Greystone Conversations

Today’s Greystone Conversations episode is taken from Greystone’s upcoming Summer module, Domestic Violence in Theology & Pastoral Ministry—a module which, in many respects, might be among the most unexpected for a theology institute dedicated to the advancement of Reformed theology in the mode of Reformed catholicity. The unexpected topic of this module highlights one of the challenges the Church faces in giving this complicated topic the attention it deserves: we often treat this incredibly complex and ugly subject as though it is in some ways less theologically demanding and less theological in nature than some of the more familiar and comfortable traditional theological questions.
We also highlight here another challenge in addressing this topic: the disconnect between what we think we see, hear, and feel among such people with the reality that they live with in a largely private and invisible way. We do this, in part, because we are inclined to assume that what we see, what we hear, and what we experience must be, if not exhaustive of reality, at least a very reliable indicator of reality.
The responsibility therefore for pastors and all Christians is a posture of patience, wisdom, thoughtfulness, and deliberateness as necessary ingredients in interpreting a situation faithfully. Such a posture, and the related virtues, belong to some of the classical virtues the church has recognized as important for doing sound theology. Therefore, we see that domestic violence is both a theologically profound and existentially disturbing reality that is no less theological and pastorally necessary to study than any other dogmatic topic.
This module will be taught online for ThM and PhD students, and will be open to all MDiv and MAR students in the Westminster at Greystone Collaboration. For access to this courses and many more, become a Greystone Member today.

How might a thematic analysis of Jeremiah, particularly the theme of the faithless bride, help pastors better serve their churches? What can Christians learn about the futility and dangers of sin by studying the Book of Jeremiah, and how might this theme of the faithless bride lead us to a deeper appreciation of Jesus Christ?

Jeremiah’s confrontation with Israel over their faithlessness is still valuable for those who confront sin today when we consider two key realities about sin. First, sin is irrational. It is utter madness to try to slake one’s thirst with the grime at the bottom of a cistern when you can drink from a clear, pure spring. Second, sin’s power is broken when we are disgusted by it. We must understand that what seems so attractive about sin is actually hideously ugly. Yes, Jeremiah is about Israel and Judah, but it is also about us.

As ministers of the gospel, pastors must gravely and potently confront sin and get people to see its abhorrence and the hopelessness that it drives us to before they can show and speak of the true hope that we have in Jesus Christ. And yet, here's this lingering question: how can we ever arrive here? How can we ever arrive at this knowledge of our sin when Jeremiah so emphasizes the power of self-deception and delusion? As the rest of Jeremiah will show, the new covenant will have the power to pierce our self-deception and engender true conviction in our hearts, and only by the power of God's initiative through Jesus Christ will the Faithless bride once again become a faithful wife and love her husband in her heart of hearts.

Today’s Greystone Conversations episode is taken from a recent Greystone Module, Jeremiah as Christian Scripture. This module was lead by Dr. Matthew Patton, and will be on Greystone Connect for all Greystone Members soon. Dr. Patton earned his MDiv from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia (WTS) and his PhD in Biblical Theology and Old Testament at Wheaton College under Dr. Daniel Block. He is pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Vandalia, OH.

To an extent which must be amusing to some, surprising to others, and perhaps even a bit unsettling to still others, all year long Greystone seems to be asking the question, what time is it? Is this a question the Scriptures themselves invite us to ask?

