Greystone Conversations

“That biblical commands are not arbitrary decrees but correspond to the way the world is and will be is fully appreciable only as we inhabit the Bible’s narrative and appropriate its perspective on how the world is and will be. The point is important because it will by no means necessarily be evident within the worldviews of our society that biblical commands correspond to the way the world is. Theories of natural law that attempt to demonstrate this independently of the biblical narrative have a certain value, but they are never completely successful, and in a postmodern society are unlikely to carry much conviction at all. Recognizing the importance of the biblical metanarrative enables us to see that inhabiting it is learning to see the world significantly differently (though not of course in every respect differently) from the way the cultural tradition of our context see it. Biblical laws that ‘make no sense’ in relation to the world as those traditions portray it may do so in relation to the world as the biblical story portrays it… Neither what the Bible obliges us to believe nor what the Bible obliges us to do can be known from isolated texts, but requires their total context in the biblical metanarrative.” (Richard Bauckham, God and the Crisis of Freedom, pp. 70, 72)Can we ever really understand Holy Scripture--and can we ever truly live with the faith, hope, and love to which the Scriptures call us--if we don’t first embrace the strangeness of the biblical world as the real world? The Christian Scriptures contain many strange commands and teachings that do not appear to correspond to the world as we know it, or as we think we know it. The truth is that we do not realize just how extensively we assume things about reality in modern and western terms until, as close readers, we run up against the very different world not only at work in Scripture but persistently commended to us in Scripture. What do we do at that point of friction? Will we submit from the start to the world Scripture commends as the real one, or will we suspend our embrace of it as true until the end of our own investigations and experiences of life? How does this issue of hermeneutics play out in relation to the ritual way that Scripture depicts that reality? The passage above from Richard Bauckham may help us reflect upon these pressing questions.To discuss these questions, and Richard Bauckham’s understanding of them, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, is joined with the Rev. Jesse Crutchley, pastor at Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church (PCA) and member of Greystone’s Presidential Ministerial Council.For more on this and related questions, Dr. Garcia’s course on Theological Anthropology and other Greystone courses are available this Fall for audit or for credit, and his multiple other lectures on this topic are available now for all Greystone Members at Greystone Connect. Become a member today for unlimited access to the growing Greystone Connect library.

Might the wilderness experience of Israel, including its story of complaint in the midst of great blessing, mean more to us if we were to believe that, in a real sense, we were there? Might it help us to see (or hear) ways that we sometimes sound like we still are? One less we should take from Israel's story is that the shape of the Christian life--as a kind of retelling of that story--is one of regular temptation toward complaint. Though surrounded with God’s presence and his promises, the ancient Israelites still found reasons to gripe. We are often tempted to the same. If we must take up the sorrows of life, can we not expect its joys too? we bitterly ask. George Herbert’s poem, The Bunch of Grapes, unites us as Christians vulnerable to griping to the Christ in whose faithfulness the crushed grapes of judgment yield the rich wine of blessing and joy. For Greystone, which has a high view of the spiritual significance of good quality wine as a testimony of God’s favor and fellowship, it is no small thing to confess, with gladness, that in Christ, the law’s sourness for sinners has become sweet wine.To help us reflect on these things, we are pleased to introduce you to Mr. Jonathan Stark, a longtime elder in the Presbyterian church and teacher of literature, French, and Bible, the director of spiritual life at Greystone Theological Institute, a founding Greystone board member, and a personal friend of many of us at Greystone. The lecture included as this episode of Greystone Conversations is part of a series of 6 lectures that Mr. Stark gave on George Herbert at Greystone and which is available as a series at Greystone Connect. This particular lecture is called “Tart Wine: The Bunch of Grapes,” and explores Herbert’s poem called "The Bunch of Grapes." The text of this poem is available in the online description of this episode and in many other places online and in published forms, and Mr. Stark also reads the poem in its entirety at the opening and the close of this lecture.We are also pleased to take this opportunity to announce that Mr. Stark, a longtime lover of the biblical psalms and of the church’s liturgical life, has completed his composition of brand new, original tones for the entire biblical psalter, and this will be released, with introduction and supplemental helps, as The Greystone Chanted Psalter. It’s hard to put into words how excited we are about this project and about Mr. Stark’s excellent work on it.The Bunch of Grapesby George HerbertJoy, I did lock thee up: but some bad manHath let thee out again:And now, me thinks, I am where I beganSev'n years ago: one vogue and vein,One air of thoughts usurps my brain.I did towards Canaan draw; but now I amBrought back to the Red sea, the sea of shame.For as the Jews of old by God's commandTravelled and saw no town;So now each Christian hath his journeys spanned:Their story pens and sets us down.A single deed is small renown.God's works are wide, and let in future times;His ancient justice overflows our crimes.Then we have too our guardian fires and clouds;Our Scripture-dew drops fast:We have our sands and serpents, tents and shrouds;Alas! our murmurings come not last.But where's the cluster? where's the tasteOf mine inheritance? Lord, if I must borrow,Let me as well take up their joy, as sorrow.But can he want the grape, who hath the wine?I have their fruit and more.Blessed be God, who prospered Noah's vine,And made it bring forth grapes good store,But much more him I must adore,Who of the Laws sour juice sweet wine did make,Ev'n God himself being pressed for my sake.

