Welcome to 2023 and our first Breakfast with Jesus talk for the year. in this talk Tony discusses the famous story of Jeremiah buying a field in the face of Jerusalem’s doom – a very stupid thing to do – and how this shines a light on how we might act in our lives according to the logic of hope. I position this talk inside a hot topic of modern Christendom; the ‘end times’ and how our fascination with predicting the future has obscured the eschatological dimensions of the gospel. Get full access...
Jan 12, 2023•30 min
Tony builds on his recent talk on the new covenant in Jeremiah by exploring how the Epistle of Hebrews uses this new covenant promise in the NT. Hebrews 8 quotes the Jeremiah passage in full – the longest OT quotation in the NT. What is interesting is how the writer uses the Jeremiah passage and takes it further by explaining how the contract based law of Moses failed to deliver what God wanted. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Dec 22, 2022•20 min
Leisa finishes the year off for GC with a profound summary of her doctorate on ‘hope’. It is full of gems and very relevant for an anxious and despairing world. Her doctorate was targeted at the secular world of clinical psychology, but in this talk we get a ‘Christian’ version of this important work where Leisa can be explicit about the theological grounds for her ideas. She aligns her work with Esther’s message on knowing as a form of desire and anticipation. Get full access to Gospel Conversa...
Dec 22, 2022•1 hr 1 min
This is the second of three short talks from Gospel Conversations supporters as a response to Esther Meek's Covenant Epistemology. Mark Ridgeway explores the thought of Esther Meek in the context of Discipleship. He follows the contours of Covenant Epistemology, explores the practice of inviting the real and concludes with some practical recommendations for the Church. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Dec 19, 2022•34 min
This is the first of three short talks from Gospel Conversations supporters as a response to Esther Meek's Covenant Epistemology. In this talk Ron Winestock addresses the big questions of the universe and how Covenant Epistemology can help us see clearly through the two levels of knowing. Ron argues that since Isaac Newton we have emphasised the focal and discredited the subsidiary. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Dec 01, 2022•37 min
In this closing section of the conference Esther Meek finishes with the question, how does the Real Invite Us? Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe
Nov 29, 2022•35 min
In this talk Tony explores the extraordinary declaration of the ‘new covenant’ in Jeremiah 31 and asks “What is ‘new’ about this new covenant?” He argues that is far more ‘new’ than most Christians assume: it is a paradigm shift that overturns the very nature of contract and conditions. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Nov 26, 2022•35 min
Esther Meek opens the afternoon session by addressing how Love invites the Real. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe
Nov 24, 2022•28 min
In this third and final section on Subsidiary Focal Integration Esther introduces Love as key component of her Covenant Epistemology. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe
Nov 19, 2022•11 min
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. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Nov 10, 2022•35 min
This is the first half of Esther's second talk where she introduces the concept of subsidiary focal integration. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe
Nov 02, 2022•19 min
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". Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe
Oct 25, 2022•36 min
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. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Oct 21, 2022•30 min
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 ...
Oct 08, 2022•44 min
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’. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Sep 27, 2022•31 min
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. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconver...
Sep 12, 2022•26 min
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 Get full access to Gosp...
Aug 29, 2022•23 min
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. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Aug 11, 2022•22 min
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 cros...
Jul 29, 2022•1 hr 8 min
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. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe...
Jun 27, 2022•20 min
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. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconve...
Jun 13, 2022•28 min
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 si...
May 24, 2022•58 min
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 conv...
Sep 17, 2021•1 hr 29 min
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 Gr...
Aug 07, 2021•1 hr
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...
Jun 11, 2021•1 hr 15 min
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Apr 28, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Here is the second conversation with Mark Strom on Faith, Hope and Love as ‘ways of knowing’. Mark is on fire in this conversation. He takes on a roller coaster ride beginning with the famous Pauline talk to the Romans on Mars Hill right through to the ‘mount Everest’ of Christ centred thinking in the hymn of Philippians 2. Throughout this journey Mark develops a grand theme; that every human made in God’s image is grasping towards higher meaning or ‘hope’ and this includes the idol worshipping ...
Dec 08, 2020•1 hr 5 min
We are excited to welcome back to Gospel Conversations one of our old friends, Mark Strom. Mark has blessed all of us over the years with his unique grasp of big picture holistic thinking coupled with his easy accessible way of explaining all of that: in particular Mark has been a leader in taking the gospel out of its religious box and putting it into the whole framework of reality – particularly in his work on Paul where he argues that Paul was not just a great theologian but a great philosoph...
Nov 24, 2020•1 hr 1 min
The modern battleground for the soul is not in fact religion - it is the field of computer science. This is because we have created the aura of 'artificial intelligence' and the end of that road seems to be that machines can think better than humans can.... if that is true (and the computer Deep Blue' did in fact beat Garry Kasparov at chess) then that implies that our mind is a machine after all. So that leaves no room for the soul, or the spirit. And indeed for God. This is the background for ...
Oct 14, 2020•38 min
The modern battleground for the soul is not in fact religion - it is the field of computer science. This is because we have created the aura of 'artificial intelligence' and the end of that road seems to be that machines can think better than humans can.... if that is true (and the computer Deep Blue' did in fact beat Garry Kasparov at chess) then that implies that our mind is a machine after all. So that leaves no room for the soul, or the spirit. And indeed for God. This is the background for ...
Oct 08, 2020•39 min
