John Behr - Was Adam created 'perfect'?

I can remember lots of times when Christians have speculated about whether salvation means returning to the ‘perfect’ state of Adam before the Fall - or do we go one better and somehow improve on the first Adam? This talk by John Behr demolishes that whole worldview….

It is the first in a series of four talks that John Behr gave at our recent Gospel Conversations conference. In this talk John introduces us to the radical way the Church Fathers thought about the gospel - and how they read the Scriptures. Of course for them, the ‘Scriptures’ meant what we call the Old Testament.

John’s stuff is paradigm shifting - that means it is clearly explained but conceptually challenging. He is inviting us to stand on the shoulders of these early church fathers and think like them. So I have added a short ten minute introduction to this talk to give you an overview of the big idea in summary. I think that will help you absorb the guts of what John has to say.

As you know, John and David Bentley Hart, admire each other’s thinking - and they are both very innovative. But they have something else in common - both of them have had their OWN paradigms shifted by the deep translation work they have done on early Christian literature. David translated the New Testament, and John has translated the Church Fathers. Both of them have told me how that task has changed the way they think, because they had to get inside the minds and paradigms of the early church writers. And in so doing they found that they thought rather differently to how we do about the gospel. And, unsurprisingly, they thought in rather larger terms than we do about the gospel. All of that makes these talks very expansionary of both our faith and our understanding.

Gospel Conversations is a reader-supported publication.

Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe