Greystone Conversations

Can we speak properly of the repentance of Jesus Christ, the One whom the Scriptures say knew no sin nor was deceit ever found in his mouth? Can we hope in him as the faithful Israel of God without doing so?According to Deuteronomy 30:1-3, the only way for Israel to return from exile and enjoy renewed fellowship with Yahweh is for them to repent with all their heart and soul. But as Jeremiah demonstrates, Israel is constitutionally incapable of this repentance. How then will exile ever end? In this episode of Greystone Conversations, we feature a presentation by the Rev. Dr. Matthew Patton recently delivered as part of our online Postgraduate Seminar Series. Aware of the often lively debates on this subject in theology and biblical studies, Dr. Patton shares his research into how the prophet Jeremiah engenders hope for a new Israel which is capable of genuine repentance. This includes exploring how this hope is realized in both Christ and his Church which, in union with one another, comprise a new Israel whom God has decisively delivered from exile.The Rev. Dr. Matthew Patton is pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Vandalia, Ohio, a congregation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and a personal friend of many here at Greystone. Pastor Patton graduated from Westminster Theological Seminary with an MDiv in 2009 and then went on to get a Ph.D. at Wheaton College in Biblical Theology and Old Testament, which he earned in 2014. At Wheaton, he had the great privilege of studying under the Old Testament scholar, Daniel Block. Pastor Patton is also a co-author of Basics of Hebrew Discourse: A Guide to Working with Hebrew Prose and Poetry (Zondervan, 2019), and he is currently working on a commentary on Jeremiah, which work is reflected in today's episode presentation. This lecture, as well as all of Greystone's recorded Postgraduate Seminar Series lectures, is available on Greystone Connect for free for all Greystone Members. The current Postgraduate Seminar Series is still ongoing and registration is open here.

How might the phenomenon of terroir--that feature of wine in which the wine truly communicates place--illuminate the task of theology, and with it the anti-modern core of faithful theological reflection and practice?In the 228 references to wine in Holy Scripture, wine is referred to as, on the one hand, a normal part of human culture, and on the other hand, as symbolic and instrumental of God's love or wrath. It is presented biblically as a blessing from God, as an element to be used in sacred offerings and sacrifices, as gifts between people, and as a comparative of quality. For instance, in Scripture, something is (five different times) said to be "better even than wine." In 19 different biblical passages, the loss of wine is also an example of the curse of God.For these and many other reasons, wine is a long-standing and serious topic of reflection and investigation. It was among the first topics explored in the serious study of the ancient philosophers. And most importantly, it was created by the God who intended its special function and use in the redemptive sacrifice and Table-fellowship of his Son in relation to his Church.But what is it about wine that has for so long captivated us and which in its own way seems to put on display the very vulnerability and vitality of the human condition? In that conversation, one thing must at least be mentioned: the phenomenon of terroir; that special power of wine to communicate place. But the history of terroir as a concept, and the nature of terroir as a philosophical question, is the history and nature of our modern condition--one which has posed special challenges to theological study, reflection, and fellowship. Indeed, the task of theology bears striking similarities to viticulture and viniculture, to winemaking, and the aim of theology bears more than a passing resemblance to the idea of a wine's terroir.To discuss this and more, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, is joined by the Rev. Jesse Crutchley, pastor at Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church (PCA) and member of Greystone’s Presidential Ministerial Council.

Our ethical relationship to technology is not exhausted by the familiar issues of too much screen time, pornography, or the vulnerabilities of social media. Neither is it as simple as using or not using this or that technology. Tech ethics is an implicate of theological anthropology--an aspect and fruit of understanding who we are and what we are for.In various episodes of Greystone Conversations, we've sought to introduce you to the growing network of thoughtful, capable, and helpful scholars and church leaders who make up Greystone's core workforce. And so it is our great pleasure today to introduce two talks by Greystone associate fellow and founding board member, Mr. Michael (L. M.) Sacasas. What follows are the first two talks in a series of lectures Mr. Sacasas gave at Greystone under the title "Tech, Faith, and Human Flourishing," the full set of which is available at Greystone Connect. The first of the two talks that we have stitched together for today's episode is called "Challenge Accepted: Thinking About Technology," and addresses the critical need for thinking about technology that avoids both thoughtless pessimism and uncritical optimism. Common misconceptions and assumptions about technology that impede thoughtful consideration of technology are also examined. Beginning with a discussion of what technology criticism entails, the second talk "Defining Technology," then takes up the surprisingly thorny task of delimiting the concept designated by the word technology. This semantic exercise is a useful introduction to the task of technology criticism which Mr. Sacasa caries out in the remainder of this series which explores traditions of technological criticism; ethics of technological mediation; humanist technology criticism; technology, habit, and the body; technology, embodiment, and intention; algorithm, technological outsourcing, and the religion of technology; algorithms and the life of the mind; and memory, outsourced and automated. Many of you may remember Mr. Sacasas from the first two episodes of Greystone Conversations in which we talked through the ethical difficulties experienced in our day in the context of personal interaction, communication, and engagement. Mr. Sacasas' series on Technology, Faith, and Human Flourishing explores the technological aspect of that difficulty in greater depth and with great effect. Those who find these lectures valuable might consider listening to the whole series of talks by Mr. Sacasas available at greystoneconnect.org, or perhaps even consider becoming a greystone member in order to gain access to this series and all other full course lectures, postgraduate seminars, and symposia and lecture events held by Greystone and our Lydia Center for Women and Families.

