Greystone Conversations

What would you write to your adult children about the good life? Would it strike the modern notes of making the most of yourself and your abilities, seizing every opportunity, making a difference in the world? Or would it focus on the beauty and goodness of our created and providentially given limits, personally and relationally?This is the question that prompted Ephraim Radner's most recent book, Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty. In today's Greystone Conversation, Greystone President, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, sits down with Professor Radner to explore the ironically revolutionary idea that the ordinary, quotidian, limited life we have been graciously given in God's providence is the world we are called to and which invites our self-offering. In a time when political and social fervor is at fever-pitch, and it's easy to believe that we are called to make a difference in the world at large, especially through political means, this is a call back to something the Church has always cherished in one way or another: both creation and providence are good, and our limits, the limits of our bodily lives maximally defined, are goods too. Radner's book takes its point of departure in a letter he wrote to his adult children, an updated version of which closes the book, and along the way he prods and provokes in the direction of greater modesty in what he calls “betterment” politics. But the frame of the book, and its heart, we suggest, is this message about the beauty of our ordinary lives and contexts, and it is this that we considered together in today's episode.

In our day, while biblical and theological studies certainly continue to abound, questions about the traditional Christian understanding of the atonement are not primarily focused on the question is it biblical. Nor are they focused on whether it is theologically coherent. Instead, they are driven by a concern that it may be violent, and whether that is or is not biblical or theologically coherent is less important than the fact that it is unacceptable. Why? Because a bloody atonement funds or leads to bloody behavior, to various forms of evil conduct. Or does it? Would a theoretically bloodless atonement really be better?For today's episode of Greystone Conversations, Mark Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute sits down with Dr. Benjamin Burkholder, a Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone who also serves North Park Church in Wexford, PA near Pittsburgh. Dr. Burkholder has written about the attraction of a bloodless atonement in modern theology and biblical studies and has a pastoral interest in its powerful role in contemporary Christian culture. Dr. Burkholder will teach a full course on this topic this coming spring of 2024, “Studies in Soteriology,” beginning in early February, and as we note in today's conversation, we are making this class available at no cost to all Greystone Members as a benefit of your Membership.

What if preaching is not only to be carried out with humility, but is also itself a humble form of the Word of God in power? Augustine is known mostly for his large and profound theological treatises, but how can this most influential of theologians also teach us about the urgency of humility as a mode of preaching to humble people?In today's Greystone Conversations episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia sits down with Greystone's Associate Fellow in Christian Tradition, Dr. Charles (Chad) Kim of St Louis University. Dr. Kim is the author of a forthcoming book on Augustine and preaching, and the special contribution of his book is Dr. Kim's exploration of the role of humility in Augustine's preaching—not only in his content, but in his mode and approach to preaching. In a recent journal article, Dr. Kim anticipated his book in a study of how Augustine preached to an audience of (many, not exclusively) fishermen and farmers in rural North Africa. Dr. Kim emphasizes how Augustine demonstrated the way of humility found in Christ for his audience, a Christological mode that helps to explain why Augustine's preaching looked so different from that of the modern day. The result is a rich insight into the density and power of a classical Reformed conviction found in the Second Helvetic Confession (chapter 1) but rarely found—or at least deployed—in contemporary works on preaching, namely, that preaching the Word of God is itself truly a form of the Word of God in which God comes near and draws near. How might this conviction change and inspire Reformed preaching?

What might it look like to refuse generalizations about faithful pastoral ministry and allow the people and context of actual ministerial labor to inform the measure of faithfulness?At Greystone, we make much of the ordinary sources of wisdom in God's Word and ways. But by “ordinary” we don't mean something less valuable or less important. In fact, we mean the opposite. It is in the ordinary (and in that sense mundane) contexts of life that God, in his ordering and sustaining providence, surrounds us with what we are to regard as sources of potential wisdom. From the ant in Proverbs whose example of industry is supposed to be noted by the sluggard, to the skilled merchant or ruler or craftsman or father or mother whose accumulated wisdom is supposed to be gleaned by the observant, God fills our lives with particular relationships and contexts that are to be attended to with spiritual interest.This informs pastoral ministry, which is not ministry to people in general but to people in particular—these people, right here, in this place and time, with their stories and backgrounds and not others. Faithful pastoral ministry is therefore something that requires not only the learned skills of biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, theology and history, and so on, but also patience, listening, and a kind of conformation to the particular people one is called to shepherd. This is of course only one particular expression of something that is true of the Christian life in general. This is more than respecting God's providence; it's using it.In today's Greystone Conversations episode Dr. Mark A. Garcia sits down with Pastor Aaron Carr. Pastor Carr is the minister of Word and Sacrament at First Presbyterian Church in Trenton, Michigan in the greater Detroit area, and he is also the Director of the Greystone Learning Community there. Pastor Carr grew up in the context he now serves as pastor, which has helped him serve them in important ways: a blue-collar environment with a rugged and tenaciously faithful people. We talked about how this has shaped his ministry among them, how mentors in his life have guided his mentorship of others, and what advice he might have for those who are called to pastoral ministry—a ministry that must love particular people enough to watch, listen to, and really get to know them before deciding what care for them looks like.

