Greystone Conversations

Does God sometimes unravel the ordinary recognizable form of the Church in times of great suffering, weakness, or judgment in order to re-weave her strands into a new form? Is this because the Church derives her form from the Lord Jesus Christ--the Christ of history, that is, of suffering to glory, humiliation to exaltation, obedience to life? What would we do if we believed this? What should we do . . . now?

There are times in the Church’s life, informed by the story of Israel and ultimately of Israel’s Lord and ours, in which God pries away our gripping fingers from the conventional expectations we have accumulated about how the Church, ministerial training, and theological fellowship look. In these times, which may be times of judgment over our sin or of weakness for other providential reasons, the Church's core identity in Christ remains as a blessing of the Spirit, even as she is, as it were, reconstructed in a new form never completely identical with her previous iteration. This is the story of Church in many eras of her history and in many parts of the world, as historians of the Church have long know, and there is good reason to think it may be what we are experiencing now. In such a time, the faithfulness of the Church is quietly eloquent yet revolutionary, and faithfulness is its own act of resistance, for God’s providential and loving loosening of our hold on what will not remain exposes the firm grip we have by faith to those things that will endure. But this faithfulness requires a new, even rare kind of courage among Christians who appreciate not only the urgency of our reconsideration of how things are, but our sacrificial investment in how things should be.

To discuss these weighty things 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.

Alongside the important place of training, encouragement, and counsel or advice, is there also a need, not only for pastors but for all thoughtful Christians, for being pastored intellectually and theologically?

Much is said in our day of the great need for church planting and for evangelism, and rightly so. We do need more faithful churches throughout the world, near and far. Understandably, this need ordinarily receives a good bit of attention in ministerial training contexts, as do missions, church or congregational principles of ministry and problem solving, preaching, and the like. Seldom do we hear, however, of the need for pastors, and all thoughtful Christians, to be pastored alongside or beyond their training in an intellectual and theological way. 

We might put the matter differently. Seminaries and divinity schools are often maligned, though usually in at least partial jest, for not teaching about everything a minister faces in the ministry. Of course, seminaries can’t do so, and in fact shouldn’t aim to do so. But if we do justice to the properly theological nature of the ministry of Word and sacrament, and of the nature of many, if not all, of the challenges and questions pastors and Christians do face throughout their service to Christ, we will recognize the need for ongoing edification and instruction regarding the Scriptures and important questions in theology. At Greystone, this is easily the most frequent need we hear expressed and the most frequent reason people appreciate our efforts, thanks be to God. One facet of our need to be pastored intellectually is the fact that so much on offer to Christians retraces very familiar and well-covered ground, and one could easily get the impression from publication lists that we are in the same place in theological and biblical understanding that we were one or two or even three generations ago, but we are not. Much important work has been done since then, much continues to be done, and engaging this work can be invigorating and deeply edifying, not only for ministerial purposes narrowly but for us all as Christians who seek to know our Lord better. Being pastored intellectually, and not only emotionally or—to use an oft misused word—practically, is very important to spiritual well being and fruitfulness.

The term we’ve been using, “being pastored intellectually or theologically” is an expression that arose in a recent conversation with two ministers in Reformed churches, Pastor Nick Smith of the United Reformed Church, who serves in Idaho, and Pastor Daniel Doleys of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church who ministers in Ohio. Nick and Daniel were here on site at Greystone recently for the last section of our Order of Reality full course module, and wanted to talk together about why this dimension of pastoral formation and fellowship is so important to their work and their lives as ministers. That conversation is today’s episode of Greystone Conversations. 

One more thing before we turn to today’s episode. With today’s conversation Greystone launches a major fundraising appeal, something we try to do as infrequently as possible, and have not done for some years. What we think you’ll hear from Nick and Daniel is that what Greystone is doing is not only important but urgently needed. Many others say the same, and we are delighted to see how the Lord has blessed our work with such enthusiasm and effect. But now we must turn to you and earnestly ask if you might consider supporting our work. If you detect a sense of urgency here, you are correct. We have needs, as well as opportunities, before us right now, and there is simply no way Greystone can continue to do our work and serve our growing network of friends without support. We’ve done much with very little by God’s grace. By that same grace we pray he will lead you to begin to support this work as our needs have caught up to us. Please pause this episode even now and pray that the Lord&

Last time, we suggested that to recover our humanity in an increasingly inhuman world, we must recover what Ivan Illich called the tools of conviviality. But this requires, at least in part, that we recognize the difference between cultural tools and modes of life which deskill and those which, increasingly, simply cultivate greater dependence.

