Gospel Conversations Gospel Conversations

Well, we have finished the trilogy of Iain Provan’s talks on creation and it provides a nice foundation for all of our thinking in Gospel Conversations. In this next podcast I pick up the Breakfast with Jesus journey through Ezekiel that Anne and I enjoyed so much. You will see a lot of resonances with Iain’s talks. In this talk I ask a question that might seem obvious but in fact is not – ‘What is glory?’ I confess that I never much asked this question for most of my early Christian life, so I just skated over the word and let it become a cliché. The question completes our BwJ series on the book of Ezekiel being framed by ‘glory’ – and in my last talk I explored the wider vision of the ‘temple’ that animates Ezekiel, where ‘temple’ becomes a synecdoche for the entire created order. But we need the second half of the concept to complete this transporting vision of creation and that is ‘glory’ filling this creation temple. In this talk I foreshadow a couple of conversations that we are going to have with Professor David Bradshaw later this year. David is Professor of Philosophy at Kentucky University and his thinking on glory is eye-opening – he explains how the Eastern church fathers explored ‘glory’ in ways that the Western church – to its loss – did not. So you can look forward to that. I also mention Meredith Kline in this talk. You probably have not heard of him, but he was a big influence on two of our friends, Rikk Watts and Mark Strom. The book that I quote from in this talk is “Images of the Spirit” and it is still freely available from online bookstores. Finally, I mention a conversation with a friend of mine at the end of this talk – I have made this letter anonymous and we will post it on the Gospel Conversations website. It is an example of how we might use the creation gospel as the platform for sharing the good news with seekers.

Here is the third and final of our reboots from Iain Provan’s epic 2011 series on the Old Testament Reloaded – “What is Creation?”. In this talk Iain concludes his magnificent trilogy of talks positioning the vast Mosaic vision of God and reality in contrast to the prevailing Ancient Near Eastern worldviews. It is so important to grasp the fact that this was a contest of worldviews – not religions. In the ANE world, the ‘cosmology’ was their total worldview – it was philosophy, reality, society and values. So Moses upturned all of this. We do Moses a vast disservice if we then put him back in our ‘religious’ box – and we can learn from these talks how to widen our grammar of the gospel from merely religious language to all of life language. This talk will echo lots of the themes that I raised in my latest Breakfast with Jesus talk on Ezekiel’s Wider Vision of the Temple where I explained some of the motifs that link the cosmos to the temple. Iain goes into even deeper detail here and weaves a vast tapestry together of OT allusions to the creation as ‘sacred space’. His overarching theme is that creation is not divine – but it is sacred. But Iain does not stop there – he moves onto the associated vision of humanity that this ‘cosmos as temple’ vision implies. That humanity is placed in the temple as the image of God – the vice regent of created space. If you like listening to Iain, then dive into more of his talks on our website. You will find two series there – the 2011 series called ‘The OT Reloaded’ and the 2015 series called ‘Seriously Dangerous Religion’. We will add a great short bibliography that Iain gave us recommending some key resources if we want to take some of the thinking further. Of course, one of them is John Walton, another valued guest of ours in Gospel Conversations. Our next talk will return to Ezekiel to continue the Breakfast with Jesus series. In that talk we will discuss ‘What is ‘glory’?’

This episode is a repost of a talk by Iain Provan from his epic series on the ‘Old Testament Reloaded’ in 2011.  Originally titled ‘Who is God?’ we have renamed it ‘Was Dawkins right about the angry God?’ because that is fundamentally what Iain concentrates on. It is a wonderful talk that is foundational for any Christian’s faith. With his characteristic understated Scottish style, Iain brilliantly lays down the most basic foundation for our faith – the notion that God is not only eternal and sovereign but that he is fundamentally good and on our side.

Tadionally we treat salvation as an individual event, but Ezekiel has a far wider scope. He sees the object of salvation is the whole cosmos not just individuals, and he sees the cosmos as the temple of God.

 Welcome to Gospel Conversations   We have an amazing backlog of great talks from great speakers and thinkers going back over a decade.  So we've decided to republish some of them to supplement our ongoing offerings.  We're going to begin with some seminal talks by Ian Proven. 
Ian is one of the leading Old Testament scholars in the world. And he gave a wonderful series for us on Genesis in 2011. We want to start with a few of these talks because, as you know, we emphasize the creation gospel in Gospel Conversations.  And obviously that demands we have a deep insight into the Genesis story, the creation story that set up  the ground breaking paradigms of what became Christianity. 
In this talk, Ian begins by explaining the ancient Near Eastern cosmology into which the book of Genesis came and which it challenged. By comparing and contrasting Moses view of God with ancient Near Eastern religions, he highlights some of the most fundamental paradigm shifts that belief in Yahweh gave to the world, and in so doing set up the foundations for our faith. 

Did Paul have an introspective conscience over sin?  The answer is “no”’according to a classic article and Tony explains the reasoning in this podcast.