From Genesis forward, including the long history of the Church since Pentecost, the people of God have recognized, confessed, and taught the theological significance of marking time. This conviction and practice is rooted in the determination to locate time among the things of creation, and thus not as an eternal attribute of God or some eternal principle existing alongside him. As part of creation, time derives its meaning and purpose not from the principles of history as such, or from purely pragmatic concerns of human and national life, nor even from general theological realities such as our doctrine of providence, but from that reality which is prior to and accounts for all of these: the Son of God himself. Time, biblically, derives its form (and thus its meaning and function) from the Son, as all features of the ritual realty of creation do. Thus biblical scholars and theologians, sensitive to how God himself explains these things, rightly point to the sun, moon, and stars of the Genesis creation narrative and the installation of Israel’s festal calendar in Lev. 23 as constitutive and formative of the relationship God’s people have to time. Scholars have also demonstrated, at great length, that this is not unique to the OT nor limited to a pre-Christ state of affairs but obtains in the NT as well. This is especially the case in work on the Gospel of John, which orders the early Church’s liturgical life by telling the story of Jesus not merely as the typological fulfillment of but also as the original and abiding meaning of that festal calendar: the form of the Son accounted for the festal calendar and his contours of birth, life, humiliation, death, resurrection, ascension, blessedness, and the like, are traced out for us in every generation by the contours of time itself, when properly interpreted and described. Thus the Church marks her time throughout the year by the same contours, though on the other side of the empty tomb, with the language often used for these contour points, namely, the so-called evangelical feast days.

For this episode of Greystone Conversations, Dr. Mark A. Garcia sits down with a longtime friend of Greystone’s, Jack Franicevich, a teacher and an Anglican clergyman. Jack has written a book on how Luke’s gospel uses the OT’s liturgical institutions, including the festal calendar, to frame a new history for the Church, one that includes the special character of the Lord’s day. As Jack notes, Luke is the only NT theological historian to tell not one but two stories that each begin with the phrase, “on the first day of the week.”

Besides publishing his research on Luke and sacred time in the life of the Church, Jack is also going to lead a Greystone microcourse in Coraopolis, PA and online exploring this subject matter this coming spring 2023. If you’re listening to this episode before that time, we heartily encourage you to consider signing up for this online and on-site micro-course as soon as you can.

In today’s episode of Greystone Conversations, we conclude to our conversation regarding craftsmanship and workmanship, and consider what might account for the resurgence of interest in craftmanship and the trades. This is the final episode in our five part series.

For today’s Greystone Conversations episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia is joined by Mr. Michael Sacasas and Mr. Joshua Klein, both fellows at Greystone who will be instrumental in the apprenticeship mode of Greystone new Mechanical Arts Program. 

In today’s episode of Greystone Conversations, we return to our conversation regarding craftsmanship and workmanship, and consider the ethics of workmanship in skill, perception, and habit. This is the forth episode in our five part series.

For today’s Greystone Conversations episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia is joined by Mr. Michael Sacasas and Mr. Joshua Klein, both fellows at Greystone who will be instrumental in the apprenticeship mode of Greystone new Mechanical Arts Program. 

In today’s episode of Greystone Conversations, we return to our conversation regarding craftsmanship and workmanship, and consider today the ends in view of such a theory of workmanship we have endeavored to express. This is the third episode in our five part series.

For today’s Greystone Conversations episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia is joined by Mr. Michael Sacasas and Mr. Joshua Klein, both fellows at Greystone who will be instrumental in the apprenticeship mode of Greystone new Mechanical Arts Program. 

In today’s episode of Greystone Conversations, we return to our conversation regarding craftsmanship and workmanship, and consider today the special significance of David Pye to our overall interest in this series. This is the second episode in our five part series, and today we want to consider the very definition of craftsmanship and the larger discussion that that has long been a part of and which bears—in increasingly relevant ways—upon how we think about theological education, about ministry in the church, about relationships generally and to one another, and our relationship to God's world.

For today’s Greystone Conversations episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia is joined by Mr. Michael Sacasas and Mr. Joshua Klein, both fellows at Greystone who will be instrumental in the apprenticeship mode of Greystone new Mechanical Arts Program. 

Welcome to Greystone Conversations and the first episode in this special series focused on explaining and commending an exciting new initiative at Greystone Theological Institute, which in one way is rather unique and in other ways is deeply traditional. And as you have perhaps come to expect, or at least we hope you have come to expect, the combination of something that is new with something that is in fact very old—making old things new—is very much a key concern for the Greystone Way.

We can hardly think of a better example of this effort and this interest than the new Greystone initiative program we are able to discuss starting in this episode and for several episodes to come. That is the Mechanical Arts Program (MAP) at Greystone. Right from the start, we're going to want to clarify what we do and do not mean by mechanical arts, but that will become clear enough as we discuss and explain this fascinating, very old, and yet very timely way of looking at faithfulness, wisdom, and the call that we all have to thoughtful engagement with one another and with the world of God's creation and providence.

