Marc Jolicoeur (aka "Jolly Thoughts"‪)‬ A repository for reflections on life, God, the Bible, etc.

Today is the first time I’ve wondered if the movie title “Free Willy” was actually a hidden joke.
…probably not. Nonetheless, the question of just how “free” our wills may be is no longer a conversation restricted to theologians. That said, this conversation is from a theological vantage point. In it, Nathan Adams (who is currently a PhD student @ McGill University) runs us through the paper he recently presented at the Wesleyan Theological Society. Wanna find out more? Either listen to the pod or comb through the guides below.
Hey, if you’ve gotten this far… maybe either leave a comment here (👇) or leave a quick review on your podcast provider of choice… if you’re inclined, that is!

Chapters:
04:04 Intro & "Wesleyan Theological Society"
09:12 What do we mean when we say "Wesleyan"?
13:05 Introduction to Melanchthon and Wesleyan Theological Society Conference
24:44 Luther and Melanchthon's Views on Free Will and Salvation
28:49 Calvin's Denouncement of Melanchthon
32:17 Melanchthon's Understanding of Grace and Human Agency
35:15 The Windmill Analogy: Human Will and God's Initiative
39:04 Faith Arising in the Process of Salvation
45:28 The Preached Word and the Transformation of Hearts
48:23 Looking to Christ and the Assurance of Salvation
50:05 Prevenient Grace and the Urgency of Responding to God's Call
56:11 Similarities Between Catholic and Protestant Perspectives on Salvation
59:38 The Ongoing Reformation Within the Catholic Church

(AI-generated) Conversation Summary:
Nathan Adams presented a paper on Proto Wesleyan Arminian at the Wesleyan Theological Society conference. The paper explores the relationship between God's will and human will in salvation. Adams delves into the theology of Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin to understand their perspectives on free will and predestination. He highlights the unique position of Wesleyan Arminians, who believe in the involvement of free will in salvation. Adams focuses on Melanchthon's theology, which emphasizes the external action of God upon humans and the role of conviction and faith in salvation. He argues that salvation is not about human striving, but about recognizing our powerlessness and relying on Christ's resources. The conversation explores the concept of salvation and the role of human agency in the process. It discusses the prevailing approach of presenting salvation as a cost-benefit analysis and contrasts it with the views of Melanchthon, Luther, and Wesley. Melanchthon's view is that everything in salvation is from God, and human will is best pictured as a windmill that desires the wind of the Spirit to move it. The conversation also touches on the significance of the preached word in initiating salvation and the assurance of salvation. It concludes by discussing the modern implications of these theological perspectives.

(AI-generated) Sound Bites:
* "One of the perennial problems of theology, any theology, is the relation between God's will and human will in salvation."
* "Salvation is something that God's doing. It starts outside of us. We're not the initiators. None of the resources for this are coming from within us."
* "You don't have a free will to do good things in regards to God. The standard's too high, you're too selfish. It's really just a will that could say no to God, but any yes that your will says, it's not even you saying yes, it's really God saying yes."
* "We all do it in a very semi-Pelagian way. We basically present Christ like a cost benefit analysis."
* "The human will is best pictured as a windmill... The windmill can't make it happen. It's only as the wind blows on the windmill, the wind of the spirit, that the windmill will move."
* "If I think that the only way that anything's gonna happen is if God is moving and present in that moment, then I'm preaching for a miracle."

Keywords: Proto Wesleyan Arminian, Wesleyan Theological Society conference, God's will, human will, salvation, Luther, Melanchthon, Ca

