Gospel Conversations podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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 gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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 Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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

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

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