Dear friends

Martin Luther described it as “the chief point, and the very central place of the Epistle, and of the whole Bible”. Australian biblical scholar Leon Morris went even further and called it “possibly the most important single paragraph ever written”.

It’s the paragraph we locate in our Bibles as Romans 3:21-26, and it’s where we’re up to in our podcast series walking through the opening chapters of this extraordinary book.

In Romans so far, Paul has been slowly building up to this point. He started by saying that his gospel is the ‘power of God for salvation’, and that it reveals the righteousness of God. But the only righteousness of God we have seen so far is his completely righteous and justified judgement against the universal rottenness of humanity. So if all of us—Jew, Greek, everybody—is under the power of sin, how can God be a righteous God and yet bring salvation to people like us?

It’s the age-old and very pressing question of how perfect justice can co-exist with grace and free forgiveness. And this world-changing paragraph has the answer.

I hope you find our discussion of these momentous ideas as encouraging as we did in the conversation that follows.

Your brother

Tony

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

Dear friends

This week in our journey through the book of Romans, we come to a summary of the argument thus far. Having introduced the idea that his gospel reveals a righteousness from God for both Jews and Greeks (back in ch 1:17), Paul has been unfolding why this ‘righteousness from God’ is needed—in fact, why it can only come from God in the way that he will soon explain.

And that’s because of the comprehensive and universal unrighteousness of humanity—of Jews, Greeks, barbarians, all of us.

In today’s passage (Rom 3:1-20), he dispatches any final excuses or objections to this idea, and draws this part of the argument to its conclusion. In doing so, he takes us to the very depths of the human predicament, and to the reality of evil.

It’s a sombre, sobering passage. But the night is darkest before the dawn.

Your brother,

Tony

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

Dear friends

Thanks for the positive feedback a number of you have sent in about our new series chatting our way through the book of Romans. It’s a slightly different way of driving a podcast conversation, and of exploring a Bible passage—so please keep letting us know how you think it’s working.

Today, we come to Romans 2, and its discussion of moralistic hypocrisy. This is something that Christians have often been accused of—of proclaiming great moral standards in public but grossly transgressing them in private. But in this passage, Paul attacks the failure of the superior, judgmental moralists of his day—the Greeks and the Jews—and holds out the possibility that true morality is indeed possible, if God writes his law on the heart.

Your brother,

Tony

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

Dear friends

We’re back with the our second excursion into the book of Romans, this time on the second half of chapter 1, with its very bracing discussion of human wickedness and God’s angry response to it.

When we were recording this episode, the internet was awash with people discussing the Super Bowl ad that featured foot-washing Christians accepting and loving the marginalized groups of our society, with punchline ‘He gets us’. I started our discussion by asking Phillip what he thought of it.

I hope you enjoying the conversation that followed.

Your brother

Tony

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

Dear friends,

Quite often on Two Ways News, we start with some issue that’s current or that Phillip or I are particularly exercised by, and think through what the gospel and the Bible as a whole say about it. 

But it’s important to go in the other direction as well—to start with the Bible, and see what God is saying there, and let that set our agenda. In this week’s episode, we begin a little series where we’ll be doing just that, with the book of Romans as our point of departure, starting with Romans 1:1-16. 

It won’t be an exposition of all the verses, more of a discussion of the key ideas of the chapter and their implications.

I hope you find this new series encouraging, and very shareable with others.

Your brother

Tony

Links:

- A sermon by Phillip on Rom 1:1-17.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

Dear friends

One of the most widely viewed editions ever of Two Ways News was our discussion of the morality of voting Yes or No in last year’s ‘Voice’ referendum here in Australia. 

That episode touched only very briefly on the problem that, for many people, was a key issue in the referendum—and that is the historical alienation, prejudice and disadvantage that Aboriginal and Torres St Islander people have suffered at the hands of white Australians over the past 200 years. 