Tim Perry has some strong feelings about the state of the Church at large, and he’s not afraid to lay them out for open & honest dialogue. In this wide-ranging conversation we discuss:
* the unique place of Mary in Christian Theology throughout history, and how that intersects with today
* the potential dangers of “dismissing” Mary
* the latent worth of the Old Testament in the Church today
* the value of embracing a whole-person, embodied worship experience
We get into some nitty gritty weeds a few times in this conversation, and I walked away with some areas of potential disagreement, but I deeply valued Tim’s time and his expertise, and hope you’ll enjoy this conversation. You can find some of Tim’s books at Lexham Press, but might need to hunt / bid for some of the others.
“I would say to evangelicals, ‘Be very careful in disparaging or getting rid of Mary, because she’ll go (she’s not a bully), but she’ll take her son with her… and you end up with a Jesus who is a motivational speaker, or who’s a politician haranguing you to get on the right or the left side of whatever is the cause du jour, but you don’t have the divine-human Saviour anymore.’” - Tim Perry
Keywords: connections, Christian traditions, denominations, research, Mary, Evangelicals, Catholicism, Orthodox, Protestant churches, Bible, Mary, Christian theology, worship, Scripture, grace, unique place, fully divine, fully human, Old Testament, embodied worship


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A few episodes back I shared my conversation with W David O Taylor, wherein we got nerdy on the question of whether or not Jesus could have been considered an “artist”. I shared part of that conversation during the Sunday morning message attached to Moncton Wesleyan Church’s annual arts fest (Imagine). This podcast is the remainder of that message...


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Imagine ‘24 (an annual Arts Fest that I’m quite involved in) is well in the rearview mirror now. Soon I’ll be posting the message I was pleased to be able to share as part of Moncton Wesleyan’s Sunday morning service (a service that featured live dance, live painting, and some other beautiful artistic expressions), but this episode is actually a panel conversation with visual artist Leanne Prescott and songwriter Aaron Bartlett, both of whom are on Imagine’s Lead Team. We recorded this conversation live & in real-time as part of Imagine ‘24’s Saturday Sessions, and the technology was giving us a little grief, so please bear with some of the glitchiness. I’m grateful for these two folks, and am glad to be able to share this wide-ranging conversation about art, the church, and the space(s) between.


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This episode of the pod is me riffing briefly on the waiting that Holy Saturday interposes into the celebration of Easter, followed by a sermon that was part of Moncton Wesleyan’s “Domino Effect” series.

I’m releasing this episode just a few hours after what amounted to a historic Good Friday service in the city of Moncton. Officially 5 churches (and several others “unofficially”) joined together in remembrance, and it was immensely powerful. Right after the service, I got into a brief conversation with someone I know who’d been participating in Lent this year a little more intentionally than has been their typical practice. He said to me, “It was… less impactful than I thought it was going to be.” Honestly, to me, this was beautiful to hear. I feel we need to be honest with ourselves & with others, honest with our expectations, honest with our gains & with our losses. I acknowledged to this individual that this is often my experience, as well. The kinds of practices I advocate for in this podcast (and that I typically practice, to greater or lesser degrees) occasionally lead me to moments of significant impact. More often than not, though, they seem to lead me nowhere at all.
Sometimes (often, even), Holy Saturday seems to lead us nowhere at all… but we can’t see what’s happening underground.
(In my message I heavily reference Justin Earley’s book The Common Rule.)


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In this episode of the podcast I am overjoyed to be able to share my recent conversation with none other than Dr W David O Taylor (hereinafter merely “David”). David is the associate professor of theology & culture at Fuller Seminary, the author of a ton of books… oh, and he was the guy responsible for pulling Bono & Eugene Peterson together for this magical conversation a few years back. Relevant to this conversation, David was (for a significant period of time) a pastor in a church that consisted almost 25% of artists, and he intentionally pastored these artists for their own apprenticeship to Jesus.  He also helped them think through how their vocations served the church and the world.  A lot of that wisdom and experience ended up in Glimpses of the New Creation (the book we primarily talk about), as well as his most recent book, A Body of Praise. I was particularly grateful for the opportunity to chat with David so close to the launch of the 4th annual Imagine Arts Fest, which I help lead in my own local context.  This was a wide-ranging conversation, to be sure, but we kept circling around questions like:
Was (is?) Jesus an artist? Does God care about “aesthetics”?
The conversation may get a little highfalutin’ at times, but (surprisingly) these esoteric questions keep getting grounded back down to earth… earthiness… the ground of being, the ground beneath our feet, and the ground of which we are composed.


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