Today's Greystone Conversations episode is taken from Greystone's upcoming Summer module, Domestic Violence in Theology & Pastoral Ministry—a module which, in many respects, might be among the most unexpected for a theology institute dedicated to the advancement of Reformed theology in the mode of Reformed catholicity. The unexpected topic of this module highlights one of the challenges the Church faces in giving this complicated topic the attention it deserves: we often treat this incredibly complex and ugly subject as though it is in some ways less theologically demanding and less theological in nature than some of the more familiar and comfortable traditional theological questions.We also highlight here another challenge in addressing this topic: the disconnect between what we think we see, hear, and feel among such people with the reality that they live with in a largely private and invisible way. We do this, in part, because we are inclined to assume that what we see, what we hear, and what we experience must be, if not exhaustive of reality, at least a very reliable indicator of reality.The responsibility therefore for pastors and all Christians is a posture of patience, wisdom, thoughtfulness, and deliberateness as necessary ingredients in interpreting a situation faithfully. Such a posture, and the related virtues, belong to some of the classical virtues the church has recognized as important for doing sound theology. Therefore, we see that domestic violence is both a theologically profound and existentially disturbing reality that is no less theological and pastorally necessary to study than any other dogmatic topic.This module will be taught online for ThM and PhD students, and will be open to all MDiv and MAR students in the Westminster at Greystone Collaboration. For access to this courses and many more, become a Greystone Member today.

How might a thematic analysis of Jeremiah, particularly the theme of the faithless bride, help pastors better serve their churches? What can Christians learn about the futility and dangers of sin by studying the Book of Jeremiah, and how might this theme of the faithless bride lead us to a deeper appreciation of Jesus Christ?Jeremiah's confrontation with Israel over their faithlessness is still valuable for those who confront sin today when we consider two key realities about sin. First, sin is irrational. It is utter madness to try to slake one's thirst with the grime at the bottom of a cistern when you can drink from a clear, pure spring. Second, sin's power is broken when we are disgusted by it. We must understand that what seems so attractive about sin is actually hideously ugly. Yes, Jeremiah is about Israel and Judah, but it is also about us.As ministers of the gospel, pastors must gravely and potently confront sin and get people to see its abhorrence and the hopelessness that it drives us to before they can show and speak of the true hope that we have in Jesus Christ. And yet, here's this lingering question: how can we ever arrive here? How can we ever arrive at this knowledge of our sin when Jeremiah so emphasizes the power of self-deception and delusion? As the rest of Jeremiah will show, the new covenant will have the power to pierce our self-deception and engender true conviction in our hearts, and only by the power of God's initiative through Jesus Christ will the Faithless bride once again become a faithful wife and love her husband in her heart of hearts.Today's Greystone Conversations episode is taken from a recent Greystone Module, Jeremiah as Christian Scripture. This module was lead by Dr. Matthew Patton, and will be on Greystone Connect for all Greystone Members soon. Dr. Patton earned his MDiv from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia (WTS) and his PhD in Biblical Theology and Old Testament at Wheaton College under Dr. Daniel Block. He is pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Vandalia, OH.

To an extent which must be amusing to some, surprising to others, and perhaps even a bit unsettling to still others, all year long Greystone seems to be asking the question, what time is it? Is this a question the Scriptures themselves invite us to ask?From Genesis forward, including the long history of the Church since Pentecost, the people of God have recognized, confessed, and taught the theological significance of marking time. This conviction and practice is rooted in the determination to locate time among the things of creation, and thus not as an eternal attribute of God or some eternal principle existing alongside him. As part of creation, time derives its meaning and purpose not from the principles of history as such, or from purely pragmatic concerns of human and national life, nor even from general theological realities such as our doctrine of providence, but from that reality which is prior to and accounts for all of these: the Son of God himself. Time, biblically, derives its form (and thus its meaning and function) from the Son, as all features of the ritual realty of creation do. Thus biblical scholars and theologians, sensitive to how God himself explains these things, rightly point to the sun, moon, and stars of the Genesis creation narrative and the installation of Israel's festal calendar in Lev. 23 as constitutive and formative of the relationship God's people have to time. Scholars have also demonstrated, at great length, that this is not unique to the OT nor limited to a pre-Christ state of affairs but obtains in the NT as well. This is especially the case in work on the Gospel of John, which orders the early Church's liturgical life by telling the story of Jesus not merely as the typological fulfillment of but also as the original and abiding meaning of that festal calendar: the form of the Son accounted for the festal calendar and his contours of birth, life, humiliation, death, resurrection, ascension, blessedness, and the like, are traced out for us in every generation by the contours of time itself, when properly interpreted and described. Thus the Church marks her time throughout the year by the same contours, though on the other side of the empty tomb, with the language often used for these contour points, namely, the so-called evangelical feast days.For this episode of Greystone Conversations, Dr. Mark A. Garcia sits down with a longtime friend of Greystone's, Jack Franicevich, a teacher and an Anglican clergyman. Jack has written a book on how Luke's gospel uses the OT's liturgical institutions, including the festal calendar, to frame a new history for the Church, one that includes the special character of the Lord's day. As Jack notes, Luke is the only NT theological historian to tell not one but two stories that each begin with the phrase, “on the first day of the week.”Besides publishing his research on Luke and sacred time in the life of the Church, Jack is also going to lead a Greystone microcourse in Coraopolis, PA and online exploring this subject matter this coming spring 2023. If you're listening to this episode before that time, we heartily encourage you to consider signing up for this online and on-site micro-course as soon as you can.