The difference just noted between cultural tools and modes of life which deskill and those which, increasingly, cultivate dependence may be reconfigured another way: The Church has long confessed and taught that our Creator has blessed us, his image bearers, with unique capacities to mirror him in love and productive self-donation, with self-giving service that generates God-glorifying things in others and in the world at large. Capacity, along these lines, is a helpful index to calling. This skill in thoughtful and productive service belongs to our root identity and vocation as human beings—vocation, that is, in comprehensive life terms, not merely in the sense of the job we do for a paycheck. It therefore finds expression in the myriad ways we creatively, productively, and thoughtfully use, manipulate, and configure the gifted stuff of creation and providence, especially in terms of time, space, and our callings as male and female, as laborers and worshipers, as persons with natural affinities and with spiritual ones. But to the extent our God-given vocations, along these basic lines, are blunted, weakened, even deadened by increased dependence on others, and especially large others like the state, we find ourselves, corporately and individually, becoming less human.

In today’s episode, Michael Sacasas and Dr. Mark A. Garcia conclude their conversation from last week on the life and work of Ivan Illich. The first five minutes of today’s episode repeat the last five of the first episode, to help listeners with a bit of context for what follows. If you haven’t yet listened to Episode 42, we encourage you to do so first and then continue with today’s conclusion.

Please also note that Mr. Sacasas has also taught a ten-lecture micro-course for Greystone which reflects many of the themes and concerns captured in these conversations. Called “Technology, Faith, and Human Flourishing,” you can access this series of lectures and many others at GreystoneConnect.org If you can graciously bear with my saying so once again, if you are, or become, a Greystone Member at GreystoneConnect.org you of course already have access to this series and all other Greystone full courses, microcourses, study days, special lectures and more.

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. And now, the continuation and concluding part of a two-part conversation with Mr. Michael Sacasas on Ivan Illich, conviviality, and the way of faithfulness and wisdom, which is episode 43 of Greystone Conversations.

To recover our humanity in an increasingly inhuman world, we must recover tools of conviviality. So what makes a tool convivial. For Ivan Illich, tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used by anybody as often or as seldom as desired for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. That is, convivial technologies are accessible, flexible, and most importantly noncorrosive. But this runs hard against the grain of a world in which we've been catechized from our youth to believe that without the tools of the professional guild, especially the credentials that they alone can give, we are uneducated, worthless, anonymous, even meaningless. Is there a better way? Unless we find it, we risk destroying one another and ourselves.

In an earlier conversation, and in other Greystone contexts, we've suggested the importance of appreciating the exodus event as liberation not from oppression in general, but oppressions of various particular sorts clarified, identified, and addressed throughout the canon of Christian scripture. One of which is the oppression of the endless demands of productivity. In the Egyptian's sabbath-less world--a world as real now as it was back then--work is a 24/7 reality yielding a mode of life driven by productivity, commodification, and, of necessity, competition. In such a world, you can only have competitors since you need a Sabbath space of rest and rejoicing without labor in order to have a neighbor. To put it differently, if nobody can work in sabbath time and in sabbath space, then, because of that time and space, your neighbor is your neighbor and not your competitor, and life as a result is clearly more than work and productivity. The world in which we live now appears to be very similar to that world from which Yahweh liberated his people, and is thus a world in constant tension with what we are and who we are for as human beings made in the image of God. But how do we articulate the nature of this problem, how do we better understand the way things should be and how we ought to be by reflecting wisely on how and why things are the way they are? Is the solution as simple as opting for traditional liberalism or traditional conservativism? Or is it perhaps a matter of tweaking this or that minor feature of every day life for a better end? Or is the diagnosis and thus the solution far deeper than this and more wide-ranging? 

As an organization and institution, Greystone is driven by a unique mission that includes recalling the ways it used to be valued in ministerial and theological formation contexts. The way, that is, communal, slow, thoughtful, textual, conversational, theological, focused on quality rather than quantity, hospitable, realistic, and humble. And we endeavor to bring these old ways into the new world in which we now live. Taking our cue from the role of the Sabbath in the exodus event, we see our mission as a call to renewal not in the form of revolution but of courageous and thoughtful resistance to the commodification and hypeindustrialization of relationships and processes in our world, believing that this resistance is quite key to the church's welfare and success in the world. Along side which we commend a better way--the better way--of the biblical world and the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Today's podcast, part one of a two-part series, explores and reflects upon hyperindustrialization and the influence of Ivan Illich on much of what might be considered The Greystone Way. 