In what ways does the final vision of the Church’s identity and activity at the end of Scripture in Revelation help us to understand the beginning of Scripture in Genesis in light of Leviticus? And within that world, how does it help us to understand the meaning of male and female as vocation? In the last several episodes of Greystone Conversations, we have explored the concept of ritual as far more than sacrifice, blood, and acceptance along atonement lines, but as a vision of reality. This biblical ritual vision, which is given expression in the Old Testament book of Leviticus--not only in its content but even in its very organization--is a view of reality which can be captured in terms of its concerns for three distinct but related elements: time, space, and vocation.We have said that this ritual world is more than theologically interesting. It belongs to how the Creator and Providential Sustainer of all things has determined to form, to catechize, and to shape His people—the Church—in and through the Lord Jesus Christ as we are ordered by the life-rhythms of time and space. What is (by virtue of creation), and what remains (by virtue of divine providence) are more than merely things that are; they are indicators of who we are and who we have been called to be. This latter concern is a vocational concern, and is the focus of today’s Conversation, which explores vocation as a deeply gendered consideration. In what ways do our bodies tell the greatest story of all, and how does this help us avoid the cul-de-sac of gender controversies of our day?To discuss this and more, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, is joined with the Rev. Jesse Crutchley, pastor at Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church (PCA) and member of Greystone’s Presidential Ministerial Council.For more on ritual ontology and theology, Dr. Garcia’s course on Theological Anthropology is available this Fall for credit, and his multiple lectures on this topic are available now for all Greystone Members. Become a member today for unlimited access to the growing Greystone Connect library.

How can the Church’s embrace of space within the biblical ritual world amount to a commitment to the visible gathered Church which proclaims the truth of belonging and home to a world struggling with a loss of place and with homesickness? How can the Church’s proclamation of the gospel meet neighbors who struggle with a kind of spiritual nostalgia echoing from the cavernous regions of our deep, though suppressed, knowledge of what we were made for? Do the Scriptures show a great interest in sacred space because God wants His prodigals to come--and to enjoy--home? Leviticus, we have suggested, is a window to reality, a door through which we come, by faith, to recognize and inhabit the real world as commended to faith in Holy Scripture. This world can be considered in terms of its ritual ordering, an ordering in which three fundamental elements of reality are distinguishable yet closely linked to one another: time, space, and vocation.In our last episode, we talked through some aspects of time in this world and what it would look like to live "with the grain" of ordered reality along the lines of time. And so today we pick up the topic of space and ask the same question: what might it look like to live faithfully "with the grain" of ordered reality in terms of space? The Levitical world certainly displays a concern about our spatial lives. At the heart of the good news of our forgiveness and acceptance before God in Jesus Christ is the Levitical concern for space in relation to purity and defilement. To discuss this and more, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, is again joined by the Rev. Jesse Crutchley, pastor at Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church (PCA) and member of Greystone’s Presidential Ministerial Council.For more on ritual ontology and theology, Dr. Garcia’s course on Theological Anthropology is available this Fall for credit, and his multiple lectures on this topic are available now for all Greystone Members. Become a member today for unlimited access to the growing Greystone Connect library.

