What exactly does the word ‘harmatia’ (usually translated as ‘sin’) mean in the New Testament? This is where my conversation with David begins in this podcast. I asked him this question because when he was in Australia, David told me that he was uncomfortable using the modern word ‘sin’ to translate ‘harmatia’. This is obviously pretty important as the idea of ‘sin’ is at the foundation of the. gospel. What was going to be a limited conversation about translation soon developed into a fascinatin...
Jun 23, 2025•53 min
Ben’s talks on the Patristic model of atonement led to the obvious question - what about their views on growth ? This is the first of two talks by Ben on this topic. In this talk he focuses on the individual and morality and in the next talk he focuses on society and politics and how they viewed Christian contributions there. Patristic views on growth are built on their views of atonement; and that is where Ben begins - with a reminder of the ground he covered in his early talks. Unlike us, they...
May 29, 2025•54 min
Well … this interview was unexpected. David Artman runs a podcast (Grace Saves All) dedicated to the topic of universal salvation. But he is very disturbed by the rise of Trump and what he sees as the ‘first stage of facism’ taking root in his country. So he wanted to interview me - to get an international comment and also a ‘systems’ perspective on what is going on. I am not an expert in US politics but like all of us I am fascinated (horrified) by what is going on - and in particular the role ...
May 12, 2025•1 hr 9 min
As promised here is the talk that I gave last Sunday at the St James Institute in Sydney. It was well received, and I was surprised by the audience and their reaction. Most were older people - not young radicals - and they were clearly bothered by this doctrine of hell but had no alternative ways to think about it. So for many the talk was a relief that there was a viable alternative to having to believe that eternal conscious torment is an essential part of the gospel. People also appreciated t...
Apr 23, 2025•1 hr 14 min
One of the main objections to universalism is that it opens the door for spiritual laziness. It is the easy way out. Why bother with the hard work of discipleship if everybody gets saved and there are no consequences for bad behaviour? Ilaria confronts this challenge in her final interview with Robin Parry. Of course this is the tip of a big iceberg - what do we mean by growth? How are human beings motivated to grow? As I have done before I bookend Ilaria’s talk with an introduction to give you ...
Mar 31, 2025•35 min
The answer is ‘yes’ - hell was a concept deeply ingrained in the pagan mind. And that is the surprising landscape that Ilaria opens up for us in this next episode in Robin Parry’s interviews with her on apokatastasis. In this interview, Robin asks her about a recent accusation that belief in '‘apokatastasis” was actually a pagan idea that crept into Christianity. Of course, that kind of accusation works well to stigmatise apokatastasis and condemn it to the heresy corner! This critique assumes t...
Mar 12, 2025•36 min
If the scripture is like a land of hills and valleys, then 1 Corinthians 15: 22-28 was the Mount Everest of the terrain. Or so thought Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, according to Ilaria Ramelli. In this short nugget of a talk Ilaria explains with her typically profound mix of big picture and detail, just why the claim that in the end “God will be all and in all” was treated so seriously by Patristic theologians. It is no ordinary claim. By this I mean that it simply does not fit into our normal co...
Feb 20, 2025•32 min
After a slow start we are ready to get going in Gospel Conversations for 2026. We will kick off with this fascinating interview I did with Robin Parry about his personal journal to universal salvation. Robin has led the vanguard for universal salvation since the publication of his landmark book in 2006 “The Evangelical Universalist” which probably did what no other book had quite done in the modern era - it put universalism on the table as a genuine option in the gospel not as a heresy. So it is...
Jan 29, 2025•1 hr 8 min
This is our last podcast for the year and it is almost Christmas. It is a short piece by our daughter Sarah which has just been published on the ABC website - in the Religion and Ethics section. Here is the link https://www.abc.net.au/religion/sarah-golsby-smith-teaching-incarnation-christmas-end-of-school/104758846 In this piece, Sarah reflects on her year of teaching and finds in that experience a touch of wonder - wonder at the privilege of helping young human beings flourish. She sees these ...
Dec 24, 2024•13 min
Welcome to our next Gospel Conversations podcast and apologies that there has been a bit of a lag. We try to keep up a regular feed but life intervenes as I am sure you all would know… grandparenting and sickness etc. Anyway here we are. This is a little unplanned diversion from our Ilaria Ramelli series - but a pretty connected one. On our last episode Ilaria explained her half of the twin books on A Larger Hope which was the early church. Robin Parry wrote the other half which was about more r...
Dec 10, 2024•52 min
This is the second of our tapes of Robin Parry’s interviews with Ilaria Ramelli in 2019 on behalf of Gospel Conversations. It focuses on the book that she had just then published, “A Larger Hope;Universal Salvation from Christian Beginnings to Julian of Norwich.” She does not summarise the book in a blow by blow way but rather gives us the big themes, which is really interesting. One of her stunning themes is that the whole Patristic theology was built on the foundation of Origen - without him, ...
Nov 13, 2024•22 min
Ilaria Ramelli is a formidable pocket rocket of a thinker. She famously wrote the breakthrough defence of the doctrine of ‘apokatastasis’ or universal salvation in her massive 900 page tome ‘The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis’. Her book was a breakthrough because she exploded the myth that most of us grew up with - that the belief in universal salvation (I prefer ‘cosmic redemption’) was always a minority position, and a heretical one in the early church. Ilaria could do this largely becaus...
Oct 22, 2024•22 min
We have all been waiting for Ben to continue our journey into the amazing Patristic model of the atonement. Here it is. The single phrase that struck me most in this discussion was the ‘friendly God’ - or the ‘philanthropic God’ as the church fathers named their view of God. This is such a contrast to the dark dead end that penal substitution takes us into. I recently heard a sermon where the preacher declared with stentorian severity that we are all born ‘enemies of God’ and that is our state p...
Oct 04, 2024•1 hr 12 min
This is a talk that I have wanted to bring to Gospel Conversations for ages. Ben Myers is the Director of the Graduate Research School at Alpha Crucis - the large Pentecostal college/university in Sydney. He has a deep background in literature (his PhD was on Milton) and also a rich grasp of the Patristic era. About ten years ago he gave a wonderful talk at a major evangelical conference in Los Angeles in which he introduced the Patristic model of the atonement. It shook everyone up at that conf...
Aug 29, 2024•58 min
This Camino talk captures a great conversation on our walk that began with a great question. Great questions are often the pathway to growth – and this is because they usually lift the lid on a topic that we really don’t understand, but skip over with cliches to cover our ignorance up. Anne is not the kind of person who happily just skips over things… I can remember many years ago when she asked Mark Strom after a sermon of his – “When God so loved the world…what does that mean? Does he love ALL...
Aug 13, 2024•35 min
Here is the second part of my talk on Jesus as the Two way Door. The first talk opened up the whole landscape of reality that the Christian message opens up – not just the ‘religious’ experience but the whole experience of how we approach life. I went back to Maximus and his picture of how reality is framed by the mind of God, and within the treaty, now the Logos was and is the architect and indeed the template of reality. So as Christians we declare that reality is personal and indeed framed af...
Jul 31, 2024•26 min
We are starting up a new series in Breakfast with Jesus based on conversations that Anne and I enjoyed as we walked some of the famous El Camino trail recently. Let me say that I do not use the word ‘conversation’ lightly. Anne has been my thought partner all our lives together – and in a really productive way. I mean that she brings intuition and experience and truth-telling to our talks – and I tend to be the academic philosophical one. It is a great – and at times tense – interaction! In this...
Jul 10, 2024•35 min
Here is the second part of my conversation with John Walton on how order not sin frames the book of Genesis – including the Fall. In this talk John gets more specific about the order spectrum of order, non-order and disorder. ‘Sin’ is obviously an important word, and central to the Christian doctrine. But it is also a loaded word, and one that works like a sinkhole to suck in streams of meaning – some of which may not be helpful. It is not just an intellectual word, but an existential one becaus...
Jul 01, 2024•49 min
We continue our reposting of some gems from our past library of talks. This episode is highly significant partly because of the big idea but also because it is John Walton who espouses it. John as you know is a legendary Bible scholar and author, and is the major voice for putting the OT back into the worldview of the Ancient Near East. That gives a fair bit of weight to the rather innovative ideas in this conversation. In essence, John says that it is ‘order’ (and what he calls the ‘order spect...
Jun 23, 2024•45 min
In this final talk, I summarise five profound ways that the Exodus narrative reframes and stretches the traditional gospel of Penal Substitution. My aim was to leave us with a metaphor that can rival the evocative power of the Penal model not just critique it systematically. In my experience, the Exodus story does this and that is what i want to share in this talk. One thing that the Exodus story does is to stretch out the redemption story across a complex landscape of the battle with Pharoah an...
Jun 11, 2024•44 min
Here is the third talk in our journey through Exodus as an analogy of redemption. In this talk we explore Exodus through the lens of drama. Of course, the whole Bible is in essence a drama in that it is a narrative or story grounded in events rather than abstract ideas. So we have to discern the ideas that the story generates. And in a way that is not a closed book – simply because the ideas are about God and his work and that is eternal. I use the legendary work of a great scholar of literature...
May 23, 2024•30 min
Welcome back to Gospel Conversations. So on with the Exodus journey as we 'cross the river and start to generate some new paradigms for the gospel. I like the term 'paradigm' as it does explain what we are trying to do rather well. A paradigm is a way of looking at something or a way of arranging it in our minds. So it is a 'pattern'. In a sense it is very different from 'content. It is much more a way of looking at the same content, but differently. In my experience, paradigms are the critical ...
May 15, 2024•48 min
Welcome to a new series called ‘What is the Gospel?’ It builds on the ‘Cross and Creation’ talks that Andrew and I gave. Those talks explored difficulties in the traditional ‘Penal Substitution Model’ but in a sense they left us with a void – what alternative image(s) can replace the Penal model. This is what we now move onto with the ‘What is the gospel’ series. First cab off the rank is “The Gospel according to Exodus”. It began as a single talk but quickly got so promising and sprawling that ...
Apr 30, 2024•56 min
Well, we have finished the trilogy of Iain Provan’s talks on creation and it provides a nice foundation for all of our thinking in Gospel Conversations. In this next podcast I pick up the Breakfast with Jesus journey through Ezekiel that Anne and I enjoyed so much. You will see a lot of resonances with Iain’s talks. In this talk I ask a question that might seem obvious but in fact is not – ‘What is glory?’ I confess that I never much asked this question for most of my early Christian life, so I ...
Apr 21, 2024•30 min
Here is the third and final of our reboots from Iain Provan’s epic 2011 series on the Old Testament Reloaded – “What is Creation?”. In this talk Iain concludes his magnificent trilogy of talks positioning the vast Mosaic vision of God and reality in contrast to the prevailing Ancient Near Eastern worldviews. It is so important to grasp the fact that this was a contest of worldviews – not religions. In the ANE world, the ‘cosmology’ was their total worldview – it was philosophy, reality, society ...
Apr 16, 2024•59 min
This episode is a repost of a talk by Iain Provan from his epic series on the ‘Old Testament Reloaded’ in 2011. Originally titled ‘Who is God?’ we have renamed it ‘Was Dawkins right about the angry God?’ because that is fundamentally what Iain concentrates on. It is a wonderful talk that is foundational for any Christian’s faith. With his characteristic understated Scottish style, Iain brilliantly lays down the most basic foundation for our faith – the notion that God is not only eternal and sov...
Mar 27, 2024•1 hr 5 min
Tadionally we treat salvation as an individual event, but Ezekiel has a far wider scope. He sees the object of salvation is the whole cosmos not just individuals, and he sees the cosmos as the temple of God. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe
Mar 17, 2024•28 min
Welcome to Gospel Conversations We have an amazing backlog of great talks from great speakers and thinkers going back over a decade. So we've decided to republish some of them to supplement our ongoing offerings. We're going to begin with some seminal talks by Ian Proven. Ian is one of the leading Old Testament scholars in the world. And he gave a wonderful series for us on Genesis in 2011. We want to start with a few of these talks because, as you know, we emphasize the creation gospel in Gospe...
Mar 04, 2024•1 hr 12 min
Did Paul have an introspective conscience over sin? The answer is “no”’according to a classic article and Tony explains the reasoning in this podcast. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe
Feb 11, 2024•24 min
Welcome to the next installment in the Breakfast with Jesus series. There's been a long pause since I did Ezekiel chapter one. Ezekiel is such an important book and, the more I think about Ezekiel, the more it frames a lot of the gospel. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe
Jan 15, 2024•28 min
