Fr John Behr’s visit to Australia is just over a month away. I interviewed him recently to get a foretaste of what he will be talking to us about.

John is clearly a major thought leader in modern theology. I got a taste of this recently from a post I read by Brad Jersak. Brad had just been to a retreat on the remote Scottish island of Iona led by Rowan Williams and John Behr (made me jealous!!). He recounts how a conversation with John (and Chris Green) was very significant for him - and helped him unravel some questions that had blocked him for years. This just confirms what a treasure John is.

This interview is a foretaste - it gives us the overall sweep of John’s ‘image of God’ theology and his wondrous vision of Christ as the ultimate ‘human being’. So if you have not registered for the conference, get onto it now. The Saturday conference is one of three events we are hosting (together with Alpha Crucis and the St James Institute).

What I liked most about my chat with John was how excited he is by this vision. It is not merely academic for him but as he says ‘it blows your mind’.

PS here is a link to Brad’s post.

Register here:

What exactly does the word ‘harmatia’ (usually translated as ‘sin’) mean in the New Testament? This is where my conversation with David begins in this podcast. I asked him this question because when he was in Australia, David told me that he was uncomfortable using the modern word ‘sin’ to translate ‘harmatia’. This is obviously pretty important as the idea of ‘sin’ is at the foundation of the. gospel.

What was going to be a limited conversation about translation soon developed into a fascinating tour through the thinking of the early church about the ‘gospel’ and what it means - all built on a very different understanding of the what ‘sin’ means.

This conversation with David charts out a radical landscape for the word ‘sin’ as it is used in the New Testament and the early church. In the modern world we have a view of sin as a kind of transgression of a moral code. And the corollary of this is ‘original sin’ - the view that we are somehow infected by the Fall with a natural propensity for doing evil not good. So like a lot of ‘big’ concepts words, the word ‘sin’ sits in a large mental landscape for us - and David explains how far this modern landscape for ‘sin’ differs from the world of the early church.

That is where we began, but it turned into a launching pad for a far ranging coverage of the conceptual landscape behind ‘sin’ and redemption in the early church. This is clearly very significant for us Christians to understand well because our gospel is framed as a redemption and ‘sin’ is normally presented as the ‘problem’ that the gospel solves. So we need to be clear and scriptural about exactly what that ‘problem’ space is. And this is the landscape that David maps out for us.

As I look back on this conversation, it reminded me of my talks about a year ago, on the Exodus story as a framework for the gospel. My Exodus talks followed the series that Andrew Baartz led for us on the weaknesses of the Penal Substitution model of atonement. In essence, I explained how the Exodus story positions the ‘problem space’ the gospel confronts as slavery not judicial guilt. So David’s talk confirms this ‘Exodus’ orientation for the gospel. I will repost one of these talks soon.

Ben’s talks on the Patristic model of atonement led to the obvious question - what about their views on growth? This is the first of two talks by Ben on this topic. In this talk he focuses on the individual and morality and in the next talk he focuses on society and politics and how they viewed Christian contributions there.

Patristic views on growth are built on their views of atonement; and that is where Ben begins - with a reminder of the ground he covered in his early talks. Unlike us, they did not struggle with a model of ‘penal substitution’ and its associated picture of an angry God. Instead they viewed atonement as ‘participation’ in the Godhead. So if ‘atonement’ qualifies humanity to ‘participate’ with God - then growth is all about making that participation real by our decisions and character development.

That means that the Church Fathers did NOT have a moral code as their model - with lists of behaviours and do’s and don’ts. For them ‘growth’ is defined entirely by Christ. He is the model and thus all growth is growing into the PERSON of Christ. In the most amazing and memorable part of the talk for me, Ben made this real by explaining the term ‘Christian’ literally means ‘little Christs’ - and that is what we are. So for the Patristics we are to be as Christ on the earth - in miniature for sure but still following the same pattern our Lord has set.