To discuss the life and work of Ivan Illich, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, President and a Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, sits down with Greystone's Associate Fellow in Ethics and Culture, Michael Sacasas.

The Skill of Hospitality: Ivan Illich on technology and the human future

Is there an order to reality and does Holy Scripture commend that reality to us to believe now or does it only record the way the ancients saw things? 

From time to time in Greystone Conversations, we feature selections from full-course modules, micro-courses, and other events that we run in the Greystone context. Today we are pleased to make available to you the opening lecture in one of the most portent of Greystone's full-course module offerings. It's a course called The Order of Reality, featuring examinations of time, space, and vocation within the Biblical world. It's among the most important modules in Greystone because it touches on many of the central and animating concerns that have driven Greystone's vision and mission since our formation. At the heart of that mission is a conviction that the world commended to us in Holy Scripture--as the real world to be inhabited by faith--is, in fact, a properly theological reality which is grounded in the Christian confession of the Triune God and of His good and holy purposes for His creation--purposes which come to realization, of course, by the way of redemption and the consummation of all things in the Lord Jesus Christ. What does the order of reality have to do with that? One way of looking at the question is to note the highly influential lectures on philosophy delivered by Hegel in which he infamously and very influentially insisted that the start of the story of Philosophy is with the Pre-Socratics, and that anyone before the Pre-Socratics were, in the nature of the case, pre-philosophical and to be dismissed as preoccupied with mythologies and the like. 

Over against that dominant stream of reading the history of ideas, an increasing number of scholars have demonstrated the properly philosophical nature of the cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean and the other cultures leading up to the time of the Pre-Socratics. Among the many benefits of this surge in interest in Philosophy before the so-called philosophers is the appreciation of the possibility that what we are looking at in Holy Scripture is not pre-scientific or pre-philosophical, and certainly not pre-theological. But theology in a different mode from perhaps what we have come to expect it to look like. Essential in that development is the rediscovery of the central importance of the book of Leviticus, which in this course Dr. Mark A. Garcia suggests should be seen as a catechism for reality—particularly as it commends to us a way of understanding the order of things in terms of time, space, and vocation.

In this opening lecture, we begin to think about what some of those most fundamental structures of reality might be. These are concerns classically connected with theory, and as this is only the first lecture in a series of lectures, it will partake of a provisional character. We encourage you to consider listening to the rest of the series as soon as it becomes available on Greystone Connect.

The chart mentioned in the lecture can be found here.

Is the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son of God evidence of the Church's departure from the simplicity and straight-forwardness of the Scriptures? Does it confirm a penchant for arid, confusing, and unhelpful metaphysical and speculative argument? Can we speak of the doctrine of eternal generation as truly biblical and, even if we may, does it matter much to the Church's faith and life?

In 2004, Paul L. Gavrilyuk published a book with Oxford University Press exploring one of the most frequently misunderstood and maligned of classical Church doctrines: the impassibility of God. In his work, The Suffering of the Impassible God, Gavrilyuk recalls his readers to the impassibility doctrine of history, not of myth, and along the way reminds us how Christian theology works and, as a result, what it is. The doctrine of divine impassibility was not articulated and defended as a way of resolving apparently contradictory truths, namely, that God is unchanging and yet that God the Son suffered. No, divine impassibility was articulated to reject efforts at such resolution. Recognizing the inherently paradoxical nature of Christian theological claims, and refusing the temptation to dissolve all mysteries by proposing an exhaustively explanatory formulation, divine impassibility affirms the truths we know from Scripture concerning God and speaks faithfully about those truths while rejecting unfaithful ways of speech and of forcing resolution of apparent tensions. In other words, Christian theology does not aim at fully explaining things that are beyond our understanding—the things that belong to the Lord, as Deuteronomy says. Christian theology is an exercise in speaking receptively and humbly in order to speak faithfully of the God who has revealed himself truly and clearly, allowing that speech of God to be properly ordered by its relation to other truths as well as with a view to things we reject. That speech is especially ordered by God's revelation of himself in his gospel.

What is true of divine impassibility holds for other doctrines as well, including the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, our topic for today's Greystone Conversations episode. Like divine impassibility, the doctrine of eternal generation has fallen on hard times. In recent decades, a significant portion of evangelical Christians, including some Reformed Christians, have assumed that this doctrine is evidence of the defiling influence of ancient Greek philosophy, or evidence of the church's departure from the simple Christian faith of the Bible and teachings of Jesus. Today's Greystone Conversations episode addresses many of these concerns as Dr. Mark A. Garcia, Greystone President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology, sits down with Dr. Charles Lee Irons.

Dr. Charles Lee Irons has written extensively on eternal generation and contributed to the book, Retrieving Eternal Generation (Zondervan Academic). He is currently writing a book on this topic, and will be teaching a Greystone Micro-Course this month on the eternal generation of the Son. For more information, and to register for this upcoming course, click here.

If the Church is facing a multifaceted and complex challenge in theology, hermeneutics, and liturgy, what does this challenge look like on the ground in the context of actual and continuing Church ministry? 

Not long ago Greystone Conversations hosted a series of conversations with Drs Mark Garcia, Garry Williams, and Robert Letham about the concerning state of theology and of distinctly Christian practices for reading and interpreting Holy Scripture in churches across the UK. In those conversations, we explored the various causes for what we agreed is an urgent state of affairs threatening the very integrity of Christian orthodoxy in our day and for generations to come, as well as prospects and practices for the renewal of a properly Christian ministry of Word and sacrament. This renewal must include the recovery of theology for ministers in training but also in practice, of a canonical spiritual reading and use of Holy Scripture, and of a self-conscious focus on the liturgical rhythms, practices, and aspects of Church life as they invariably form God's people as his own. In all three respects—theological, hermeneutical, and liturgical—this amounts to a call to courage: the embrace of being perceived as strange and odd. The result of such courage is the cultivation of a Church community which is nothing less than an act of resistance and the joyous proclamation of an alternative to the ways of the world in our day.

In those earlier conversations, we enjoyed the input and reflections of expert scholars in theology and Christian history who have had extensive experience in the service of Church congregations. Today, the conversation continues a bit further, as Dr. Mark Garcia sits down with three ministers who are actively serving the Church in this context: Philip Haines in Cardiff, Andrew Young at Oxford, and Steve Hayhow in London. Cardiff, Oxford, and London are three gleaming gyms on a belt of Greystone's UK presence as we work in all three of these key cities to advance confessional Reformed catholicity in the faith and life of UK churches and institutions. 

I am who I am largely because of my biography, that is, the way people, places, and things have shaped me. I am not an idea but a storied creature with flesh and blood and history. But who am I if I lose my memory of others--and even myself--as a consequence of dementia? Can I still be who I am at all if I do? If so, how?

For today’s episode of Greystone Conversations, we pause over a small portion of the full Greystone course module, Theological Anthropology, which features, among many other things, several lectures on the phenomenon of dementia. In the small section featured here, we wrap up some reflections on the philosopher Robert Spaemann and tease out some rich and helpful insights on dementia from John Swinton and Rowan Williams. Along the way, it is suggested that the challenge of dementia in relation to the human person, and to the stability of our identity, is a focal point of the Gospel of God and the God of the Gospel. Among the blessings of that Gospel is this simple and profound truth: we are constituted in our identity, and stable in that identity, not because we remember, but because we are remembered. If that sounds a bit like the popular 2007 Pixar film, Coco, I agree: in fact I think this is the chief reason that film is so compelling!

But the remembering we are considering for our purposes is far grander and more powerful than the bond we have with those who came before us and who will follow us. We are stable and secure in who we are not because we remember but because God remembers us. That apparently quite straightforward observation in fact invites, perhaps even requires, some patient reflection and meditation, and I hope today’s selection will help us all a step or two down that path.

If you enjoy today's Greystone Conversations episode, the Theological Anthropology course module is available to all Greystone Members at Greystone Connect, along with many other modules available in our growing course library.

What do we mean--or what should we mean--by the term "biblical theology"? Is it the same as the New Testament use of the Old Testament? Is it more biblical than systematic theology? And is there a reading of Holy Scripture that is demanded by and provoked by its very nature as Scripture rather than just a book of books?

In our last two episodes, Drs. Garcia, Williams, and Letham reflected on particular challenges facing the church in the United Kingdom and throughout the West—including North America. That challenge, we noted, is two-fold as it has to do not only with theology but also with the way Holy Scripture is perceived, spoken of, interpreted, and proclaimed in relation to the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. The relationship of Christ to Scripture, particularly the Old Testament, is a key area of significant concern among conservative Christians. To refer again to a common expression, a high view of Scripture which insists on important attributes such as inspiration and inerrancy tends too often to exist independently of a high use of Scripture.

