Gospel Conversations podcast

This is the continuation of Esther's second talk where she continues to explain the practice of Subsidiary Focal Integration with an emphasis on how the concept of Integration works. At the end of the session participants are asked to share their examples of Subsidiary Focal Integration in operation.

This is the first half of Esther's second talk where she introduces the concept of subsidiary focal integration.

This is the first lecture given by Prof Esther Meek at the Gospel Conversations conference in 2022. The talk is titled "The Crisis of Meaning".

Lots of Christian preaching frames ‘forgiveness of sins’ as the big offer of the gospel.  But this does not lead us far enough. It also implies holiness and wrath as the key attributes of God. Jeremiah 9 takes us somewhere else – the knowledge of God and his work on the earth is the end game of the gospel.  Tony unpacks these epic verses in this latest Breakfast with Jesus talk.  

Where do we put Jesus into our philosophy of knowledge?  This talk by Mark is a compacted, brilliant answer to this question. He takes Jesus out of the religious box (which limits his Lordship to morality and ritual) and positions him as Lord of the cosmos – including politics and history. To make this real for us, he takes us on a whirlwind tour of Paul and his apprehension of how Jesus had turned the world, and its categories of knowing, upside down.  Mark draws deeply on the social and culture of both first century Judaism and first century Graeco-Roman thought to make all of this grounded. This talk is really about five talks in one – but put beside Esther’s talks it establishes Jesus as Lord of all knowledge and all ways of knowing.

The 2022 Gospel Conversations conference has been considered a great success. This is the first talk to be released; an introductory talk by Dr Sarah Golsby-Smith on Romanticism and Knowing. As always Sarah’s talk is inspiring and offers a fresh look at theology through the lens of literature. In particular she argues that the Romantic era led the charge against ‘scientism’ in the 19th century and advocated ways of knowing that Esther argues are central to all real knowing. Sarah finishes with a wondrous unfolding of Coleridge’s epic poem on the imagination – ‘Frost at Midnight’

There is also a You Tube video of the talk at - link

Tony argues that the word ‘hell’ is not only a mistranslation – which nobody can deny – but he goes on to explain how the medieval choice of this word has distorted the gospel and its impact. He takes us to Jeremiah to get closer to the real meanings of what Jesus may have meant by his use of the original word (Gehenna) that was mistranslated as ‘hell’. 

In this latest BWJ talk Tony looks at an intriguing mistranslation by the NIV of a key verse in Jeremiah 7 – and unpacks how that ‘mistranslation’ actually shines a light on the big current debate over the ‘holiness’ of God versus the ‘mercy of God’.  He puts forward this controversial claim: “if you start with the ‘holiness’ of God as his primary attribute, you can’t find your way to the true gospel.”  So where do we start?  Listen and enjoy.

Tony takes us on an intriguing literary journey in this short talk.  He compares Old Testament literature to Homer and Greek literature and explains how they offer contrasting views of reality.  He then turns this contrast onto Jeremiah and explains how Jeremiah offers the climax and the resolution to much of Kings and the anger of God in the histories. In all of this he uses the great literary text Mimesis by Eric Auerbach, who famously compared Homer and the Old Testament

In this latest Breakfast with Jesus talk Tony addresses the question of the ‘angry’ God.  No prophet captured God’s wrath quite as eloquently as Jeremiah – so we would expect the themes of retribution and judgment to dominate his views.  But Tony looks closely at the text and finds a very different view to this….  A God made vulnerable by love.