Greystone Conversations

Today we reflect on death, courage, and eschatology. Death and eschatology are often connected, of course, but courage takes its shape in relation to both of them. The questions that may elucidate the relationship could be put this way: How do my occasional experiences of great loss or of major life changes help prepare me for my death? Where is courage in that picture? And is there a relationship between (1) eschatologies that emphasize continuities between the present order and the future, consummated order and (2) the domestication of death (as the minimization of the radical and mysterious change that awaits us in it). Might the domestication of death relate to a lack of courage as well?

After a lengthy hiatus, Greystone Conversations is back! The reasons for that hiatus will soon be made public, our Lord willing, and if they are then we think you’ll be encouraged that the radio silence of our podcast has been a result of necessary labor in other directions, which we pray will yield great fruit for the Lord and his Church. We look forward to announcing those updates soon, but until then we are excited to roll out a few new podcast episodes recorded during this interval. In these conversations, we had the great pleasure of speaking with two truly fascinating and helpful guests who are leading scholars in theology and biblical studies: Drs. Matthew Levering and Charles (Chuck) Hill, and we will also have Pastor Jesse Crutchley on the podcast again to talk about Greystone’s theological vision and mission in relation to the concept of disruptive economies.

In today’s episode, Dr. Mark Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, speaks with Dr. Levering about a difficult yet increasingly explored topic: death. Drawing from his own personal experience as well as the long virtues tradition of Christian ethics, Dr. Matthew Levering has put together a collection of essays that use death as a foil for unpacking and exploring the content of the virtues, and sometimes with rather surprising results. The book is called, Dying and the Virtues, and the theme we were most interested in was the theme of courage with which Dr. Levering closes his book. Courage in the face of death, he suggests, is required not only at the time of death, but also in the midst of the many times God providentially leads us through the experiences of significant loss or significant change—providential experiences in which we can say, in fact, that God is preparing us for the greatest transition of all death. Personally I have to say I have found that simple observation deeply moving, profound, and challenging, and it has come to mind many times since I first read Dr. Levering’s relatively brief discussion of it. Listen in as we discuss this idea with Dr. Levering.

What is the form and dynamic of faithful ministry and theology in a contested time? And in what ways might those with Reformed Anglican sympathies appreciate and capitalize upon the very best of that tradition without falling for Anglo-catholicism? Perhaps surprisingly, both of these questions come together in one figure: the famous Archbishop of Armaugh, James Ussher.

On 30 October at Greystone Cardiff and online, Greystone is hosting a special lecture series event called "Theological Ministry in a Contested World: James Ussher as Reformed Churchman," with Dr. Harrison Perkins, scholar of early modern Reformed theology and minister at London City Presbyterian Church in London. You can find out more about this event and register for it at Greystone’s website, greystoneinstitute.org   Dr. Garcia had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Perkins recently about his upcoming talks at Greystone Cardiff, about an exciting translated and edited collection of some hitherto unpublished works by Ussher forthcoming from Westminster Seminary Press, and about Ussher’s perhaps surprising relevance and importance in our day. As Ussher in particular and Reformed Anglicanism in general are enjoying a revival of serious interest among confessional Reformed Christians, surefooted and clear-sighted guidance into this giant of the Reformed tradition is very welcome, and Dr. Perkins provides just that.

How should we understand the psalmists who teach that God tests the kidneys and the heart? Who make much of our eyes, ears, and more, in an overtly spiritual and theological way? What is the anatomy of the soul according to the Psalms, which, it has been said, provides an organ recital of the ways of God’s relationship with people?

Today’s episode is quite different from our usual offerings. Last month Greystone enjoyed a special time of fellowship, of new and renewed friendships, and of prayer and encouragement in the context of a long-overdue Greystone support event. On this joyous occasion, we reviewed various ways in which the Lord has so conspicuously and movingly blessed Greystone’s work in the last two years, despite the pandemic context in which our work, and everyone else’s, has needed to be rethought and redeployed.