To make this tangible, he centres on an essay by Gregory of Nyssa where he lays out this pathway of development in concrete examples. This is very liberating stuff. It leaps over our typical concepts of morality and virtue and instead declares that all ‘virtue’ is shaped and defined by a Person - THE human being who defined in flesh and blood what it means to be human.

As always Ben is so lucid on these complex topics - and he is helping us make a paradigm shift from a concept of growth as behaviour defined, to a concept of growth as Christ defined - so the we may be ‘as Christ’ in the world.

Well … this interview was unexpected. David Artman runs a podcast (Grace Saves All) dedicated to the topic of universal salvation. But he is very disturbed by the rise of Trump and what he sees as the ‘first stage of facism’ taking root in his country. So he wanted to interview me - to get an international comment and also a ‘systems’ perspective on what is going on.

I am not an expert in US politics but like all of us I am fascinated (horrified) by what is going on - and in particular the role of white evangelicals in supporting Trump. (David Hart has stressed that it is white evangelicals not African American evangelicals). So my perspective - one that has occupied my mind - is how did Christians get sucked in to this demagogue and is there anything intrinsic in the way evangelicals frame the gospel that made them susceptible to a manipulator like Trump. Frankly what has happened has made me question evangelicalism (whatever that means) deeply.

As you might imagine this interview was quite a journey. It became a discussion about power, patriarchy and the cross. And I framed it within the overarching theme of ‘rule’ - which I see as the divine mandate for humanity on the earth - a mandate confirmed and affirmed in Christ and the cross/new creation.

If you are interested in other views on this same topic, David interviewed Douglas Campbell the episode before me and Brian Zanhd the week after me. Both were really good according to my wife Anne who listened to them all.

As promised here is the talk that I gave last Sunday at the St James Institute in Sydney. It was well received, and I was surprised by the audience and their reaction. Most were older people - not young radicals - and they were clearly bothered by this doctrine of hell but had no alternative ways to think about it. So for many the talk was a relief that there was a viable alternative to having to believe that eternal conscious torment is an essential part of the gospel.

People also appreciated the journey idea. They liked me sharing about my experience, and the situations that provoked me to challenge my beliefs on hell. Let me quickly explain what I mean by a ‘journey’ and by ‘experience’ as it frames the talk.

I don’t mean merely a chronicle of events. I mean instead a meaning making narrative. I see life in some ways as an interaction between situations we encounter and the mental models that we use to make meaning out of those situations. We are ‘meaning making’ creatures not merely sensate ones and this makes the narratives we tell ourselves vital and crucial. I see growth therefore as the ‘amplification’ or ‘enlargement’ of those narratives - an enlargement that in my experience keeps going on.

This enlargement however is not alway easy. More often than not it requires a cycle of ‘unlearning’ and ‘disordering’ before we can move to a new ordering. In Second Road we captured this learning cycle in the ‘Frames’ model - we begin wth ‘freeze frames’ that we are comfortable with, then for some reason we are challenged and go through a time of ‘unframing’ which can be tough. But grace - and reflection - takes us through this phase to a ‘reframing’ which results in a new frame.

That is what happened in this journey to me. I think that is the work of the Holy Spirit not merely an autonomous human faculty. My experiences stretched me outside my theological models and I had to let them be challenged and reframed.

The talk finishes with a couple of great questions. Can I also give St James Institute a plug. Go to their website as they have some great talks coming up on their monthly Sunday afternoons.

One of the main objections to universalism is that it opens the door for spiritual laziness. It is the easy way out. Why bother with the hard work of discipleship if everybody gets saved and there are no consequences for bad behaviour? Ilaria confronts this challenge in her final interview with Robin Parry.

Of course this is the tip of a big iceberg - what do we mean by growth? How are human beings motivated to grow?

As I have done before I bookend Ilaria’s talk with an introduction to give you the coat hanger to absorb her rather dense material, and then I add a postscript that builds on what she has said.

