Gospel Conversations

Esther Meek opens the afternoon session by addressing how Love invites the Real.

In this third and final section on Subsidiary Focal Integration Esther introduces Love as key component of her Covenant Epistemology.

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.

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.

This is the third talk in our Habakkuk series, and in it Tony dives into the Exodus as an alternative paradigm on redemption.  He contrasts the very significant differences in emphasis that the Exodus paradigm of redemption introduces when compared to the Penal Substitution model.  Then he opens up the grand cosmic sweep that the Exodus model opens up – and he finishes with a very different picture of God’s wrath that Habakkuk leaves with us. In the contemporary debate over the meaning of the cross, this topic is timely and quite exciting.

In this second talk for Breakfast with Jesus Tony summarises the devastating critique by Michael Sandel on the way that Calvinism has laid the groundwork for inequality and a ‘winner/loser’ society in modern America. Tony connects this idea to the prophet Jeremiah – strangely enough – and to the previous talk on the ‘first fruits’ model as an alternative to the included/excluded model implicit in Calvinism.

In Tony’s second talk on Habakkuk he opens up the topic of ‘penal substitution’ which is increasingly controversial today.  For many it is the bedrock of the gospel but for a growing number it is an uneasy doctrine that suggests a nasty picture of God. Where do we go with this?  And why on earth is Habakkuk in any way relevant to the issue?  In this talk Tony pursues a multi-perspectival approach to the topic.  He explains how it is based on a metaphor, and begins by diagnosing some of the metaphor’s strengths and weaknesses.  He then suggests a different metaphor – one that dominated the Old Testament far more than the ‘penal substitution’ model and one that is described in Habakkuk in richly poetic terms. This talk aims to begin a journey for us so like any good inquiry it opens up the topic rather than trying to package a neat answer. Whatever the case, we need to think this topic through far more deeply.

This is the first talk on our new ‘Breakfast with Jesus’ channel. We have decided to publish the first few talks on our regular channel so that you can get a feel for what Tony is intending to deliver. In due course we will move these talks to a separate podcast channel and to a separate section of the Gospel Conversations website.   In this very first talk Tony dwells on the significance of the phrase "firstfruits of his harvest" in Jeremiah.

This is our latest talk from Gospel conversations.  it was also our first face to face forum in a couple of years. Tony took us through the great minor prophet Habakkuk whom he calls the ‘Hamlet’ of the Old Testament.  Habakkuk is like Hamlet, because the whole book, all three chapters, is an extended inner dialogue between the prophet and God. It is thus not so much a book about prophecies, but a book about the mind of the prophet.  In particular it is a book about hope – and hope in dark times since Habakkuk was commenting in the dark last days of the Jewish experiment. Tony shows how the literary structure of the book, can teach us a lot about how to meditate, and how to reflect on our version of ‘dark times’, whatever they may be for us as individuals. 

Why did the wrong guy win? The Disastrous results of the rivalry between two visions of God Gospel Conversations welcomes you to the third talk on Gregory of Nyssa between Tony Golsby-Smith and David Bentley Hart. The towering genius of Augustine casts a long and too often dark shadow over western Christianity. What would Christianity have looked like if the equal genius of Gregory had achieved such dominance? Why did the wrong guy win? Tony and David rove over these questions in a riveting conversation. Don't forget to engage with us through our website or with our new social media platforms Website - www.gospel.conversations.com  Twitter - https://twitter.com/gospelconv Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/gospelconversations/ 

Welcome to the second conversation between David and Tony on Gregory of Nyssa. ‘Gregory and his Sister on the Resurrection of all Humanity’ How a woman’s mind framed the gospel around the resurrection. In a sense that is the topic of David and Tony’s second conversation on Gregory of Nyssa. In this chat they discuss Gregory’s epic “On the Soul and the Resurrection’ which is structured as a dialogue between Gregory and his influential sister Macrina. In this dialogue Macrina is the teacher and Gregory is the dull and doubting learner. The context is poignant and personal as it is set in the immediate shadows of the death of their brother Basil, and in the imminent death of Macrina herself. Gregory is despondent in the face of this shadow of death. But Macrina leads him on a grand sweep from the beginning of all things in the mind of God to the end of all things in the ‘feast of the tabernacles’ when all mankind will be welcomed into the holy of holies. David explains why this is his favourite work on Gregory’s

People all over the world are rediscovering the great 4th century theologian, Gregory of Nyssa.  David Bentley Hart is an unabashed admirer of the great Cappadocian Father calling him the most innovative theologian of the early church. In this first of three interviews on Gregory’s thought and influence, David introduces us to Gregory and explains why he was the so-called ‘pillar of orthodoxy’ and yet was also a thinker who took the gospel into the widest realm of any of the church fathers.  Along the way, Tony and David compare Gregory with Coleridge, and explore the poetic eloquence which distinguished Gregory. They dive in some detail into Gregory’s masterpiece, “On the Making of Humanity” and David explains just how Gregory did nothing more profound than invent a new Christ centred anthropology – and cosmology – that rocked the ancient world.

In this last talk, Mark and Tony discuss how ‘Faith, Hope and Love’ shape all wise human enterprise not just religious activity. They share stories from their long careers in corporate life and consulting, of how Faith, Hope and Love gave breakthrough perspectives on projects and problem solving. They argue that all humans share in an instinct and desire for Faith, Hope and Love so Christians don’t have a mortgage on these qualities. But we do have the gospel that confirms and anchors them, so we Christians can advocate and pursue them on behalf of everybody – and not just in church but in the wider fields of all human enterprise.