What then might the high use of Scripture entail? One way this question has been answered in recent generations is with reference to so-called "biblical theology." But almost as quickly as the term was introduced it has required explanation and has been used in a wide variety of ways. Do we mean, by biblical theology, something different from or even the opposite of systematic or dogmatic theology? Does the term mean a theology that is more biblical than other approaches? Does it refer to a largely descriptive and historical enterprise characterizing how various biblical authors or later editors understood the subject matter they deal with? More common in conservative circles, does biblical theology essentially mean how we can find anticipations of Jesus in the Old Testament that are confirmed explicitly in the New Testament—or more generally, the New Testament use of the Old Testament? And should our reading rules and strategies start with and even end with our reading rules for any other kind of text? Or does the fact that Scripture is God's Word play a difference in how we read from the start?

At Greystone, the use of Scripture connected to a properly high view of Scripture serves as a key aspect of our mission for the renewal and re-invigoration of the Church in faith and life. Understanding this Greystone mission can be approached by way of the reasons why Greystone answers "no" to all of those aforementioned approaches to or models of biblical theology. What then do we want to say about biblical theology?

Dr. Don Collett, Greystone Fellow in Old Testament and professor of Old Testament at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA (USA). He has been teaching course modules and participating in rich conversations with us at Greystone from the beginning, and has often provided stimulating and compelling explanations of biblical theology as it ought to be carried out against a backdrop of not only modern critical and evangelical approaches to Scripture, but more importantly against the backdrop of the Church herself and her particular faith-claims and commitments concerning Lord Jesus Christ. 

In today's Greystone Conversations episode, we are pleased to invite you to listen in on the first lecture segment in Dr. Collett's new full-course module with Greystone called Hermeneutics of Christian Scripture which was recently run live at Greystone and is nearly ready to be posted in fully produced form for Greystone Members at Greystone Connect. In this opening lecture, Dr. Collett introduces many of the concerns of the course module as a whole, remarking on many of the concerns addressed above.

In our last Greystone Conversations episode, we asked the question of how long can the Christian Faith survive in recognizable form in a Church context where the work of theology is held in suspicion and the priority of divine authorship of Holy Scripture plays little to no role in biblical interpretation? We asked if there is not a true sense in which the frontlines of the Church's spiritual warfare today is in the library? 

As we turn our attention to possible remedies for this situation, does our concern for ideas suggest a new kind of Gnosticism or is there another way to think about the rehabilitation of the theological life of the church in relationship to Scripture and the ministry? 

Last episode, Drs. Letham, Williams, and Garcia explored the issues at hand regarding the questions above. Today's episode explores what the solution or solutions might look like. That solution we suggest includes at least three elements: 

1. the recovery of properly theological interest in the faith, life, and ministry of Christ's church, and one which we recognized has both exegetical roots and exegetical consequences. Our theology shapes how we read Scripture, whether we intend this relationship or not. And it is in fact quite unbiblical to divorce faithful, biblical reading and interpretation from the work of Theology. Theology is in fact the disciplined and ordered reading of Holy Scripture which attends to its anchor in the trinitarian God of the Christian faith, and the purpose of that God in history. A purpose brought to its fullness, beginning to end, in the Lord Jesus Christ. 

2. Attention to the institutional and organizational contexts in which such a recovery might be advanced. This requires exploration of the successes and failures of traditional institutions but also openness to the ways non-traditional and newer entities might be well equipped to serve as vehicles for further reformation of the church according to the word of God.

3. Liturgy. We are Gnostics, and so we must not allow ourselves to indulge the temptation to think that the remedy is simply more ideas or better ideas whether about doctrine or the Scriptures. No, it is, in fact, a refusal of the scriptures themselves to imagine that orthodoxy can long survive in a church context where it is detached from the worshipping and common life of God's people; where the routines, rhythms, cadences of the sacred assembly cannot repeatedly reorder us toward our life in Christ including our thinking.

To discuss this and more Greystone President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, is joined once again with Greystone Fellows, Dr. Garry Williams and Dr. Robert Letham. Dr. Robert Letham is Greystone Fellow in Theology and History and professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Union School of Theology. Dr. Garry Williams is Greystone Fellow in Theology and History and director of the Pastor's Academy in London. Drs. Garcia, Letham, and Williams have extensive experience teaching and writing theology in the UK, and are therefore keenly aware of the challenges facing the church in that context.