In today's episode of Greystone Conversations, we conclude to our conversation regarding craftsmanship and workmanship, and consider what might account for the resurgence of interest in craftmanship and the trades. This is the final episode in our five part series.For today's Greystone Conversations episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia is joined by Mr. Michael Sacasas and Mr. Joshua Klein, both fellows at Greystone who will be instrumental in the apprenticeship mode of Greystone new Mechanical Arts Program. 

In today's episode of Greystone Conversations, we return to our conversation regarding craftsmanship and workmanship, and consider the ethics of workmanship in skill, perception, and habit. This is the forth episode in our five part series.For today's Greystone Conversations episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia is joined by Mr. Michael Sacasas and Mr. Joshua Klein, both fellows at Greystone who will be instrumental in the apprenticeship mode of Greystone new Mechanical Arts Program. 

In today's episode of Greystone Conversations, we return to our conversation regarding craftsmanship and workmanship, and consider today the ends in view of such a theory of workmanship we have endeavored to express. This is the third episode in our five part series.For today's Greystone Conversations episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia is joined by Mr. Michael Sacasas and Mr. Joshua Klein, both fellows at Greystone who will be instrumental in the apprenticeship mode of Greystone new Mechanical Arts Program. 

In today's episode of Greystone Conversations, we return to our conversation regarding craftsmanship and workmanship, and consider today the special significance of David Pye to our overall interest in this series. This is the second episode in our five part series, and today we want to consider the very definition of craftsmanship and the larger discussion that that has long been a part of and which bears—in increasingly relevant ways—upon how we think about theological education, about ministry in the church, about relationships generally and to one another, and our relationship to God's world.For today's Greystone Conversations episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia is joined by Mr. Michael Sacasas and Mr. Joshua Klein, both fellows at Greystone who will be instrumental in the apprenticeship mode of Greystone new Mechanical Arts Program. 

Welcome to Greystone Conversations and the first episode in this special series focused on explaining and commending an exciting new initiative at Greystone Theological Institute, which in one way is rather unique and in other ways is deeply traditional. And as you have perhaps come to expect, or at least we hope you have come to expect, the combination of something that is new with something that is in fact very old—making old things new—is very much a key concern for the Greystone Way.We can hardly think of a better example of this effort and this interest than the new Greystone initiative program we are able to discuss starting in this episode and for several episodes to come. That is the Mechanical Arts Program (MAP) at Greystone. Right from the start, we're going to want to clarify what we do and do not mean by mechanical arts, but that will become clear enough as we discuss and explain this fascinating, very old, and yet very timely way of looking at faithfulness, wisdom, and the call that we all have to thoughtful engagement with one another and with the world of God's creation and providence.For today's Greystone Conversations episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia is joined by Mr. Michael Sacasas and Mr. Joshua Klein, both fellows at Greystone who will be instrumental in the apprenticeship mode of the MAP. 

It is trendy these days to be disruptive. Though it is a word that may seem to refer to a negative reality, “disruptive” is a word used in business, academic, and in many other contexts to refer to an upset that is needed and salutary. Is there a sense in which the concept and language of disruption may help the Church capture something important about her identity and nature, and how does the answer to this question inform who Greystone is and what Greystone is doing?Culturally, we live in a time when upsetting the status quo is appealing, exciting, and assumed to be necessary for the common good. We are all revolutionaries now, and revolution is the new normal. To the same extent, and probably for similar reasons, tradition, age, and established ways are unappealing, and pejoratively characterized in terms of sterility and stagnation. As you know well by now, Greystone shares neither of these assumptions and in fact labors quite explicitly against these trends in all that we do. Still, the concept of disruption does commend something to us regarding the Church and her place in the world that is both traditional and timely. In this episode of Greystone Conversations, we sit down once more with Pastor Jesse Crutchley of the Greystone Chesapeake Learning Community at Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church (PCA), and we run the concept of disruption through the filter of the three elements of the order of reality: time, space, and vocation. This in turn sets up a frankly rather exciting moment in Greystone's life as we are then able to announce a key degree program collaboration that we suspect many of our listeners will want to know about. For more on that announcement, you can chase your time with this episode with a heavy dose of our brand new website, greystoneinstitute.org.As we now sit down again with Pastor Crutchley, let us also thank you once again for spending some time with Greystone today to reflect together on the shape and direction of greater faithfulness to our triune God. Your prayers, support, and partnership truly mean a great deal to us and to the many we are honored to serve. Thank you.