We also spent some time listening to various people in the Greystone network who wanted to share how the Institute has proven to be a key part of their own work, ministries, even their lives. (You can see the videos of these testimonials at our website.) Truly it was, and still is, humbling yet exciting to learn from friends, students, and fellow scholars in the growing Greystone network of specific ways Greystone is helping to provide important resources and direction for the Reformed tradition and ministry throughout the world.

We also enjoyed a terrific concert from New Song, the choral group of Geneva College, and a stimulating, edifying talk by Dr. Byron Curtis, a professor of biblical studies at Geneva and Fellow of Old Testament at Greystone. Dr. Curtis explored the often bewildering yet wonderfully rich anthropological imagery of the psalms, and the reasons they are important for us to hear well. His lecture was very well received and, combined with the exquisite food and wine and song, ensured a time of great joy and celebration.

With that encouragement, and facing new opportunities for service to the Church, this support event was organized to help marshal the resources of God’s people in support of these endeavors. And we are profoundly grateful for how the Lord blessed Greystone that night. However, we also learned of many who wanted to attend but were unable to do so, and this started a conversation about how to provide an opportunity for our global network to give in support of Greystone. Today’s podcast episode is the recording of Dr. Curtis’ talk given at our support event, and we would like to ask you to listen, to enjoy it, and to regard it as our appeal to you to consider becoming a regular supporter of Greystone. One-time or monthly gifts of any amount are absolutely key to our work, and we depend quite heavily on your partnership. Would you consider going to greystoneinstitute.org/donate today, maybe even right now, and giving the equivalent of maybe one cup of coffee, or one paperback book, or more, to help Greystone forward? We are truly grateful for you and for your support in this way.

There is a beautiful mystery in the fact that we often think of certain novels and poems in terms of our experiences at the time we first read them. This is both appropriate and fascinating, especially when second and third readings of the same literature yield further layers of our experiences with them. We are reminded, then, that we are biographical creatures, storied creatures, and that stories, poems, and sagas do not only entertain us; they help to articulate and explain us. 

Today in August of 2021 the writer Walt Wangerin Jr. has just recently died. Wangerin, a Lutheran storyteller who received many of literature’s highest awards, is best known for a series of fantasy books situated in a most unusual world—a farm that intersects with the meaning, the dangers, and the promises of everything.

The first book in the series is called The Book of the Dun Cow. Dr. Garcia first read it at the recommendation of Jonathan Stark, his friend, a longtime teacher, and a ruling elder at Immanuel, the Presbyterian congregation Dr. Garcia served as pastor. He couldn’t help but read this story as one nearly consumed with his own experiences of horror and pain in a very difficult time of pastoral labor. Nor could Wangerin, it turns out. Perhaps this is why this book has been precious to Dr. Garcia ever since, and yet it remains a compelling and worthwhile book in its own right, quite apart from ways this biographical sketch may or may not prove to disclose. But then, perhaps we should not hesitate to notice such things either, if our stories partake, purposefully, of the features of the story of everything precisely so we can be sure of the Creator’s purposes at work in his creation.

Despite its apparently comical setting (talking animals and the like), The Book of the Dun Cow is a profoundly serious book and--as Jonathan and Dr. Garcia both agree in today’s conversation--it is not to be confused with a children’s book. In its seriousness, though, it is also refreshing. It does better justice to the realities of sin, evil, and pain than so much of what the world offers—indeed, than the Church sometimes offer. This alone commands our attention.

At long last, then, Greystone Conversations was pleased to sit with Jonathan Stark to talk a bit about one of our favorite topics: Wangerin’s The Book of the Dun Cow. Thank you for sitting with us to listen in. We hope you will consider reading the book yourselves, of course, but would be quite content if we are all reminded by this story that the real world is more fantastic—in the literal sense of the word—than we could possibly imagine in our largely disenchanted age, and that good writing reminds us, even urgently, of reality’s enchantment.

