions and truths come?

What dignity, value or significance does our daily work have? Does it really matter to God? Or are gospel preaching and Christian ministry the only things that really matter in the end?

This much-discussed question (at least recently) is the subject of Episode 3. Moore Theological College lecturers Chase Kuhn and Peter Orr speak with Tony Payne about the dangers of both over-valuing and under-valuing our work, about the common arguments and key texts that come up in the debate, and about the vexed question of how our work relates to ‘the work of the Lord’.

Christians have always grappled with how they should relate to the world around us. Is the idea or category of ‘exile’ a good one for thinking about that perplexing relationship?

In this episode, Tony Payne talks with Phil Colgan and Lionel Windsor about what ‘exile’ means in the Bible, whether or not we should think of ourselves as being in ‘exile’ in our culture as Christians, and what difference it all makes to how we live in the world.