The form of the Word belongs to the meaning of the Word, and this includes its providentially ordered literary presentation. How do the Church's ways of dividing up the Scriptures inform the way the Church has heard and read the Scriptures?We at Greystone were very pleased to speak recently with Prof. Charles (Chuck) Hill, Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. We've long benefitted from Professor Hill's meticulous attention to matters of text and reception, and his exemplary standards of scholarship. He retired from his regular post at RTS in 2021 but thankfully continues to be quite active and productive, and you can see something of his prodigious output if you visit his faculty page at the RTS website. Professor Hill's most recent book, called, The First Chapters: Dividing the Text of Scripture in Codex Vaticanus and Its Predecessors, published by Oxford in 2022, is the focus of today's episode of Greystone Conversations.As the posted book description explains, Hill's book, The First Chapters, uncovers the origins of the first paragraph or chapter divisions in copies of the Christian Scriptures. Its focal point is the magnificent, fourth-century Codex Vaticanus (Vat.gr. 1209; B 03), perhaps the single most significant ancient manuscript of the Bible, and the oldest material witness to what may be the earliest set of numbered chapter divisions of the Bible. The First Chapters tells the history of textual division, starting from when copies of Greek literary works used virtually no spaces, marks, or other graphic techniques to assist the reader. It explores the origins of other numbering systems, like the better-known Eusebian Canons, but its theme is the first set of numbered chapters in Codex Vaticanus, what nineteenth-century textual critic Samuel P. Tregelles labelled the Capitulatio Vaticana. It demonstrates that these numbers were not, as most have claimed, late additions to the codex but belonged integrally to its original production. The First Chaptersthen breaks new ground by showing that the Capitulatio Vaticana has real precursors in some much earlier manuscripts. It thus casts light on a long, continuous tradition of scribally-placed, visual guides to the reading and interpreting of Scriptural books. Finally, The First Chapters exposes abundant new evidence that this early system for marking the sense-divisions of Scripture has played a much greater role in the history of exegesis than has previously been imaginable.In other words, these markings have hermeneutical, and thus theological significance.

Today we reflect on death, courage, and eschatology. Death and eschatology are often connected, of course, but courage takes its shape in relation to both of them. The questions that may elucidate the relationship could be put this way: How do my occasional experiences of great loss or of major life changes help prepare me for my death? Where is courage in that picture? And is there a relationship between (1) eschatologies that emphasize continuities between the present order and the future, consummated order and (2) the domestication of death (as the minimization of the radical and mysterious change that awaits us in it). Might the domestication of death relate to a lack of courage as well?After a lengthy hiatus, Greystone Conversations is back! The reasons for that hiatus will soon be made public, our Lord willing, and if they are then we think you'll be encouraged that the radio silence of our podcast has been a result of necessary labor in other directions, which we pray will yield great fruit for the Lord and his Church. We look forward to announcing those updates soon, but until then we are excited to roll out a few new podcast episodes recorded during this interval. In these conversations, we had the great pleasure of speaking with two truly fascinating and helpful guests who are leading scholars in theology and biblical studies: Drs. Matthew Levering and Charles (Chuck) Hill, and we will also have Pastor Jesse Crutchley on the podcast again to talk about Greystone's theological vision and mission in relation to the concept of disruptive economies. In today's episode, Dr. Mark Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, speaks with Dr. Levering about a difficult yet increasingly explored topic: death. Drawing from his own personal experience as well as the long virtues tradition of Christian ethics, Dr. Matthew Levering has put together a collection of essays that use death as a foil for unpacking and exploring the content of the virtues, and sometimes with rather surprising results. The book is called, Dying and the Virtues, and the theme we were most interested in was the theme of courage with which Dr. Levering closes his book. Courage in the face of death, he suggests, is required not only at the time of death, but also in the midst of the many times God providentially leads us through the experiences of significant loss or significant change—providential experiences in which we can say, in fact, that God is preparing us for the greatest transition of all death. Personally I have to say I have found that simple observation deeply moving, profound, and challenging, and it has come to mind many times since I first read Dr. Levering's relatively brief discussion of it. Listen in as we discuss this idea with Dr. Levering.