One way in which the biblical-theological work of Geerhardus Vos in the late 19th and early 20th century differed from what then and since has been called biblical theology was Vos’s commitment to the vertical dimension of history and revelation in relationship: by the vertical we mean that revelation is not limited to, exhausted by, or even primarily focused on the horizontal, historical, sequential elements of before/after, promise/fulfillment, and versions of typology that can be reduced to such concerns. Instead, at every point God’s revelation in and through history is related to, in fact anchored by and in, the triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, the realities of heavenly and glorious life and fellowship within the trinity and the economic purpose of that triune God to glorify the Son in the Spirit by way of his Church. That “vertical” reality is primary; history is explained by it, not the other way around.

Ironically, a purely horizontal approach can confuse the idea of “fulfillment” with displacement, and the Son of God’s relationship, personally, to the OT (and its people) becomes at least a strained and weak thing. Unfortunately, the horizontal model continues to be the most familiar and conventional way of thinking about biblical theology, the relation of the two testaments, Christ and the OT, and so on, even among some who would claim to work self-consciously in the wake of Vos’s proposals. Since Vos, a great deal of excellent work has been done in the history and theological nature of Scripture and its reading, and much of it can advance insights Vos commended to our attention. Advancing those insights, and doing so in conversation with other voices in biblical, historical, and theological scholarship will require sustained consideration of the effect of the vertical upon our understanding of Christ himself and the relationship of Church in Christ to all of Holy Scripture. And this is a wonderful thing to learn and to pursue. In today’s episode, we even suggest that the lowly lint-roller – yes, a lint-roller — might help us avoid the errors of the before/after, promise/fulfillment model in favor a more conspicuously Christian practice of Scriptural reading.

To discuss this and more, we are pleased to welcome back once again friend and minister of Word and sacrament, Pastor Jesse Crutchley, pastor of Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a PCA congregation in Millersville, MD, and member of Greystone’s ministerial council.

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Is there a Christian reading of Proverbs, and of Proverbs 31 in particular, that is both determined by Christ and also materially relevant, even constitutive, for personal, familial, communal, and ecclesial wisdom? Is that reading coherent with Scripture as a whole in such a way as to be prompted by it?

The Book of Proverbs has notoriously suffered at the hands of moralists who reduce its message to a range of maxims printable on your favorite mug or t-shirt or framed and placed on your sitting room wall. But it has also arguably suffered at the hands of those who, in reaction to that moralistic misuse of the Book, reduce its testimony to a Christ who fulfills Proverbs by, as it were, doing away with it. This not only blunts the force of the Proverbs, refusing its continuing witness to Christ and to our life in him; it also evidences confusion on what typology, figuration, promise/fulfillment, and biblical theology, etc. really mean. It ends up emptying the proper and important morals with the moralism. It mutes the ethical content of Christ’s work and world—to which we belong by faith—in the quest to be, we think, “Christological” readers rather than legalistic ones.

Is there a better way? And how might that better way disclose rich features of that most abused of Proverbs passages—Proverbs 31—in a time when we need to hear again, or perhaps for the first time, how Proverbs, and all of Scripture, speaks about gender, domestic relations, ordered reality, and the like?

What do Reformed Christians mean today when they refer to limited atonement or particular redemption? Is it the same idea that has prevailed in the Reformed tradition historically and confessionally? Are there different Reformed ways of understanding and affirming the truth that God in Christ saves his people by his obedience and sacrifice?

It is always difficult to discover that what we first learn about something doesn’t quite fit the reality of the thing on closer inspection. The difficulty is often less theological and intellectual than emotional and psychological. This is true for many Reformed Christians who converted to the Reformed tradition of faith and worship by way of the many influential popular presentations of Reformed theology, often connected in some way with popular conferences and personalities. It can be jarring to discover, as some do eventually, that the so-called five points of Calvinism are not really a summary of the Reformed theology of anything, including salvation, and were never intended to be. It can also prove eye-opening to learn that most of the key distinctives of the Reformed theological tradition aren’t unique to the Reformed at all but reach far back into the deep Christian tradition shared by other Christians and of which the Reformed fathers insisted the Reformed tradition was but one--though the most faithful--expression. But learning the real history and theology of the Reformed tradition is important, not only to represent it correctly in conversations and in preaching, but also to ensure that our quest to advance and build the Reformed theological tradition is advancing and building something that really does exist.

