Gospel Conversations Tony Golsby-Smith

We are starting up a new series in Breakfast with Jesus based on conversations that Anne and I enjoyed as we walked some of the famous El Camino trail recently. Let me say that I do not use the word ‘conversation’ lightly. Anne has been my thought partner all our lives together – and in a really productive way. I mean that she brings intuition and experience and truth-telling to our talks – and I tend to be the academic philosophical one. It is a great – and at times tense – interaction!  
In this first talk, I am calling ‘Jesus as the two-way door’.  It began on the third morning of our walk at the now-famous Hotel Akerretta which was featured in the movie ‘The Way’. 
 
This meditation began as Anne was praying for a young friend of ours. It was ignited by a sudden illumination as she prayed – which I recognised as the Spirit speaking since the thought came from nowhere – there was no cognitive trajectory in my mind that morning. But there was a festering unease to which this sudden illumination spoke. The unease was our religious jargon around “Jesus” which seems to position him as the entrance to a club or religious clique.  And the sudden illumination was ‘Jesus is the door – and two-way door’. I felt like I stepped out of a dark room into the sunlight.
In this talk, I wander into the wondrous world of Maximus the Confessor a little. This foreshadows a later Camino conversation. I also intend to focus more on Maximus by interviewing Jordan Wood who is the current new master of Maximus and has just written a breathtaking book on Maximus called “The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor”.
I can remember David Hart telling me that for all his boundary-stretching thought, Maximus was actually only taking seriously the implications of the oft-repeated NT phrase ‘in Christ’.  
Anyway join us on our walking and talking !! 

 

 

 


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Here is the second part of my conversation with John Walton on how order not sin frames the book of Genesis – including the Fall. In this talk John gets more specific about the order spectrum of order, non-order and disorder.

‘Sin’ is obviously an important word, and central to the Christian doctrine. But it is also a loaded word, and one that works like a sinkhole to suck in streams of meaning – some of which may not be helpful. It is not just an intellectual word, but an existential one because it so easily tugs into deep feelings of guilt and unworthiness that plague many people – indeed all of us from time to time if we are honest.  That is why being as ‘biblical’ as possible to get behind the word into the conceptual frames that inform it, is so important. And John’s talks here are among the most helpful ‘paradigm shifters’ that I know. 

I wrote an article some years ago on ‘sin’ and what I thought about it. I might change some of the thinking now – and I wrote it before I had the benefit of this talk with John. Nonetheless I think it is worth posting it on our website so we will do that soon after this talk.

If you want to dive more in some of John’s thinking, a good place to start is his book on Genesis called “The Lost World of Genesis One”.  

Of course you can also dive into more of John talks on our website. John gave a wonderful series on Genesis and also Deuteronomy in 2013.  Both are worth listening to, but here is a link to his first talk on Genesis 1 –  “The Cosmos as God’s House”.  So if you integrate the ‘order’ series with his “God’s house” you get a powerful mandate for our jobs on the earth: bring order to God’s house and make it a ‘home’ not just a ‘house’ (John’s words not mine).  https://www.gospelconversations.com/series/genesis-the-cosmos-as-gods-house


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We continue our reposting of some gems from our past library of talks. This episode is highly significant partly because of the big idea but also because it is John Walton who espouses it. John as you know is a legendary Bible scholar and author, and is the major voice for putting the OT back into the worldview of the Ancient Near East. That gives a fair bit of weight to the rather innovative ideas in this conversation. In essence, John says that it is ‘order’ (and what he calls the ‘order spectrum’) that frames the thinking in Genesis – not ‘sin’. He implies (what I would say more boldly perhaps) that the ‘sin’ framework is a modern anachronistic reading – whereby we are reading our modern paradigms backwards into the text. What this does is to deny us some of the rich meaning in the text, and stop it extending our faith and minds. None of this is to deny that ‘sin’ is not an absolutely core part of Christian theology – but it does modify just what that word might mean for us. And it is a bigger word than ‘sin’ because the order spectrum includes chaos that does not come from a moral failure – and lots of our lives fall into that category. We make a big mistake by sucking everything back into the moral/sin category. It can really distort our understanding of life and how to react to it. This talk is a real conversation between John and I. There is a lot of back and forth, and of course it is exploratory and unscripted.


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In this final talk, I summarise five profound ways that the Exodus narrative reframes and stretches the traditional gospel of Penal Substitution. My aim was to leave us with a metaphor that can rival the evocative power of the Penal model not just critique it systematically.  In my experience, the Exodus story does this and that is what i want to share in this talk.
One thing that the Exodus story does is to stretch out the redemption story across a complex landscape of the battle with Pharoah and Egypt.  So it leaves us with an extended metaphor or analogy, not just a single idea. But that is okay and I think it works in our favour, since one of the insights about redemption that we have developed is that ‘salvation’ is a vast and multi-faceted act of God in his relation with creation.  
I organise the analogies using the five dramatic terms of Kenneth Burke, and I think it works well. I created a table to capture the comparisons and I organised the talk using that table.  I will post it on the Gospel Conversations website.
One of the texts that I allude to is the important book by Richard Gaffin called ‘Redemption and Resurrection’.  Look at it as he critiqued traditional redemption models as having limited space for Resurrection.  
I hope this talk and the whole series have blessed you and keep provoking thought as it has for me.


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Here is the third talk in our journey through Exodus as an analogy of redemption. In this talk we explore Exodus through the lens of drama.  Of course, the whole Bible is in essence a drama in that it is a narrative or story grounded in events rather than abstract ideas. So we have to discern the ideas that the story generates. And in a way that is not a closed book – simply because the ideas are about God and his work and that is eternal.

I use the legendary work of a great scholar of literature and philosophy, Edmund Burke, to unpack ‘drama’ for us and so give us the ability to go a bit deeper. A great friend of mine, Richard Buchanan, once told me that the breakthrough intellectually on any topic was the first level of declension after the big word…. So ‘drama’ is a big word, and a bit too big to do much with. But Burke’s five terms takes us one level down and gives us something to work with.

Actually I use the ‘drama’ schematic in both this talk and the next one. In this talk I look at the theological and philosophical suggestions of using ‘drama’ as the structure for a divine text. It is a pretty simple but profound idea: most religious texts present us with precepts or axioms – kind of like a rule book.

But ‘drama’ is utterly different. It is much more mysterious and leaves a lot of work up to us to figure out what is going on.

But drama that includes the divine does something else – it implies a very different conception of ‘God’ and his ‘working’ to the normal picture most of us have of the omnipotent God – and that is what I unpack in this talk.The book of Burke’s that I quote from is called “A Rhetoric of Motives” – it is pretty heavy and only for the literary minded. But the word ‘motives’ captures the essence of his theory of drama – it a genre about intent. And that really positions it as appropriate for understanding the Bible as a discourse unfolding God’s intent.


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Welcome back to Gospel Conversations.

So on with the Exodus journey as we 'cross the river and start to generate some new paradigms for the gospel. I like the term 'paradigm' as it does explain what we are trying to do rather well. A paradigm is a way of looking at something or a way of arranging it in our minds. So it is a 'pattern'. In a sense it is very different from 'content. It is much more a way of looking at the same content, but differently.

In my experience, paradigms are the critical ways to grow and develop. Changing them seems not just intellectual but existential. Sometimes people only change paradigms when circumstances force them to do so. By that I mean, circumstances reveal the inadequacy of old paradigms, and demand we develop new ones. For lots of people this is just plain scary but I think it is the means of growth.

So I am presenting Exodus as a 'paradigm' through which we can look at the same gospel in broader ways. In this talk I use literary features to the Exodus event - and how it is handled by the prophets much later in the OT. As I have often said, "bible as literature" is a new and widening approach to reading the Bible. In this talk I look at the way the motif of 'creation' is echoed, built on, and then extended through the lens of the Exodus account.

So 'creation' is not just used as a one-off image, for salvation but it is an organising motif that recurs throughout the OT - and the NT. So we get a kind of reverberation of themes that echo back and forth; they reach back and they reach forward. The upshot is that the governing theme or image emerges as something much bigger than any of the events that it illuminates. It emerges as the architecture of what is happening. So that is what I am arguing in this talk that the 'creation/Genesis' framework does. In this talk, I mention how Alexander Solzhenitsyn did something very similar in his epic book, 'Cancer Ward'. If you have never read any Solzhenitsyn, and want to find a good - or great - novel to read, have a go at 'Cancer Ward'. It is mesmerising.

 




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