Our world is currently overwhelmed with cries for protests and resistance, and the confessional Reformed church often sits uneasily between a recognition of the place and need for certain cries of this sort and the equally important need to distance herself—for sound, biblical, and theological reasons—from many of them. Even when the world is effective in identifying specific ills, it is incapable and ordinarily counterproductive in commending remedies. This may leave many Reformed Christians with the impression that we are called to a kind of tranquil equilibrium in a distressed world when in fact the Scriptures seem to expect a Church constantly caught up in the most dramatic conflict and conquest of history: the arrival and triumph of the Kingdom of God. What is our “way in” to such things? It may be last on our list of likely candidates for resources for navigating these waters, but the theological and dynamic density of sacred time in Scripture may be just what we are looking for and just what we need. How can the Church’s embrace of time within the biblical ritual world amount to a protest--an act of resistance--to the world as it is, and signal an alternative that comes from the new world of the gospel?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.For more on ritual ontology and theology, Dr. Garcia’s course on Theological Anthropology is available this fall for credit, a full course module on Reformed ritual reality is forthcoming, and multiple lectures related to this topic are available now for all Greystone Members. Become a member today for unlimited access to the growing Greystone Connect library.

How can a ritual vision of reality enrich and advance the confessional Reformed tradition? Does, or can, ritual have anything to do with being Reformed in the first place? Thoughtful critiques of evangelical Christianity have long complained of the Gnosticism infecting everything from church teaching to worship, including, especially, its often anemic grasp of the why and the what of the Sacraments. When this is true in Reformed churches, we add irony to tragedy since the Reformed theological tradition has its origins in a specifically Eucharistic commitment.But after more than a generation of being taught that being Reformed means believing certain things in the head rather than also doing certain things with the body in worship and in life, we now face a real challenge in responding coherently to a world and culture that wishes to deny that bodily matters matter. How might biblical ritual ontology and theology help us clearly and consistently proclaim the gospel of the incarnate Savior and his love for his confessing, singing, eating Body? There may be no moment in our lifetimes in which the need is so great for clear, courageous, relentlessly biblical, and thoughtful teaching on the meaningfulness of material things. The Scripture's ritual vision of reality, faithfully embraced by the Reformed Churches in her confessions and in her liturgical life, can resource the Church in her witness to Lord Jesus Christ in the world as it now is. 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.For more on ritual ontology and theology, Dr. Garcia’s course on Theological Anthropology is available this Fall for credit, a full course module on Reformed Ritual Reality is forthcoming, and multiple lectures related to this topic are available now for all Greystone Members. Become a member today for unlimited access to the growing Greystone Connect library.

The problem with Roman Catholicism is that it is insufficiently catholic. The problem with Protestantism, including confessional Reformed Christianity, is that it too is often insufficiently catholic. Roman Catholicism is insufficiently catholic because, by definition, it has no real place for the global church of every age. This includes the patristic and Late Antique era, not only the churches after the Reformation. Rome has quietly set the Western terms for what counts as theology, holy philosophy, and the tradition, and we too often blindly follow their lead. We know Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, and we tend to think this is the history of Christian theology when it really is the history of Western theology. We don’t know Ephraim, the Didascalia, or the origins of Islam as they took form within the Church rather than outside of it.This is the key reason why at Greystone we read far more widely and deeply than our favorite theologians and events; why we include and strongly encourage our courses in Christian Syriac and other languages; and why we are committed, in the context of a hearty and confessional Reformed Christianity, to a substantial and working catholicity. These are just a few things that you’ll learn from Dr. Mark Graham’s Greystone course module on Christianity in Late Antiquity. For today’s Greystone Conversations episode, we are pleased to introduce this fascinating course of lectures. In what follows, you’ll be able to listen in on Dr. Graham’s introductory lectures for this course.Dr. Graham’s course is one that may just provoke a revolution in our thinking about the Church, and what ought to be the rich density of the catholicity of the Reformed Faith. We encourage the listener to think deeply through these lectures, and to continue listening to them at Greystone Connect. Doing so, you may learn far more about your own family history as a Christian, and what you learn may reconfigure, in a lasting way, what you thought you already knew. Dr. Graham is a Greystone fellow in Christianity and Late Antiquity. An accomplished scholar and active churchman, Dr. Graham has taught in the History department at Grove City College since 2003, serving as full professor there since 2013. He is the author, with Eric H. Cline, of Ancient Empires: From Mesopotamia to the Rise of Islam (New York: Cambridge University Press, June 2011), and News and Frontier Consciousness in the Late Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).Dr. Graham’s Greystone course on Christianity in Late Antiquity is available this fall for credit or to audit, and his multiple lectures on this topic are available now for all Greystone Members. Become a member today for unlimited access to the growing Greystone Connect library.