The nature and purpose of the atonement is one doctrine that has enjoyed a close reexamination in terms of the actual texts, events, and figures of the critically important 16th and 17th century periods of rapid theological development and of confessionalization. This includes the reconsideration of the often misunderstood language of limited atonement, and the also often misunderstood or mischaracterized teaching of a remarkably capable Reformed theologian named John Davenant, the famous Bishop of Salisbury and prodigious British scholar. Dr. Michael Lynch knows Davenant’s teaching on the atonement very well, and has just published a full monograph on the topic with Oxford University Press called John Davenant’s Hypothetical Universalism: A Defense of Catholic and Reformed Orthodoxy. Whatever your own view of the matter, if you thought John Owen’s teaching on the atonement was or is the only Reformed way of saying things, or if you thought Peter Lombard was a medieval hair-splitter with no relevance to contemporary theology on the person and work of Christ, or if you thought the diversity of the Reformed tradition was a problem remedied by the confessions, you’ll appreciate what you learn in Dr. Lynch’s book and also find my conversation with him in this episode quite interesting.

Please remember, too, that we in the midst of a major push for support as we seek to take the next steps in our development and fund our operations for the coming days. Your gift at our website, however small or great, is a terrific help to that end.

A perhaps surprising amount of Holy Scripture is presented in terms of a dialogue where the identification of the different speakers is important to proper interpretation. And yet, biblical text does not provide us the modern printing conventions we are used to for dialogues, such as naming the speaker before the speech and clearly breaking up the speeches so we know where one ends and the next begins. Why is Scripture presented this way, and how does the form of Scripture belong to its message?

God did not give his inscripturated Word to his Church all at once or as a single literary unit. To use the language of Hebrews 1, it was “at many times and in many ways” that he gave the Word that finds its fullest visible and incarnate realization in Jesus Christ. The discreet parts of Holy Scripture, therefore, mark out the ways God has related to his people in history by particular words, words and messages and texts which have their own integrity. And yet that integrity must not be confused with independence: the integrity of every Word given from the mouth of God is rooted in its relationship to all Words given from that divine mouth and, most ultimately, in the fact that the divine Author is every word’s primary and original context. 

When we further consider that the Author’s self-disclosure is part of that context—that the Gospel of God gives the God of the Gospel—then we can appreciate how every word may be understood as a “conjugating” of that Gospel. The Old Testament prophecy of Jeremiah is full of mysterious dialogue, weeping, and confession. How, then, does Jeremiah function as a canonical conjugation of the Gospel?

To discuss Jeremiah Dr. Mark A. Garcia was pleased to talk recently with the Rev. Dr. Matthew Patton who is minister of Word and Sacrament in Vandalia, Ohio, and who will teach a full Greystone course module on “Jeremiah as Christian Scripture” online and in Coraopolis, PA this Fall. Dr. Patton is also working on publications that explore Jeremiah’s text and message, including a major commentary with Zondervan. Among the features that we found most interesting in our conversation is what scholars call the “dramatic dialogue” literary device, including its relationship to patristic prosopological exegesis and the identity of God in relation to passions and history. Along the way we also talk a bit about one of Dr. Patton’s professors at Wheaton, Dr. Daniel Block, whose work in the Old Testament has been a great gift to the Church.

We trust you will find this conversation with Dr. Patton interesting and edifying. If you do, we’d like to encourage you to listen to his Greystone Online Postgraduate Seminar presentation on Jeremiah and the theology of repentance, and to consider signing up for his fall 2021 module on Jeremiah by visiting our Modules and Events page. Please remember, too, that we are in the midst of a major push for support as we seek to take the next steps in our development and fund our operations for the coming days. Your gift at our website, however small or great, is a terrific help to that end. Thank you once again for spending some time with us today to reflect together on the shape and direction of greater faithfulness to our triune God. Now, the Rev. Dr. Matthew Patton and Dr. Mark A. Garcia talk about Jeremiah, Holy Scripture, and conjugating the Gospel as episode 48 of Greystone Conversations.

Scripture regularly deploys the imagery of agriculture and farming to describe the nature and dynamics of human faithfulness--or the lack thereof. While many might be inclined to explain away the agrarian assumptions of biblical teaching on vocation and human meaning as mere metaphors, others might be equally tempted to confuse the biblical direction of argument with a clear warrant for farming as the highest human calling. The truth, though, is somewhere in the middle, and its appreciation may go a long way toward our urgently needed recovery of the integrity and value of good work, the long view of personal, communal, and churchly formation, and the dispositional aspects of relating properly to tradition on the one hand and the present on the other.

In 1995, poet Seamus Heaney of Northern Ireland received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Probably best known to the wider public for his translation of Beowulf, Heaney, who died in 2013, is easily among the most well-received and respected of 20th century poets. “Digging,” which opens his debut 1966 collection of poems, may be his best-known poem. In “Digging,” Heaney characterizes his vocation as a writer with the imagery of a farmer working the potato field. Heaney betrays a special fondness and respect for farming and for the land, not least because the potato field encloses within itself the lives and stories of his farming father and grandfather before him. That same special fondness, however, introduces possible tension, as his own apparently non-farming vocation as a writer suggests that their hard-won legacy may be broken by his craft. Or is it?

The following lecture is selected from the Greystone full course module, The Order of Reality, and is drawn from the concluding series of lectures in that module which focused on the concept of vocation. The full course module will soon be available at Greystone Connect, but we are happy to provide it to the public today in the hope and prayer that it might encourage our listeners in the value, integrity, and meaningfulness of what may at times seem quite mundane and ordinary in the daily grind of modern life. At the least, we pray it will be of some interest to you in a way that leads you pick up some excellent poems, perhaps Heaney’s in particular, and sit back and reflect on things. Among the highest virtues of poetry is also a reason they are so rarely enjoyed in our day: they force us to slow down, think, follow, work, and only then enjoy the rewards.

Seamus Heaney reading "Digging"

If the God confessed by the Church is real, then it is not merely ill advised but an act of rebellion against that God to attempt to approach Holy Scripture in order to demonstrate that He is and has revealed himself, rather than because He is and because he has revealed himself. In other words, as Christians approaching Holy Scripture, we do not merely end with the triune God of the Christian faith; we begin with him in order to know him, and anything else.

For centuries and straight through to our day there have been attempts to assume, introduce, or defend a gap, even a chasm, between the world and witness of Holy Scripture as such, and the triune God himself as confessed by the Church. When the truly “original” world of Scripture is thought to be the ancient Near East or the first century Greco-Roman world instead of the speech of God whose work history is, then theology, understood as speech about God, is often assumed to be subsequent to and separate from what the Bible is itself really about and really doing.

But this is a fundamental rejection of how the Bible itself speaks, and in particular of biblical creed-like material we see within the Scriptures themselves. These creeds, or expressions of the “rule of Faith,” regulated the faith and life but also the Scriptural reading of the Church even before the close of the New Testament canon. That is to say, the Christian way of reading in particular the Old Testament Scriptures was not seen by the New Testament writers as merely one legitimate option among others, but as the only valid and faithful way to receive the Scriptures, and that valid way was from the start trinitarian and christological. Appreciating this phenomenon of Holy Scripture in relationship to the Church and her traditions regarding God in Christ yields a fresh insight into an often overlooked but critically important reality: the fruitful and enlivening power of Scripture as a properly theological, divinely authored and given, ecclesiastically embraced Word that is positively related to the key concerns of the Christian tradition historically and presently.

To discuss these rich topics we are pleased to welcome today to Greystone Conversations Dr. Craig Carter, recently retired Professor of Theology at Tyndale University College & Seminary in Toronto, Ontario, and author of Contemplating God with the Great Tradition, a book which prompted our conversation in this episode. Dr. Carter is also teaching a full course module for Greystone in London and online in October of this year (2021), and we would like to warmly welcome you to consider signing up for what promises to be a rich and rewarding time of theological edification. You can find out more on our classes and events page at our website, greystoneconnect.org, where you can also consider joining our supporters with your gift to keep Greystone serving the Church and the world with the advancement of confessional Reformed theology and reflection.