What does the Exodus event have to do with contemporary concerns with divorce, domestic violence, biblical law, and the identity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? And are these purely contemporary concerns?Precisely because there is so much heated rhetoric--culturally and ecclesiastically--over the issues of gender, domestic violence, abuse, and Church power, this is not a good time for serious work to be done on these issues. To plead now for patient attention to be given to these topics and for reconsideration of various assumed principles and conclusions inevitably suggests to some that we are simply riding the cultural wave and hoping to be relevant in doing so. However, our fear of being confused with "issue people" must not deter us from what has long been and continues to be an area where further reformation is needed as part of the ongoing reformation of the church by Word and Spirit. To do so effectively, and to avoid merely parroting the cultural emptiness of so much outrage and rebellion, we must be willing again to hear the voice of God in Scripture ordering our reflections to Himself and His gospel to the end of our greater faithfulness to Him for His glory. For today's Conversation episode, we feature a public lecture given at Greystone's second Lydia Center Symposium. The 2018 symposium, My Sister’s Keeper: The Gospel, Domestic Violence, and Pastoral Practice, featured talks from scholars and church leaders regarding the nature and use of Church power and the law in relation to the challenging yet critically important reality of domestic violence within the visible Church.In the course of this lecture, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, Greystone's president and fellow of Scripture and Theology and Director of Greystone's Lydia Center for Women and Families, explores the issues of divorce and domestic violence within the biblical world. In doing so, Dr. Garcia shows how we may come at this question, not with the lenses provided by liberation theology or its contemporary form, critical theory, but by way of1) how Scripture works, especially in terms of biblical law;2) how the Exodus as an event serves as the infrastructure of the gospel for all who are oppressed and enslaved by sin and sinners; and3) how the questions of disordered and misused power, when biblical considered, belong to the identity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--the God of the Exodus who did indeed demand, "Let My people go."Those who find this lecture valuable might consider listening to the other talks given at the 2018 Lydia Center Symposium available at Greystone Connect, or becoming a Greystone Member to gain access to this lecture and the growing Greystone Connect library, which includes all full course lectures, special lectures, study day and weekend lecture series, postgraduate seminars, and many other symposia and lecture events held by Greystone and our Lydia Center for Women and Families.

How will our love finally be perfected? And how will our perfected love relate directly to our final fullness of joy?Today's Greystone Conversations episode explores Anselm of Canterbury's work Proslogion. But in exploring this great work, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, Greystone President and Fellow of Scripture and Theology, seeks to highlight an often and routinely overlooked part of Anselm's genius. While most philosophically oriented Christians perceive this work as one primarily consisting of, and purposed toward, the so-called "ontological argument" for the existence God, one may see a much more rewarding and proper understanding of Anselm's Proslogion as a work in which Anselm is leading us by the hand to look around us and begin to pay attention to the inherent goodness of so much that we know and experience—leading us by the hand to look around us and press beyond the surface of things to inquire after the greatest and ultimate Good apart from whom nothing can be recognized as good and from whom every good comes. In other words, there is an Anselm of myth with his work on an argument for God, and an Anselm of history with his work on so much more than that narrow consideration. By considering the latter, one may see anew the significant contribution Anselm can make to something we seldom connect him to: the fervency and final satisfaction of our desire—our holiest desires—and the consequent shape, dynamic, and nature of perfected love. In today's Greystone Conversations, Dr. Garcia seeks to answer, along with Anselm, the great question posed to all Christians throughout the history of the Church: how should our understanding of the end and realization of our love and joy inform and shape how we live now and what we take delight in? For more Greystone content on the Early and Medieval church Become a Greystone member today.

What does the sacramental table have to do with the confession of Lord Jesus Christ, and what do these have to do with Reformed catholicity? Today we're featuring a lecture given in Waco Texas called “The Christ of Reformed Catholicity” by Dr. Mark A. Garcia. In this lecture, Dr. Garcia seeks to answer these questions and more by focusing on two aspects of the liturgical life of the church: the confession of Lord Jesus Christ and the celebration of the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper. In much of the Church today, the weekly celebration of the Lord's Supper is often regarded as a peripheral matter--something, it is assumed, the scriptures do not speak to and the Reformed tradition has not been uniform on. If, however, the Church is fundamentally Eucharistic, perhaps this assumption should be reconsidered.Today’s lecture looks to Ignatius of Antioch to help identify what came to distinguish theologically the Reformed tradition in the 16th century, an animus that today’s Church desperately needs to recover.In what way might this help us regain a vibrant, powerful, and compelling vision of who the Church is in the world as we know it, and having answered that question, how we come to understand who the Christian is in light of the world disclosed by the gospel--the gospel made visible at the table even as it is also proclaimed from the pulpit?To explore more of Greystone’s vision of Reformed catholicity, become a Greystone member today and register for Dr. Garcia’s class on Reformed Catholicity.

Is Paul's famous Areopagus speech in Acts 17 a model for the Church's engagement with other religions? How so, or how not? Today's Episode of Greystone Conversations introduces our listeners to the Rev. Dr. Flavien Pardigon. Dr. Pardigon is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) who teaches at a variety of theological institutions on four different continents and is a Greystone Associate Fellow in New Testament. Dr. Pardigon has investigated the above question at the convergence point of New Testament studies, missiology, and the philosophy of regions. He does so especially in his 2019 book Paul Against the Idols: A Contextual Reading of the Areopagus Speech (Pickwick Publications).From the book description, we read: “The story of Paul’s visit to the city of Athens with its speech delivered before the Areopagus council is one of the best-known and most-celebrated passages of the Acts of the Apostles. Being the only complete example of an apostolic address to 'pure pagans' recorded, it has consistently attracted the attention of historians, biblical scholars, theologians, missionaries, apologists, artists, and believers over the centuries.Interpretations of the pericope are many and variegated, with opinions ranging from deeming the speech to be a foreign body in the New Testament to acclaiming it as the ideal model of translation of the Christian kerygma into a foreign idiom. At the heart of the debate is whether the various parts of the speech must be understood as Hellenistic or biblical in nature—or both.Paul Against the Idols defends and develops an integrated contextual study of the episode. Reading the story in its Lukan theological, intertextual, narrative, linguistic, and historical context enables an interpretation that accounts for its apparent ambivalence. This book thus contributes to the ongoing hermeneutical and exegetical scholarly discussions surrounding this locus classicus and suggests ways in which it can contribute to a Christian theology of religions and missiology."Those who find this conversation valuable might consider joining an upcoming Greystone micro-course with Dr. Pardigon on the Areopagus speech of Acts 17 and its implications for ministry and for the philosophy of religions. Look for more information on this event in the coming weeks. This micro-course will also be available to all Greystone Members upon its completion. Become a member today for unlimited access to the growing Greystone Connect library.

It is not enough to have a high view of Scripture if we do not also have a high use of Scripture. In fact, a failure in our use of Scripture can empty our high view of Scripture of any real value or importance. It is arguably the case that the confessional Reformed tradition has the most vested interest in ensuring that its famously high view of what Scripture is finds expression in the classroom where its ministers are being trained in the reading, teaching, and preaching of Holy Scripture. The Reformed tradition, that is, should have a greater interest than most--theoretically--in guaranteeing that there is a meaningful and lively link, that is dynamic rather than static, of what we are learning about what Scripture is and how we decide we need to preach, teach, and read those same Scriptures as thoughtful Christians. With a view to recent developments in Old Testament studies, today’s Greystone Conversations episode reflects on what difference those developments should have on what’s happening in the seminary and Bible college classroom--both in terms of Old Testament classes and the whole curriculum as well. How should that developing understanding find expression in the way we think about the most faithful theologically coherent and effective ways to order our reading of Scripture in whatever department of the seminary or Bible college?To discuss this and more, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, sits down with Dr. Don C. Collett, Greystone's Fellow in Old Testament and associate professor of Old Testament at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA (USA). Dr. Collet has spent many years reflecting carefully on the questions we are exploring today, and he’s just recently published a book on this topic entitled Figural Reading and the Old Testament: Theology and Practice, released by Baker Academic in April of this year (2020). Dr. Collett’s Greystone course, Job as Christian Scripture, is available to all Greystone Members. Become a member today for unlimited access to the growing Greystone Connect library.