What is the form and dynamic of faithful ministry and theology in a contested time? And in what ways might those with Reformed Anglican sympathies appreciate and capitalize upon the very best of that tradition without falling for Anglo-catholicism? Perhaps surprisingly, both of these questions come together in one figure: the famous Archbishop of Armaugh, James Ussher.On 30 October at Greystone Cardiff and online, Greystone is hosting a special lecture series event called "Theological Ministry in a Contested World: James Ussher as Reformed Churchman," with Dr. Harrison Perkins, scholar of early modern Reformed theology and minister at London City Presbyterian Church in London. You can find out more about this event and register for it at Greystone's website, greystoneinstitute.org   Dr. Garcia had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Perkins recently about his upcoming talks at Greystone Cardiff, about an exciting translated and edited collection of some hitherto unpublished works by Ussher forthcoming from Westminster Seminary Press, and about Ussher's perhaps surprising relevance and importance in our day. As Ussher in particular and Reformed Anglicanism in general are enjoying a revival of serious interest among confessional Reformed Christians, surefooted and clear-sighted guidance into this giant of the Reformed tradition is very welcome, and Dr. Perkins provides just that.

How should we understand the psalmists who teach that God tests the kidneys and the heart? Who make much of our eyes, ears, and more, in an overtly spiritual and theological way? What is the anatomy of the soul according to the Psalms, which, it has been said, provides an organ recital of the ways of God's relationship with people?Today's episode is quite different from our usual offerings. Last month Greystone enjoyed a special time of fellowship, of new and renewed friendships, and of prayer and encouragement in the context of a long-overdue Greystone support event. On this joyous occasion, we reviewed various ways in which the Lord has so conspicuously and movingly blessed Greystone's work in the last two years, despite the pandemic context in which our work, and everyone else's, has needed to be rethought and redeployed.We also spent some time listening to various people in the Greystone network who wanted to share how the Institute has proven to be a key part of their own work, ministries, even their lives. (You can see the videos of these testimonials at our website.) Truly it was, and still is, humbling yet exciting to learn from friends, students, and fellow scholars in the growing Greystone network of specific ways Greystone is helping to provide important resources and direction for the Reformed tradition and ministry throughout the world.We also enjoyed a terrific concert from New Song, the choral group of Geneva College, and a stimulating, edifying talk by Dr. Byron Curtis, a professor of biblical studies at Geneva and Fellow of Old Testament at Greystone. Dr. Curtis explored the often bewildering yet wonderfully rich anthropological imagery of the psalms, and the reasons they are important for us to hear well. His lecture was very well received and, combined with the exquisite food and wine and song, ensured a time of great joy and celebration.With that encouragement, and facing new opportunities for service to the Church, this support event was organized to help marshal the resources of God's people in support of these endeavors. And we are profoundly grateful for how the Lord blessed Greystone that night. However, we also learned of many who wanted to attend but were unable to do so, and this started a conversation about how to provide an opportunity for our global network to give in support of Greystone. Today's podcast episode is the recording of Dr. Curtis' talk given at our support event, and we would like to ask you to listen, to enjoy it, and to regard it as our appeal to you to consider becoming a regular supporter of Greystone. One-time or monthly gifts of any amount are absolutely key to our work, and we depend quite heavily on your partnership. Would you consider going to greystoneinstitute.org/donate today, maybe even right now, and giving the equivalent of maybe one cup of coffee, or one paperback book, or more, to help Greystone forward? We are truly grateful for you and for your support in this way.

There is a beautiful mystery in the fact that we often think of certain novels and poems in terms of our experiences at the time we first read them. This is both appropriate and fascinating, especially when second and third readings of the same literature yield further layers of our experiences with them. We are reminded, then, that we are biographical creatures, storied creatures, and that stories, poems, and sagas do not only entertain us; they help to articulate and explain us. Today in August of 2021 the writer Walt Wangerin Jr. has just recently died. Wangerin, a Lutheran storyteller who received many of literature's highest awards, is best known for a series of fantasy books situated in a most unusual world—a farm that intersects with the meaning, the dangers, and the promises of everything.The first book in the series is called The Book of the Dun Cow. Dr. Garcia first read it at the recommendation of Jonathan Stark, his friend, a longtime teacher, and a ruling elder at Immanuel, the Presbyterian congregation Dr. Garcia served as pastor. He couldn't help but read this story as one nearly consumed with his own experiences of horror and pain in a very difficult time of pastoral labor. Nor could Wangerin, it turns out. Perhaps this is why this book has been precious to Dr. Garcia ever since, and yet it remains a compelling and worthwhile book in its own right, quite apart from ways this biographical sketch may or may not prove to disclose. But then, perhaps we should not hesitate to notice such things either, if our stories partake, purposefully, of the features of the story of everything precisely so we can be sure of the Creator's purposes at work in his creation.Despite its apparently comical setting (talking animals and the like), The Book of the Dun Cow is a profoundly serious book and--as Jonathan and Dr. Garcia both agree in today's conversation--it is not to be confused with a children's book. In its seriousness, though, it is also refreshing. It does better justice to the realities of sin, evil, and pain than so much of what the world offers—indeed, than the Church sometimes offer. This alone commands our attention.At long last, then, Greystone Conversations was pleased to sit with Jonathan Stark to talk a bit about one of our favorite topics: Wangerin's The Book of the Dun Cow. Thank you for sitting with us to listen in. We hope you will consider reading the book yourselves, of course, but would be quite content if we are all reminded by this story that the real world is more fantastic—in the literal sense of the word—than we could possibly imagine in our largely disenchanted age, and that good writing reminds us, even urgently, of reality's enchantment.