Warning: There is an ‘R rated’ part of this talk - and that is my description of exactly what kind of torture Origen was subjected to as an old man - tortured on the rack ‘to four spaces’. Stomach churning. But what is more sickening is the comparison with the Emperor Justinian who eventually ‘condemned’ him in the anathemas. How on earth did the church prefer a dictatorial tyrant to an old man who defied torture for his faith??

We are going to build on the topic of growth in upcoming interviews/talks with Ben Myers. He will explore the model of growth in Patristic theology: his first series was pretty exciting on the Patristic model of the Atonement. This next one will be the natural extension - the Patristic model of growth. Juicy stuff and likely to open up new perspectives on what ‘discipleship’ can mean today.

The answer is ‘yes’ - hell was a concept deeply ingrained in the pagan mind. And that is the surprising landscape that Ilaria opens up for us in this next episode in Robin Parry’s interviews with her on apokatastasis.

In this interview, Robin asks her about a recent accusation that belief in '‘apokatastasis” was actually a pagan idea that crept into Christianity. Of course, that kind of accusation works well to stigmatise apokatastasis and condemn it to the heresy corner! This critique assumes that such a benevolent view of destiny must have its origins in human optimism not in any revelation.

Ilaria dismisses this out of hand - and says that the idea of apokatastasis originated in the scriptures. But in so doing, she makes a brief but intriguing point - that Plato did NOT believe in apokatastasis but in fact believed in hell as ‘eternal conscious torment’. This clip is very short - so I decided to expand Ilaria’s comments. (Plato’s views on hell are found in his Socratic dialogue “Gorgias” which I analysed as a source text in my doctoral thesis some years ago).

It turns out that Plato’s views on hell - and divine judgment - are remarkably similar to lots of traditional Christian views. The implications of this are significant: lots of our so-called “Christian” views on heaven and hell are not unique to Christianity but are shared with the pagan world. This is not to say that they are wrong - or right - but it does say that they are common sense ideas that spring from human reasoning not revelation.

So in my comments I compare and contrast the shared landscape between Plato’s ‘pagan’ views on hell (and heaven) and typical Christian views. The results are illuminating because they shine the light on what is really unique about the Christian view of human destiny and what seems to be just human reasoning. As Ilaria declares apokatastasis was one of those features that was unique to early Christianity. For the pagan mind, it was just too good to be true, and too wondrous for unaided common sense to apprehend.

If the scripture is like a land of hills and valleys, then 1 Corinthians 15: 22-28 was the Mount Everest of the terrain. Or so thought Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, according to Ilaria Ramelli. In this short nugget of a talk Ilaria explains with her typically profound mix of big picture and detail, just why the claim that in the end “God will be all and in all” was treated so seriously by Patristic theologians.

It is no ordinary claim. By this I mean that it simply does not fit into our normal conceptual landscape of reality - it redraws the whole map of reality. That is how the great minds of the early church treated it - they allowed it to chart out a vision of the end of all things that draws a new map of reality - a map of reality forged and pioneered in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Since Ilaria’s talk is so condensed, I have attached a beginning and end bookend to the talk. In the beginning I introduce and expand a couple of the new conceptual frameworks that Ilaria assumes and works with. One is what ‘submission’ means and the second is what she means by extending the term “logos” to the adjectival term '“logikon” - both of which are describing not just the qualities of the Son of God but also of his relationship with creation generally and humanity in particular.

At the back end, I append a ten minute discussion of how a typical ‘evangelical’ reading tries to explain away the pretty obvious universalism in this text. I use the commentary notes in my English Standard Version as examples of the ‘yes-but- it doesn’t mean what it looks like’ interpretation of this passage that is quite typical of the struggles that traditional hell doctrines have with the persistent use of the word ‘all’.

After a slow start we are ready to get going in Gospel Conversations for 2026. We will kick off with this fascinating interview I did with Robin Parry about his personal journal to universal salvation. Robin has led the vanguard for universal salvation since the publication of his landmark book in 2006 “The Evangelical Universalist” which probably did what no other book had quite done in the modern era - it put universalism on the table as a genuine option in the gospel not as a heresy.