Do we struggle against a downward tug when contemplating God’s perfect happiness or beatitude? Does it seem too human to speak of God as perfectly happy? How might we confess the perfection of God as blessed in a way that is both faithful and edifying? What blessings might be ours if we were to return to the realm of the perfectly happy God?The Christian tradition has a varied history of locating beatitude among the unity of the divine perfections. And yet the confession that God is blessed, that he possesses the perfection of divine blessedness or beatitude, stands in need of retrieval today. Among the divine perfections, blessedness repays our contemplation for at least these three reasons: First, it is a summative doctrine that helps us grasp the unity of all other divine perfections; second, it directs our attention to the mystery of God's own perfect self-possession, which is otherwise difficult to conceive of; and third, it is the bridge doctrine between the doctrine of the one God and the doctrine of the Trinity. In today's episode of Greystone Conversations, Dr. Fred Sanders recommends the doctrine of divine blessedness, explaining how to restore it to its proper function within the doctrine of God, and describing some of the challenges the doctrine faces in the modern setting.Dr. Sanders is a systematic theologian who studies and teaches across the entire range of classic Christian doctrine, but with a special focus on the doctrine of the Trinity. He has taught in the Torrey Honors Institute since 1999. This talk was originally delivered in the fall of 2019 as the inaugural presentation in the Greystone online Postgraduate Seminar Series, now in its second iteration. This series seeks to capture the liveliness, quality level, and variety of the traditional postgraduate theological seminar but expand its reach and usefulness for thoughtful Christians around the world. The Greystone postgraduate seminar series is open to the public and meets online monthly for 9 months per year. It features many scholars working at the top of their respective fields. Dr. Sanders’ presentation was a truly fitting way to launch this initiative. Remember that Greystone Members enjoy access to this and all other previously recorded presentations, as well as all full modules, study day lectures, special lectures, and more.

Evolution. Our reaction to this word may reflect the legacy of one or the other of two orthodox Reformed perspectives on what it is and how we approach it.Two of the greatest and most influential of American Presbyterian theologians, Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, weighed in on the new theories being propounded in their day by one Charles Darwin. Both Hodge and Warfield are justly famous for their rigorous commitment to biblical authority and inspiration, the sovereignty and providence of God, and the confessional nature of orthodox Reformed faith and life. Both Hodge and Warfield also represent a high watermark of rigor and scholarship in the Reformed tradition, and both remain directly or indirectly responsible for much of what is taken for granted in American confessional Reformed theology.But their approaches to Darwin’s new theories were markedly distinct. One understood evolution to be a naturalistic theory of the universe, and the other as a scientific model of natural and biological processes within the scope of divine providence. The importance of noting this distinction of perspectives is significant: the legacy of how Hodge and Warfield understood the nature, and thus the question, of evolution, is tangible in the fact that these two orientations to the topic adopted by these giants of confessional Reformed theology remain the two basic options with us today.At Greystone, we believe it is important and fruitful to return to and reconsider many apparently familiar questions and topics in Christian theology in order to discover how our framing of a question goes a long way toward determining what answers we admit as possibilities. This is especially important when dealing with certain questions which, for a range of cultural and historical reasons, tend to provoke primarily emotional reactions, making patient study and discourse that much more challenging. Evolution is certainly one such topic, and simply learning how two unassailably orthodox theologians, each with a famously high view of Scripture, perhaps surprisingly framed the evolution question quite differently from each other may enrich our own approach to the question, and perhaps to others like it.It is our pleasure to introduce you today to Dr. Jason M. Rampelt (M.A.R., Westminster Theological Seminary; Ph.D., University of Cambridge), Greystone Fellow in Christianity and Science, who will lead us through this question of how Hodge and Warfield understood evolution. This talk was originally delivered at a Greystone event in Grove City, Pennsylvania, and those who find it valuable might consider listening to more of Dr. Rampelt’s lectures found at Greystone Connect, such as his full course of lectures on the History of Christianity and Science, and his upcoming full course on Early Modern Natural Philosophy.