One way in which the biblical-theological work of Geerhardus Vos in the late 19th and early 20th century differed from what then and since has been called biblical theology was Vos's commitment to the vertical dimension of history and revelation in relationship: by the vertical we mean that revelation is not limited to, exhausted by, or even primarily focused on the horizontal, historical, sequential elements of before/after, promise/fulfillment, and versions of typology that can be reduced to such concerns. Instead, at every point God's revelation in and through history is related to, in fact anchored by and in, the triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, the realities of heavenly and glorious life and fellowship within the trinity and the economic purpose of that triune God to glorify the Son in the Spirit by way of his Church. That “vertical” reality is primary; history is explained by it, not the other way around.Ironically, a purely horizontal approach can confuse the idea of “fulfillment” with displacement, and the Son of God's relationship, personally, to the OT (and its people) becomes at least a strained and weak thing. Unfortunately, the horizontal model continues to be the most familiar and conventional way of thinking about biblical theology, the relation of the two testaments, Christ and the OT, and so on, even among some who would claim to work self-consciously in the wake of Vos's proposals. Since Vos, a great deal of excellent work has been done in the history and theological nature of Scripture and its reading, and much of it can advance insights Vos commended to our attention. Advancing those insights, and doing so in conversation with other voices in biblical, historical, and theological scholarship will require sustained consideration of the effect of the vertical upon our understanding of Christ himself and the relationship of Church in Christ to all of Holy Scripture. And this is a wonderful thing to learn and to pursue. In today's episode, we even suggest that the lowly lint-roller – yes, a lint-roller — might help us avoid the errors of the before/after, promise/fulfillment model in favor a more conspicuously Christian practice of Scriptural reading.To discuss this and more, we are pleased to welcome back once again friend and minister of Word and sacrament, Pastor Jesse Crutchley, pastor of Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a PCA congregation in Millersville, MD, and member of Greystone's ministerial council.To purchase a Greystone “Never Just Passing Through” t-shirt or mug, email info@greystoneinstitute.org

Is there a Christian reading of Proverbs, and of Proverbs 31 in particular, that is both determined by Christ and also materially relevant, even constitutive, for personal, familial, communal, and ecclesial wisdom? Is that reading coherent with Scripture as a whole in such a way as to be prompted by it?The Book of Proverbs has notoriously suffered at the hands of moralists who reduce its message to a range of maxims printable on your favorite mug or t-shirt or framed and placed on your sitting room wall. But it has also arguably suffered at the hands of those who, in reaction to that moralistic misuse of the Book, reduce its testimony to a Christ who fulfills Proverbs by, as it were, doing away with it. This not only blunts the force of the Proverbs, refusing its continuing witness to Christ and to our life in him; it also evidences confusion on what typology, figuration, promise/fulfillment, and biblical theology, etc. really mean. It ends up emptying the proper and important morals with the moralism. It mutes the ethical content of Christ's work and world—to which we belong by faith—in the quest to be, we think, “Christological” readers rather than legalistic ones.Is there a better way? And how might that better way disclose rich features of that most abused of Proverbs passages—Proverbs 31—in a time when we need to hear again, or perhaps for the first time, how Proverbs, and all of Scripture, speaks about gender, domestic relations, ordered reality, and the like?

What do Reformed Christians mean today when they refer to limited atonement or particular redemption? Is it the same idea that has prevailed in the Reformed tradition historically and confessionally? Are there different Reformed ways of understanding and affirming the truth that God in Christ saves his people by his obedience and sacrifice?It is always difficult to discover that what we first learn about something doesn't quite fit the reality of the thing on closer inspection. The difficulty is often less theological and intellectual than emotional and psychological. This is true for many Reformed Christians who converted to the Reformed tradition of faith and worship by way of the many influential popular presentations of Reformed theology, often connected in some way with popular conferences and personalities. It can be jarring to discover, as some do eventually, that the so-called five points of Calvinism are not really a summary of the Reformed theology of anything, including salvation, and were never intended to be. It can also prove eye-opening to learn that most of the key distinctives of the Reformed theological tradition aren't unique to the Reformed at all but reach far back into the deep Christian tradition shared by other Christians and of which the Reformed fathers insisted the Reformed tradition was but one--though the most faithful--expression. But learning the real history and theology of the Reformed tradition is important, not only to represent it correctly in conversations and in preaching, but also to ensure that our quest to advance and build the Reformed theological tradition is advancing and building something that really does exist.The nature and purpose of the atonement is one doctrine that has enjoyed a close reexamination in terms of the actual texts, events, and figures of the critically important 16th and 17th century periods of rapid theological development and of confessionalization. This includes the reconsideration of the often misunderstood language of limited atonement, and the also often misunderstood or mischaracterized teaching of a remarkably capable Reformed theologian named John Davenant, the famous Bishop of Salisbury and prodigious British scholar. Dr. Michael Lynch knows Davenant's teaching on the atonement very well, and has just published a full monograph on the topic with Oxford University Press called John Davenant's Hypothetical Universalism: A Defense of Catholic and Reformed Orthodoxy. Whatever your own view of the matter, if you thought John Owen's teaching on the atonement was or is the only Reformed way of saying things, or if you thought Peter Lombard was a medieval hair-splitter with no relevance to contemporary theology on the person and work of Christ, or if you thought the diversity of the Reformed tradition was a problem remedied by the confessions, you'll appreciate what you learn in Dr. Lynch's book and also find my conversation with him in this episode quite interesting.Please remember, too, that we in the midst of a major push for support as we seek to take the next steps in our development and fund our operations for the coming days. Your gift at our website, however small or great, is a terrific help to that end.

A perhaps surprising amount of Holy Scripture is presented in terms of a dialogue where the identification of the different speakers is important to proper interpretation. And yet, biblical text does not provide us the modern printing conventions we are used to for dialogues, such as naming the speaker before the speech and clearly breaking up the speeches so we know where one ends and the next begins. Why is Scripture presented this way, and how does the form of Scripture belong to its message?God did not give his inscripturated Word to his Church all at once or as a single literary unit. To use the language of Hebrews 1, it was “at many times and in many ways” that he gave the Word that finds its fullest visible and incarnate realization in Jesus Christ. The discreet parts of Holy Scripture, therefore, mark out the ways God has related to his people in history by particular words, words and messages and texts which have their own integrity. And yet that integrity must not be confused with independence: the integrity of every Word given from the mouth of God is rooted in its relationship to all Words given from that divine mouth and, most ultimately, in the fact that the divine Author is every word's primary and original context. When we further consider that the Author's self-disclosure is part of that context—that the Gospel of God gives the God of the Gospel—then we can appreciate how every word may be understood as a “conjugating” of that Gospel. The Old Testament prophecy of Jeremiah is full of mysterious dialogue, weeping, and confession. How, then, does Jeremiah function as a canonical conjugation of the Gospel?To discuss Jeremiah Dr. Mark A. Garcia was pleased to talk recently with the Rev. Dr. Matthew Patton who is minister of Word and Sacrament in Vandalia, Ohio, and who will teach a full Greystone course module on “Jeremiah as Christian Scripture” online and in Coraopolis, PA this Fall. Dr. Patton is also working on publications that explore Jeremiah's text and message, including a major commentary with Zondervan. Among the features that we found most interesting in our conversation is what scholars call the “dramatic dialogue” literary device, including its relationship to patristic prosopological exegesis and the identity of God in relation to passions and history. Along the way we also talk a bit about one of Dr. Patton's professors at Wheaton, Dr. Daniel Block, whose work in the Old Testament has been a great gift to the Church.We trust you will find this conversation with Dr. Patton interesting and edifying. If you do, we'd like to encourage you to listen to his Greystone Online Postgraduate Seminar presentation on Jeremiah and the theology of repentance, and to consider signing up for his fall 2021 module on Jeremiah by visiting our Modules and Events page. Please remember, too, that we are in the midst of a major push for support as we seek to take the next steps in our development and fund our operations for the coming days. Your gift at our website, however small or great, is a terrific help to that end. Thank you once again for spending some time with us today to reflect together on the shape and direction of greater faithfulness to our triune God. Now, the Rev. Dr. Matthew Patton and Dr. Mark A. Garcia talk about Jeremiah, Holy Scripture, and conjugating the Gospel as episode 48 of Greystone Conversations.