Today’s Church is in great need of reimagining the nature of theological education; a reassessment of its purpose, not as merely the pursuit of a degree, but as education in the classical sense of formation. This view of education, measured by our understanding of the questions we should be asking rather than our grasp of what the answers are, will invariably influence the role that classic texts of the Christian Tradition have in the context of that educational formation. Our interest in Lombard’s Sentences, therefore, goes well beyond the content and context of that work as an important and formative publication. Rather, it touches deeply on a matter of great overarching importance for Greystone and the Church in our day. That is, the nature and goal of a properly understood theological education. In particular, how might Lombard’s famous Sentences help us in the pursuit of reimagining theological education?To discuss this and more, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, sits down with Dr. Atria Larson, Greystone's Academic Dean, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Fellow in Medieval Church History and Canon Law. Dr. Larson is Associate Professor of Medieval Christianity in the Theology Department at Saint Louis University, and winner of the 2015 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise from the University of Heidelberg, and author of many studies in penitential theory and canon law, including Master of Penance: Gratian and the Development of Penitential Thought and Law in the Twelfth Century (Washington DC: CUA Press, 2014).Dr. Larson’s directed reading course module on Lombard’s Sentences will be available this fall for credit, and her multiple lectures, including those on Penance in the Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation Church, are available now for all Greystone Members. Become a member today for unlimited access to the growing Greystone Connect library.

In what way should we understand the New Testament and the Church's proclamation of Lord Jesus Christ as a proclamation that takes place "according to the Scriptures"? This question focuses attention on how the Old Testament continues in Spiritual power to proclaim and commend the Son of God to the faith of his Church on its own terms. That is, the Church must not approach the Old Testament as a text that merely discloses Christ by pointing away from itself, away from its own temporal context, to what Jesus and the New Testament will bring. For the Church, it is not the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament which ultimately justifies and grounds the Old Testament’s witness to Jesus Christ, its Christology, and all that attends it—or that ultimately justifies and grounds our own understanding of the Old Testament’s relationship to Christ. Rather, the Old Testament bears theological witness to Christ on its own terms. How then should Christians regard the Old Testament as an abiding theological witness to Lord Jesus Christ? 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.

Does the Old Testament continue to function for the Church as Holy Scripture, and if so, how? This is a key question for the Church’s faith and life. Interest in the question among Evangelicals and Reformed Christians often quickly turns into the alleyways of debates over theonomy, the uses of the law, and other such topics. But there’s a far more fundamental, even elemental, theological reality to which this question of the Old Testament as Christian Scripture belongs, one which requires that we first appreciate the nature of Scripture as rooted in God’s economy--that is, his ordered and purposed working in the world to the end or eschatological telos of the glory of the Son by the Spirit through the Church. Holy Scripture is what it is only as it is first located within those purposes. But this entails certain other commitments such as the relationship of the Son, the Arche and Logos, to Scripture from the very beginning and not only at the end. If the Scriptures which we call “Old” are as much the Word of God about the Son of God as the New Testament Scriptures are, how then should we understand the Old Testament in relation to this Christ and to the New Testament?To discuss this and more, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, sits down with Greystone's Fellow in Old Testament and associate professor of Old Testament at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA (USA), Dr. Don C. Collett. Dr. Collett 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.