So it is really intriguing to get the story behind the book, and his journey. I have always been fascinated by seeing how poets or writers actually crafted their works, and developed their ideas. In Robin’s case we get the story - including his early years as an agnostic and his conversion to a pretty fundamentalist form of Christianity. But then he shares the doubts that led to his changing mind.

But we get more than that. We also get his feelings about the book and his position - did he feel precarious being out on a limb so far? And in a fascinating section, he explains why the book was so well received in the end - including by its critics. We also get a feel for Robin the person - his lovely combination of measured thought, synthetic thinking and very irenic disposition which has commended him to many including his opponents. So all this makes his journey one for our times, I believe.

In the course of this interview, he mentions a couple of key texts - here are the details of you want to get hold of them.

Firstly, Eric Reitan whose book “Troubled Paradise” was recently published by Wipf and Stock. It addresses one big issue around hell - how can anyone be happy in paradise if they know others, including their beloveds, are in hell.

Secondly he mentioned Al Kimel’s book “Destined for Joy” and in particular the chapter on whether the Fifth Ecumenical council really did condemn Origen and universal salvation as heresies. This book is a profound defence of universal salvation but you need to read the last bit first to grasp its power: the 2012 funeral oration that Kimel delivered on the death (by suicide) of his adult, unbelieving, son. This event made him ‘come out’ as a universalist.

Soon we will post the last of the talks by Ilaria Ramelli, and then I will repost a short talk I gave on my personal journey towards cosmic restoration.

This is our last podcast for the year and it is almost Christmas. It is a short piece by our daughter Sarah which has just been published on the ABC website - in the Religion and Ethics section. Here is the link https://www.abc.net.au/religion/sarah-golsby-smith-teaching-incarnation-christmas-end-of-school/104758846

In this piece, Sarah reflects on her year of teaching and finds in that experience a touch of wonder - wonder at the privilege of helping young human beings flourish. She sees these young students as vessels of grace, made in God’s image and at Christmas, as echoes of the ultimate image of God - Christ.

Sarah’s experience is a great example for us all - to find the wonder in quotidian moments as we walk the earth. I call these ‘burning bush’ experiences where we see the inner light of some part of creation burst forth and reveal itself. And of course, where greater to see that than in the experience of watching a child learn and grow.

Of course, Sarah is hinting at a far broader concept of ‘incarnation’ than just Christ’s brief sojourn on earth - begun at his birth and concluded at his resurrection. She is working with a bigger view that sees Christ’s incarnation as a synecdoche or crystallisation for all the created order. In this view, all of creation is templated after the image of God, and continues to be ‘created’ in that image. And as we see, like Moses, the inner glory of burning bushes, we participate in this living ongoing touch of God in the creation. The great 7th-century mystic, Isaac of Nineveh, saw this as the pinnacle of spiritual growth - he called it a ‘state of wonder’ at the mysteries of God’s involvement, his incarnation, in the created order.

Enjoy this talk, look it up and read it on the ABC website. In the New Year we will resume our series on Ilaria Ramelli and Robin Parry with an interview I did recently with Robin on his journey to a belief in cosmic redemption.

Of course, Christmas means the incarnation, the core of the Christian faith and the stunning message of God’s participation in our world. But just what does the incarnation mean? Typically it means the 33 year episode of Christ’s life on earth as a discreet event: it has an entry point at his birth and an exit at his resurrection.

But great theologians see it more broadly than that. They see the incarnation as beginning with creation, and they see the divine imprint holding all the creation together like gravity might be holding all of our mobility and earthly experience together. So in a sense, this latent divinity in creation was always ready to erupt - and this it did notably in the Burning Bush experience of Moses. But finally, climactically it erupted in the only way possible - by God himself presencing himself with us.

This wider view