Gospel Conversations podcast

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 stunning themes is that the whole Patristic theology was built on the foundation of Origen - without him, she says, Patristic thought would have collapsed. This does not mean they agreed with him wholeheartedly, anymore than great philosophers agreed with everything Aristotle said - but it does mean that Origen did for theology what Aristotle did for philosophy; he built a coherent foundation for it on which others could build.

I have appended an introduction to help digest her arguments, and I also did something else in the intro - I read out some of the opening comments in the Foreword by Richard Bauckham. I think that this Foreword is pretty significant and a sign of the times because Bauckham, as far as I know is not a Universalist, but he is one of the most notable Biblical scholars in the world. Clearly he admires Ilaria a lot for her academic and intellectual credibility, and clearly he does not consider universal salvation a heresy, but rather a topic deserving of inquiry and one that is growing in interest rapidly.

That is one of my major contentions - not so much that ‘universal salvation’ is ‘right’ (which I think it is) but rather that the Christian church has become increasingly dogmatic on too many topics that are consequences of our core beliefs not intrinsic to them. As a result a lot of Christian cultures are not very attractive to seeking people - or doubting and inquiring Christians. Dogmatism paints everything into black and white categories, so it does not leave any grey space for ambiguity and discussion. Actually let me go further - the ‘grey’ space is where we grow. Dogma gives us the landscape and the borders of our inquiry, but inquiry into grey space is where we go deeper into the forest of our faith and start to see the depth, texture and nuances. So I applaud the open mindedness of Bauckham and really sense that people like him are opening up the grey space for us all.

I also finish off Ilaria’s talk with a postscript in which I announce that - quite concidentally - I have stumbled across a great talk by Robin recently which he has give us permission to post on Gospel Conversations. We will post it next. Robin’s talk is really instructive on the topic of grey space because he traces the different pathways that led some significant evangelical thought leaders of the last few centuries to embrace Universal Salvation. Like all of Robin’s material, it is a delightful mix of erudition and calm intellect all expressed in accessible language.

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 always a minority position, and a heretical one in the early church. Ilaria could do this largely because she is a scholar of vast erudition - and in particular in the expansive world of classical thinking not just biblical theology.

These tapes are short clips of Robin Parry interviewing her in 2019 before his visit to Australia. Robin intended to use them but we never got around to it. So I thought it was a good time to offer them up now. They are gold because they are short and punchy, and give you a good overview of some big ideas.

I introduce the talks with an overview that shows (graphically) how the six talks connect to each other - so you can view them as a coherent structure not just fragments. We attach the first talk at the end of my introduction and will publish the following talks in relatively quick succession.

PS - I am afraid I cannot resist adding a somewhat humorous note to this talk. As we all have found, it is difficult to pronounce the word ‘apokatastasis’. It is a multi-syllable tongue twister, and most of us stumble over it. Well, take heart - so does the voice recognition of Descript, the program we use to edit and upload all our talks. It made several vain attempts to get it, and finally gave up, but not before some noble efforts. My favourite one was ‘apple catastrophes’!

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 preacher declared with stentorian severity that we are all born ‘enemies of God’ and that is our state prior to our salvation. Frankly I found that jarring - it just sounded so wrong. But I know that the view is a common one. I don’t think people adopt it deliberately but they are pushed there by the logic of the judicial model of atonement and the harsh, despotic view of God that this entails.

That is why this talk is so important. Ben takes us into another world that the early church fathers inhabited. They were not ‘soft’ on sin, or on ‘evil’ - but they fundamentally believed that evil was not a substance but a deprivation. Evil was the absence of God and his life, not a toxic rival to God, with some kind of substantial reality to it. If deprivation is the problem, then the solution has to be the presence of God, and of his life. If only God can put on the cloak of humanity, then he can bring life right up close to death - and once he does that, once the life of God confronts death - it will extinguish death just like turning on a light extinguishes darkness and fills a space with light.

This is the thought world that Ben takes us into with masterful eloquence - and a passionate love for the friendly God who has engineered this beyond-our-wildest-dreams reconciliation or ‘at-one-ment’.

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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 Angeles in which he introduced the Patristic model of the atonement. It shook everyone up at that conference in a good way - they were tasting a whole new way of thinking about the Cross and the atonement model of the early church fathers. And - surprise, surprise - it was NOT a model of penal substitution. It was not so much that they disagreed with that model, but rather that it did not cross their minds. They were, theologically, altogether elsewhere.

This is that talk - but split into two parts (this is part one) and delivered as a dialogue between Ben and me (a format which Ben prefers). It is a fitting climax to our series on ‘Cross and Creation’. Ben has the unusual gift of erudition and conciseness so I think many of you will find this most enlightening.

As a brief postscript, I am starting a second doctorate and Ben will be my supervisor/fellow traveller. In essence I am doing it at my wife’s urging (‘get your ideas down in a disciplined way’) and to take the vision of human creativity that I developed in my first doctorate (on ‘the Two Roads to Truth’) in a business context, and roll them into their theological implications. So Ben and I have a background of some indepth conversations. I will keep you posted on my progress. The broad topic will hover around ‘In an era of Artificial Intelligence, what is unique about humanity and how we think? Towards a theology of ‘rationality’.

In this dialogue, I clumsily mention a verse in Job about how God longs to keep us, his beloved, from death. I could not recall the reference during the discussion. It was Job 14:14 - 15 “If a man dies, shall he live again? All the days of my service I would wait, till my renewal should come. You would call, and I would answer you; you would long for the work of your hands.”

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 Mark Strom after a sermon of his – “When God so loved the world…what does that mean?  Does he love ALL the world, or just the Christians in it?” 