For today’s Greystone Conversations episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia is joined by Mr. Michael Sacasas and Mr. Joshua Klein, both fellows at Greystone who will be instrumental in the apprenticeship mode of the MAP. 

It is trendy these days to be disruptive. Though it is a word that may seem to refer to a negative reality, “disruptive” is a word used in business, academic, and in many other contexts to refer to an upset that is needed and salutary. Is there a sense in which the concept and language of disruption may help the Church capture something important about her identity and nature, and how does the answer to this question inform who Greystone is and what Greystone is doing?

Culturally, we live in a time when upsetting the status quo is appealing, exciting, and assumed to be necessary for the common good. We are all revolutionaries now, and revolution is the new normal. To the same extent, and probably for similar reasons, tradition, age, and established ways are unappealing, and pejoratively characterized in terms of sterility and stagnation. As you know well by now, Greystone shares neither of these assumptions and in fact labors quite explicitly against these trends in all that we do. Still, the concept of disruption does commend something to us regarding the Church and her place in the world that is both traditional and timely. In this episode of Greystone Conversations, we sit down once more with Pastor Jesse Crutchley of the Greystone Chesapeake Learning Community at Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church (PCA), and we run the concept of disruption through the filter of the three elements of the order of reality: time, space, and vocation. This in turn sets up a frankly rather exciting moment in Greystone’s life as we are then able to announce a key degree program collaboration that we suspect many of our listeners will want to know about. For more on that announcement, you can chase your time with this episode with a heavy dose of our brand new website, greystoneinstitute.org.

As we now sit down again with Pastor Crutchley, let us also thank you once again for spending some time with Greystone today to reflect together on the shape and direction of greater faithfulness to our triune God. Your prayers, support, and partnership truly mean a great deal to us and to the many we are honored to serve. Thank you.

The form of the Word belongs to the meaning of the Word, and this includes its providentially ordered literary presentation. How do the Church’s ways of dividing up the Scriptures inform the way the Church has heard and read the Scriptures?

We at Greystone were very pleased to speak recently with Prof. Charles (Chuck) Hill, Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. We’ve long benefitted from Professor Hill’s meticulous attention to matters of text and reception, and his exemplary standards of scholarship. He retired from his regular post at RTS in 2021 but thankfully continues to be quite active and productive, and you can see something of his prodigious output if you visit his faculty page at the RTS website. Professor Hill’s most recent book, called, The First Chapters: Dividing the Text of Scripture in Codex Vaticanus and Its Predecessors, published by Oxford in 2022, is the focus of today’s episode of Greystone Conversations.

As the posted book description explains, Hill’s book, The First Chapters, uncovers the origins of the first paragraph or chapter divisions in copies of the Christian Scriptures. Its focal point is the magnificent, fourth-century Codex Vaticanus (Vat.gr. 1209; B 03), perhaps the single most significant ancient manuscript of the Bible, and the oldest material witness to what may be the earliest set of numbered chapter divisions of the Bible. The First Chapters tells the history of textual division, starting from when copies of Greek literary works used virtually no spaces, marks, or other graphic techniques to assist the reader. It explores the origins of other numbering systems, like the better-known Eusebian Canons, but its theme is the first set of numbered chapters in Codex Vaticanus, what nineteenth-century textual critic Samuel P. Tregelles labelled the Capitulatio Vaticana. It demonstrates that these numbers were not, as most have claimed, late additions to the codex but belonged integrally to its original production. The First Chaptersthen breaks new ground by showing that the Capitulatio Vaticana has real precursors in some much earlier manuscripts. It thus casts light on a long, continuous tradition of scribally-placed, visual guides to the reading and interpreting of Scriptural books. Finally, The First Chapters exposes abundant new evidence that this early system for marking the sense-divisions of Scripture has played a much greater role in the history of exegesis than has previously been imaginable.

In other words, these markings have hermeneutical, and thus theological significance.