The recent death of Aboriginal leader Lowitja O’Donoghue provides an occasion for us to revisit this issue, and in particular—for us as Christians—the uncomfortable reality that Christian churches and denominations played their own role in the sad history of the Stolen Generations. 

In today’s episode, Phillip and I talk about why and how Christians became involved in taking Aboriginal children from their parents, and what we can learn as we look back on it—not just in relation to that particular issue but more broadly.

Your brother

Tony

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

Dear friends,

With Phillip away this week, I’ve taken the opportunity of chatting to our regular North American correspondent—Marty Sweeney, director of Matthias Media USA.

We talked in particular about a debate that’s broken out in recent months in the US over the ‘gospel-centred’ label—and we could even have a squabble about the spelling of ‘centred’ if we wanted to!

To be ‘gospel-centred’ is a kind of motherhood statement and aspiration, but some are questioning whether it has become a cover for having a minimalist view of Christian involvement in anything other than church and evangelism.

What’s the debate really about, and is it possible to be too ‘gospel-centred’?

Hope you enjoy our discussion.

Your brother

Tony

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

Dear friends

This week I’m hoping that you can help me prepare for a major talk that I’m giving in a few weeks time at the Nexus Conference (on March 11 here in Sydney). 

Nexus is an annual ministry conference for the evangelicals of greater Sydney to get together in person for the day, to encourage each other, and to stretch and challenge each other. (If you’re in Sydney and haven’t signed up yet, here’s where you can do that!) 

This year the conference is about how to move from theology to practice—because I think this is one of our weaknesses. As Reformed evangelicals, we tend to be very united on classic biblical doctrine, and very good at expounding the Scriptures. But we’re not as good, and certainly not as united, about how our theology filters down into the practical and moral issues of our ministries. 

Sometimes our differences will simply be differences in context, history and circumstance. We should expect practices to work themselves out differently in different places. But very often our differences reveal not so much that we read different passages differently, or even that we have different theological principles, but that we have different methods or approaches for applying theology to our practice. Or perhaps, we don’t really know how to apply our theology to our practice, and so we just kind of wing it. 

And so in today’s episode, Phillip and I have a chat about one of the angles I’m reading and thinking about in preparation for my talk at Nexus—the historical angle. We’ve faced these kinds of battles before, in the historic debates that took place between Protestant evangelicals, during and after the Reformation, about what their new Reformed doctrine should mean for practice. Those debates gave rise to two contrasting approaches to applying the Bible to our practice, often called the ‘Regulative Principle’ and the ‘Normative Principle’. In this week’s Two Ways News we explore these historic debates, and begin to suggest a better way forward. 

I hope you find it stimulating, and that you’ll get in touch and help me improve my thinking in advance of the conference! 

Your brother

Tony

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

Dear friends

It’s nice to be back for 2024 and chatting with Phillip again, although I can’t say I expected death and grieving to be our first conversation topic for the year.

But that’s the nature of suffering, sorrow and grief. You can’t plan around it, or avoid it when it comes. But we can be prepared to respond Christianly to it, which means bringing the gospel to bear.

That’s the nature of the Christian life, and the tagline of this podcast—‘Gospel thinking for today’—and that’s certainly true when ‘today’ is a day of grief.

I hope you find our conversation encouraging.

Your brother

Tony

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

Dear friends

Welcome back to a new year of Two Ways News.

Tony is not quite back yet—he’ll be with us on next week’s episode—but in the meantime I hope you enjoy this conversation with Talar about ‘first order’ and ‘second order’ issues in ministry. 

It’s a common way of talking about things we disagree about in ministry or in the Christian life—that there are ‘first order’ questions of prime importance that we must resolve and be unified about, and then there are ‘second order’ issues that we can afford to put to one side and agree to disagree about. 

But is that the best way to think about the various issues we have conflict or disagreement about? 

That’s what my conversation with Talar is about this week. I hope you find it encouraging. 

Phillip

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe