Welcome to a special guest for Gospel Conversations – Dr Esther Meek. Esther will be front-lining our next conference in 2021 so we decided to give us all a foretaste of her wisdom and she did not disappoint! She explains her lifelong story as to how she began a quest for truth and reality – as a 13 year old girl in a conservative Christian family. At first she thought her deep questions were sin, but eventually she found a bigger God at the end of them. Esther has pioneered an epistemology grou...
Aug 28, 2020•48 min
In their second discussion John and Tony explore the theme of ‘order’ in more depth. They agree that ‘order’ is a bigger paradigm than the ‘sin/salvation’ paradigm – and that it cannot be separated from the presence of God. Anyone who tastes or yearns for ‘order’ is in fact tasting and yearning for God himself. John then develops order into three manifestations; rest, peace and coherence. In John’s own words, “these all come about through God’s presence in the world (not really having much to do...
Jul 02, 2020•48 min
Tony interviews John Walton about his theory that ‘order’ not ‘sin’ is the dominant theme of the early chapters of Genesis – and that we have in fact ‘over emphasised’ sin as the major problem that the Bible and Genesis confront. In this free ranging conversation, Tony and John explore this new idea in some depth. John explains how the concept of ‘order’ is anchored in Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, and Tony jumps straight across to the twenty first century and links the concept of order with d...
May 26, 2020•44 min
Part one I charted the wider landscape that Creation theology gives us – a wider landscape I argued, than what I called the ‘Redemption’ gospel. I want to stress that the key theme was not either or choice between the two – we obviously need ‘redeeming’ or ‘saving’ and any thinking person who denies that is deceiving themselves as if humanity has no problem or blood on our collective hands…. No, my point was where does the gospel begin where does the story of the gospel begin. And we argued that...
Apr 29, 2020•47 min
Rev Dr Brad Jersak explores Christian knowing through Plato, Plantinga, and Paul the Apostle. This is an incredibly important topic for Christians today as most of us feel caught between the conservative ‘Biblical’ view that dominates Sydney evangelicalism, and a more liberal humanist view that seems to threaten the pillars of faith. Brad has a rich mind and insightful perspectives, including a deep understanding of the early church fathers. He will offer us a much wider paradigm of knowing and ...
Feb 25, 2020•48 min
How broad are God's plans? Tony shares his life story: from his childhood in Fiji to becoming a teacher and then, to everyone's surprise, a strategy consultant to some of Australia's largest corporations. He began to see God working everywhere and this led him to ultimately discover Christ's Cosmic Redemption—which is good news for the entire cosmos! Video: https://youtu.be/8fq7xvqQoHQ Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/gospelconversations/my-journey-into-christs-cosmic-redemptiontony- golsbysmi...
Jan 12, 2020•38 min
Brad Jersak (Feb 14th), Esther Lightcap Meek, Rikk Watts, Tony Golsby-Smith, Ron Winestock, & Leisa Aitken will help us explore "Knowing and Mystery"—2020 theme. Talks will include: —Is Design the new theology? —What is the Gospel's offer of hope to a postmodern world? —Will Artificial Intelligence save humanity or make us obsolete? —Loving to Know —Mystery in the Quantum world —What were Maximus the Confessor and Origen's views on Mystery? Video: https://youtu.be/_w2BkOKbWdk iTunes, Spotify...
Dec 30, 2019•9 min
Gerard Manley Hopkins only lived a short life and he never published a single poem during his lifetime. However, this intense and brilliant Jesuit priest revolutionised forever how poetry was written and laid the foundations for twentieth-century poetry. He is arguably the greatest religious poet of all time, and yet some psychiatrists also believe that nobody wrote about depression with such penetrating insight as he did. He was a true manic genius. The theory of ‘inscape’ underpinned lots of h...
Nov 21, 2019•55 min
Sarah will extend our series on Poetry and Faith by taking us into the world of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great philosopher and poet of Romanticism, who lived at the tumultuous time of the French Revolution abroad and the Industrial Revolution at home. In the face of this tumult, Coleridge and the Romantics championed humanity, the imagination and the mystery of Nature as the source of all meaning. Coleridge, a troubled Anglican spirit, found the origin of humanity’s imagination in the great ...
Oct 30, 2019•56 min
Robin's final talk in our series explores perhaps the most significant question of all: "How does a belief in universal salvation influence my life and service in the world—including things like evangelism, counselling, and taking funerals?" Robin is a pastor as well as a theologian, and he brings a wealth of practical experience to this huge question. Does universal salvation mute the gospel and just make us melt into a kind of uncritical pantheism? Robin argues that universal salvation, far fr...
Oct 18, 2019•42 min
In this third talk of our Hope and Hell conference, Robin paints a sweeping picture of the story of salvation beginning with creation and ending with the eschaton. He then poses the significant question—which fits best into this picture—hell or universal salvation? This talk is quite awe-inspiring—not because it advocates universal salvation (which it does) but even more because it stretches our horizons beyond individual redemption into the purpose of the cosmos. In developing his theme, Robin ...
Oct 10, 2019•1 hr 10 min
Universal salvation raises the critically important question of how we read the Bible—or ‘hermeneutics’. That is what Robin covers in this talk. He sweeps us through a big landscape in three succinct waves—each bigger than the one before. Firstly he confronts the foreground question of biblical texts—and he makes the point that everybody has problems here. How do we reconcile God’s love with his omnipotence? He then moves onto slightly broader terrain—we need the read texts in their context BUT ...
Sep 26, 2019•1 hr 5 min
Tony introduces Rev Dr Robin Parry by explaining what Gospel Conversations is all about—expanding our view of God and that means inquiring into mystery. One of the best ways to inquire is to map out the landscape of a debate—and that is exactly what Robin does in this marvellous talk. He gives us a birds-eye view of the long debate over universalism. But he goes further—and he gives us a map to navigate the territory. He defines what universalism is and is not. He explains the different pathways...
Sep 20, 2019•1 hr 11 min
Sarah’s talk is a celebration of the glory in the mundane. That is the theme of the two wondrous Gwen Harwood poems that Sarah takes us through. But this leads naturally onto a view of the incarnation—the ultimate revealing of glory in the mundane. And Gwen Harwood pursued this glory in the mundane as a woman and mother—which leads her (and Sarah) to advocate a distinctly feminine view of incarnation and Christ. A view that Sarah brilliantly touches on in Luke’s gospel where the gentle domestic ...
Sep 14, 2019•52 min
Anyone who is not shocked by Quantum Theory has not understood it. —Niels Bohr, father of Quantum Theory Ron gives us a crash course in Quantum Theory and explains why it has profound implications for our understanding of reality and Creation's everlasting significance. Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/gospelconversations/how-to-design-an-eternal-universequantum-theory-implications Video: https://youtu.be/N1Mg2yzeGQk iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/gospel-conversations/id87854916...
Jun 21, 2019•1 hr 3 min
This is the second talk on the incarnation in which Tony develops the expansive picture of how the incarnation defines and secures the ultimate destiny of humanity. This expansive vision only makes sense in a big picture of the cosmos so that is where Tony begins. He finishes with a summary of probably the most sophisticated framework of the incarnation that the church has developed—Irenaeus' theory of recapitulation. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/su...
May 16, 2019•59 min
Tony’s latest series of talks will position Ron’s talks on Mind over Matter in a biblical context. Ron’s talks have humanised creation and reintroduced mystery to nature. In this talk, Tony's asks how does this apply to our theology of: Creation? The relationship between man and God? God and the natural world? All of these questions come to a head in our view of the Incarnation—was it a ‘detour’ or was it actually necessary as defining the destiny of all creation? Was Irenaeus right when he said...
May 01, 2019•1 hr 6 min
In this talk, Ron puts humanity back at the centre of the cosmos. He begins by admitting that the cosmos seems to dwarf us human beings. We are intimidated by the scale of the universe and thus we can feel small. The universe’s immensity is framed by space and time: these are the dimensions that make the cosmos ‘big’ and us humans ‘small’. But then Ron explains how Einstein’s theory of relativity turned that world upside down. It turns out that light is the only constant, and space and time shri...
Apr 03, 2019•1 hr 27 min
Ron takes the debate over to mind vs. matter into language—which is where the mystery of mind is best revealed. He gives us a crash course in philosophy in ten minutes—and uses the colour 'red' to reveal the immense complexity in simply naming the world. The highlight though belongs to his one-year-old grandson, Levi—and he uses Levi's early experiments with words to celebrate the wonders of the mind at work through language and how we acquire it. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospe...
Feb 18, 2019•1 hr 44 min
Is the mind a machine, or is it a soul? This is the fast emerging modern debate—which began slowly with the materialist world view but has accelerated in the era of Artificial Intelligence. At the end of this road, lies Jesus - who has set the archetype for what it means to be human—fully human. It is immensely helpful to consider this debate over the course of its history—and in this talk, this history is what Ron lays out. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack...
Feb 18, 2019•56 min
This short talk climaxes our investigation of apokatastasis from a very unusual source—the book of James. James is not noted for his audacity or profundity as. theologian compared to Paul or John, but here we find possibly the most succinct summary of both the doctrine—and its consequences. Tony connects the passage to our psychology—and he does this by telling a story of his visit to the dark historical site of Port Arthur in Tasmania. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversati...
Jan 24, 2019•18 min
Our Hope & Hell series has raised a lot of interest; people like the ideas a lot but everyone has questions. We created a panel of three to address eight of these questions that our listeners sent in. In this talk, Ron, Andrew, and Tony give their responses in a free-flowing, exploratory, and honest dialogue. Mark Ridgway facilitates the dialogue. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Sep 16, 2018•1 hr 44 min
As we continue to ponder the hope of 'apokatastasis', we confront some of the 'so what's' beginning with evangelism. At face value, it looks like a doctrine of 'universal salvation' makes evangelism unnecessary—why preach if everybody gets saved eventually anyway? Tony addresses this question by first changing the question—and then building a far bigger picture of 'salvation' into which we can place 'evangelism'. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscri...
Aug 31, 2018•1 hr 26 min
Tony finally confronts the scary verses in this talk—the passages that at face value talk about hell, judgment, and wrath. Traditionally they have so gripped the dark imaginations of the church that they have totally overshadowed the even clearer verses that declare universal hope. But we need to answer the question—What do the 'Bad News' verses really say about eternal hell? What do they really tell us? Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Jul 18, 2018•1 hr 7 min
St Augustine laid the foundations for the doctrine of Hell in his epic tome the City of God. But did he get it right? Tony gives a penetrating diagnosis of where Augustine's thinking had 'code errors' that distorted the gospel and predisposed him to the idea of hell as never-ending torment. Unfortunately, the church of Rome validated his thinking and excluded the broader eschatology that we are now beginning to realise was the orthodoxy of the Patristic Fathers. Get full access to Gospel Convers...
Jun 12, 2018•1 hr 5 min
In this talk, Tony advances Gregory of Nyssa's picture of the Restitution of all things. The question of 'universal salvation' needs to fall onto a big eschatological landscape not onto a narrow one. Only then does it make sense. That is what Gregory does. Tony gives us a detailed summary of his epic eschatological vision of creation in 'On the Making of Man', which explores the profound implications of being made in the image of God. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversation...
May 16, 2018•1 hr 42 min
Our second talk builds a richer view of 'judgment'. What house is God building? is a better question—and it immediately opens up a new view of judgment. Architects judge as part of their creative process. This positions 'judgment' out of the penal system and inside a creation system. Tony explores this new perspective in this talk. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Apr 23, 2018•1 hr 20 min
We recorded the questions and discussions that followed Tony's first talk. We have not done this before, so we hope that some of you will find it valuable to hear the inquiries and comments that followed the talk. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe
Mar 21, 2018•25 min
Hell is the question we all avoid but it is the corollary of hope. How do we fit the two together? Is the traditional model of hell right? Or scriptural? Could everyone get saved in the end? Tony begins to address these vexed questions by first examining the landscape of the debate—the language and assumptions, the possibilities, the history and the problems of all the usual positions. He ends by suggesting a better question to frame our thinking. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospe...
Mar 21, 2018•1 hr 5 min
Rikk finishes his series on Design as the new Theology in this talk. He spends time synthesising his argument thus far—that the language of design offers a fruitful lens to view the gospel because it makes sense of some of the deep paradoxes of creation like change and agency—in fact, more sense than traditional theology does. Then he concludes with a breathtaking reading of Genesis through the lens of design—which leaves us with the picture of God as the original designer. Get full access to Go...
Dec 06, 2017•1 hr 18 min