This time Anne asked me what the idea of ‘participation’ that is so central to Ephesians 1 means.  And let’s face it, Ephesians does not handle participation as if it is some interesting sideshow to salvation – it claims that it is the high point of all God’s purposes. You could not have asked a more important question. 

So this talk is my struggle to answer it – and I think it came together more succinctly than normal because I was walking and talking at the same time.  Time to draw breath and ponder not just blurb stuff out.

A special request

Can I raise another issue entirely with you my friends. We have all been blessed by David Bentley Hart’s talks and ideas.  You may or may not know, but David struggles with poor heath, and the latest episode is a crippling neuralgia in his neck that requires some expensive surgery. His insurance has let him down and he has to pay for lots of the surgery which he can’t afford. He is most embarrassed by this – but his dear brother ignored him and set up a Gofundme page for anyone who might like to help out. Here it is if you would like to do that.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-david-bentley-harts-spinal-surgery-costs

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 indeed the template of reality. So as Christians we declare that reality is personal and indeed framed after a Person. There is a mind behind all things, and thus there is love and intention behind all things. Simple but profound truths.

In this talk I explain two stories from my consulting career where this ‘personal’ scale of thinking made a difference. As far as I know I did not intentionally try to apply to this model to the situation, it just happened naturally and was the way of wisdom. But in both cases it meant I had to swim against the tide and introduce a new way of thinking that was fragile and competing with the dry analytics that prevailed. I am reminded of TS Eliot’s memorable phrase, summarising his views of ordinary people in a bleak evening as they travelled home:

“I am moved by fancies that move around these images and cling.

The notion of an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.”

I knew then that Eliot was talking about the human spirit, confronted by the indifference of space and time and crowds and itineraries. But I now realise that he was also talking about the spirit of Christ, the logos upholding and suffering with all of our humanness. 

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 tend to be the academic philosophical one. It is a great – and at times tense – interaction!  
In this first talk, I am calling ‘Jesus as the two-way door’.  It began on the third morning of our walk at the now-famous Hotel Akerretta which was featured in the movie ‘The Way’. 
 
This meditation began as Anne was praying for a young friend of ours. It was ignited by a sudden illumination as she prayed – which I recognised as the Spirit speaking since the thought came from nowhere – there was no cognitive trajectory in my mind that morning. But there was a festering unease to which this sudden illumination spoke. The unease was our religious jargon around “Jesus” which seems to position him as the entrance to a club or religious clique.  And the sudden illumination was ‘Jesus is the door – and two-way door’. I felt like I stepped out of a dark room into the sunlight.
In this talk, I wander into the wondrous world of Maximus the Confessor a little. This foreshadows a later Camino conversation. I also intend to focus more on Maximus by interviewing Jordan Wood who is the current new master of Maximus and has just written a breathtaking book on Maximus called “The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor”.
I can remember David Hart telling me that for all his boundary-stretching thought, Maximus was actually only taking seriously the implications of the oft-repeated NT phrase ‘in Christ’.  
Anyway join us on our walking and talking !! 

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 – some of which may not be helpful. It is not just an intellectual word, but an existential one because it so easily tugs into deep feelings of guilt and unworthiness that plague many people – indeed all of us from time to time if we are honest.  That is why being as ‘biblical’ as possible to get behind the word into the conceptual frames that inform it, is so important. And John’s talks here are among the most helpful ‘paradigm shifters’ that I know. 

I wrote an article some years ago on ‘sin’ and what I thought about it. I might change some of the thinking now – and I wrote it before I had the benefit of this talk with John. Nonetheless I think it is worth posting it on our website so we will do that soon after this talk.

If you want to dive more in some of John’s thinking, a good place to start is his book on Genesis called “The Lost World of Genesis One”.  

Of course you can also dive into more of John talks on our website. John gave a wonderful series on Genesis and also Deuteronomy in 2013.  Both are worth listening to, but here is a link to his first talk on Genesis 1 –  “The Cosmos as God’s House”.  So if you integrate the ‘order’ series with his “God’s house” you get a powerful mandate for our jobs on the earth: bring order to God’s house and make it a ‘home’ not just a ‘house’ (John’s words not mine).  https://www.gospelconversations.com/series/genesis-the-cosmos-as-gods-house

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 ideas in this conversation. In essence, John says that it is ‘order’ (and what he calls the ‘order spectrum’) that frames the thinking in Genesis – not ‘sin’. He implies (what I would say more boldly perhaps) that the ‘sin’ framework is a modern anachronistic reading – whereby we are reading our modern paradigms backwards into the text. What this does is to deny us some of the rich meaning in the text, and stop it extending our faith and minds. None of this is to deny that ‘sin’ is not an absolutely core part of Christian theology – but it does modify just what that word might mean for us. And it is a bigger word than ‘sin’ because the order spectrum includes chaos that does not come from a moral failure – and lots of our lives fall into that category. We make a big mistake by sucking everything back into the moral/sin category. It can really distort our understanding of life and how to react to it. This talk is a real conversation between John and I. There is a lot of back and forth, and of course it is exploratory and unscripted.

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 does is to stretch out the redemption story across a complex landscape of the battle with Pharoah and Egypt.  So it leaves us with an extended metaphor or analogy, not just a single idea. But that is okay and I think it works in our favour, since one of the insights about redemption that we have developed is that ‘salvation’ is a vast and multi-faceted act of God in his relation with creation.  
I organise the analogies using the five dramatic terms of Kenneth Burke, and I think it works well. I created a table to capture the comparisons and I organised the talk using that table.  I will post it on the Gospel Conversations website.
One of the texts that I allude to is the important book by Richard Gaffin called ‘Redemption and Resurrection’.  Look at it as he critiqued traditional redemption models as having limited space for Resurrection.  
I hope this talk and the whole series have blessed you and keep provoking thought as it has for me.