Gospel Conversations podcast

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.

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 about God and his work and that is eternal.

I use the legendary work of a great scholar of literature and philosophy, Edmund Burke, to unpack ‘drama’ for us and so give us the ability to go a bit deeper. A great friend of mine, Richard Buchanan, once told me that the breakthrough intellectually on any topic was the first level of declension after the big word…. So ‘drama’ is a big word, and a bit too big to do much with. But Burke’s five terms takes us one level down and gives us something to work with.

Actually I use the ‘drama’ schematic in both this talk and the next one. In this talk I look at the theological and philosophical suggestions of using ‘drama’ as the structure for a divine text. It is a pretty simple but profound idea: most religious texts present us with precepts or axioms – kind of like a rule book.

But ‘drama’ is utterly different. It is much more mysterious and leaves a lot of work up to us to figure out what is going on.

But drama that includes the divine does something else – it implies a very different conception of ‘God’ and his ‘working’ to the normal picture most of us have of the omnipotent God – and that is what I unpack in this talk.The book of Burke’s that I quote from is called “A Rhetoric of Motives” – it is pretty heavy and only for the literary minded. But the word ‘motives’ captures the essence of his theory of drama – it a genre about intent. And that really positions it as appropriate for understanding the Bible as a discourse unfolding God’s intent.

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 a way of looking at the same content, but differently.

In my experience, paradigms are the critical ways to grow and develop. Changing them seems not just intellectual but existential. Sometimes people only change paradigms when circumstances force them to do so. By that I mean, circumstances reveal the inadequacy of old paradigms, and demand we develop new ones. For lots of people this is just plain scary but I think it is the means of growth.

So I am presenting Exodus as a 'paradigm' through which we can look at the same gospel in broader ways. In this talk I use literary features to the Exodus event - and how it is handled by the prophets much later in the OT. As I have often said, "bible as literature" is a new and widening approach to reading the Bible. In this talk I look at the way the motif of 'creation' is echoed, built on, and then extended through the lens of the Exodus account.

So 'creation' is not just used as a one-off image, for salvation but it is an organising motif that recurs throughout the OT - and the NT. So we get a kind of reverberation of themes that echo back and forth; they reach back and they reach forward. The upshot is that the governing theme or image emerges as something much bigger than any of the events that it illuminates. It emerges as the architecture of what is happening. So that is what I am arguing in this talk that the 'creation/Genesis' framework does. In this talk, I mention how Alexander Solzhenitsyn did something very similar in his epic book, 'Cancer Ward'. If you have never read any Solzhenitsyn, and want to find a good - or great - novel to read, have a go at 'Cancer Ward'. It is mesmerising.

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 Gospel according to Exodus”.  It began as a single talk but quickly got so promising and sprawling that we developed it into four parts, each with a separate talk. We developed it with a couple of deep discussions amongst the GC team, but I delivered them.

I am pretty excited by this series and must say that I found the journey personally expansive. I had subconsciously recognised ‘salvation story’ typologies in Exodus but never made much of them – beyond the obvious one of the Passover.  But as we allowed the typology to unfold it got a lot bigger than that. Lots of people have successfully critiqued the PSA model – but in general we are left without strong alternative metaphors, and this is a real problem simply because the penal model is so evocative and strong.

Talk one introduces the journey and I explain the ‘generative’ role that metaphor or analogy plays. I use a technique we developed effectively in 2nd Road called ‘Crossing the River’ and I take some time to explain it.

Of course, modern evangelical biblical criticism is pretty sceptical about any ‘analogical/metaphorical’ reading of the Scriptures. I defend the analogy approach a little bit in the beginning of this talk – but if you want to take it further, then I recommend Richard Hays to you. Hays has written a couple of profound books on a more literary reading of the scriptures – and defends it by explaining how Paul used analogy to ‘read backwards’ into the Scriptures (which for him was what we call the Old Testament).  So Hays’ books are ‘Reading backwards’ and ‘The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scriptures’.

I build some of my ideas on a great essay by George Athas, who is a lecturer in OT at Moore college. His paper is called “The Creation of Israel: the Cosmic Proportions of the the Exodus Event”.  I downloaded it from academia.edu.  He offers us an academically rigorous foundation on which to build a more cosmological reading of the Exodus narrative.