Scripture regularly deploys the imagery of agriculture and farming to describe the nature and dynamics of human faithfulness--or the lack thereof. While many might be inclined to explain away the agrarian assumptions of biblical teaching on vocation and human meaning as mere metaphors, others might be equally tempted to confuse the biblical direction of argument with a clear warrant for farming as the highest human calling. The truth, though, is somewhere in the middle, and its appreciation may go a long way toward our urgently needed recovery of the integrity and value of good work, the long view of personal, communal, and churchly formation, and the dispositional aspects of relating properly to tradition on the one hand and the present on the other.In 1995, poet Seamus Heaney of Northern Ireland received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Probably best known to the wider public for his translation of Beowulf, Heaney, who died in 2013, is easily among the most well-received and respected of 20th century poets. “Digging,” which opens his debut 1966 collection of poems, may be his best-known poem. In “Digging,” Heaney characterizes his vocation as a writer with the imagery of a farmer working the potato field. Heaney betrays a special fondness and respect for farming and for the land, not least because the potato field encloses within itself the lives and stories of his farming father and grandfather before him. That same special fondness, however, introduces possible tension, as his own apparently non-farming vocation as a writer suggests that their hard-won legacy may be broken by his craft. Or is it?The following lecture is selected from the Greystone full course module, The Order of Reality, and is drawn from the concluding series of lectures in that module which focused on the concept of vocation. The full course module will soon be available at Greystone Connect, but we are happy to provide it to the public today in the hope and prayer that it might encourage our listeners in the value, integrity, and meaningfulness of what may at times seem quite mundane and ordinary in the daily grind of modern life. At the least, we pray it will be of some interest to you in a way that leads you pick up some excellent poems, perhaps Heaney's in particular, and sit back and reflect on things. Among the highest virtues of poetry is also a reason they are so rarely enjoyed in our day: they force us to slow down, think, follow, work, and only then enjoy the rewards.Seamus Heaney reading "Digging"

If the God confessed by the Church is real, then it is not merely ill advised but an act of rebellion against that God to attempt to approach Holy Scripture in order to demonstrate that He is and has revealed himself, rather than because He is and because he has revealed himself. In other words, as Christians approaching Holy Scripture, we do not merely end with the triune God of the Christian faith; we begin with him in order to know him, and anything else.For centuries and straight through to our day there have been attempts to assume, introduce, or defend a gap, even a chasm, between the world and witness of Holy Scripture as such, and the triune God himself as confessed by the Church. When the truly “original” world of Scripture is thought to be the ancient Near East or the first century Greco-Roman world instead of the speech of God whose work history is, then theology, understood as speech about God, is often assumed to be subsequent to and separate from what the Bible is itself really about and really doing.But this is a fundamental rejection of how the Bible itself speaks, and in particular of biblical creed-like material we see within the Scriptures themselves. These creeds, or expressions of the “rule of Faith,” regulated the faith and life but also the Scriptural reading of the Church even before the close of the New Testament canon. That is to say, the Christian way of reading in particular the Old Testament Scriptures was not seen by the New Testament writers as merely one legitimate option among others, but as the only valid and faithful way to receive the Scriptures, and that valid way was from the start trinitarian and christological. Appreciating this phenomenon of Holy Scripture in relationship to the Church and her traditions regarding God in Christ yields a fresh insight into an often overlooked but critically important reality: the fruitful and enlivening power of Scripture as a properly theological, divinely authored and given, ecclesiastically embraced Word that is positively related to the key concerns of the Christian tradition historically and presently.To discuss these rich topics we are pleased to welcome today to Greystone Conversations Dr. Craig Carter, recently retired Professor of Theology at Tyndale University College & Seminary in Toronto, Ontario, and author of Contemplating God with the Great Tradition, a book which prompted our conversation in this episode. Dr. Carter is also teaching a full course module for Greystone in London and online in October of this year (2021), and we would like to warmly welcome you to consider signing up for what promises to be a rich and rewarding time of theological edification. You can find out more on our classes and events page at our website, greystoneconnect.org, where you can also consider joining our supporters with your gift to keep Greystone serving the Church and the world with the advancement of confessional Reformed theology and reflection.

Does God sometimes unravel the ordinary recognizable form of the Church in times of great suffering, weakness, or judgment in order to re-weave her strands into a new form? Is this because the Church derives her form from the Lord Jesus Christ--the Christ of history, that is, of suffering to glory, humiliation to exaltation, obedience to life? What would we do if we believed this? What should we do . . . now?There are times in the Church’s life, informed by the story of Israel and ultimately of Israel’s Lord and ours, in which God pries away our gripping fingers from the conventional expectations we have accumulated about how the Church, ministerial training, and theological fellowship look. In these times, which may be times of judgment over our sin or of weakness for other providential reasons, the Church's core identity in Christ remains as a blessing of the Spirit, even as she is, as it were, reconstructed in a new form never completely identical with her previous iteration. This is the story of Church in many eras of her history and in many parts of the world, as historians of the Church have long know, and there is good reason to think it may be what we are experiencing now. In such a time, the faithfulness of the Church is quietly eloquent yet revolutionary, and faithfulness is its own act of resistance, for God’s providential and loving loosening of our hold on what will not remain exposes the firm grip we have by faith to those things that will endure. But this faithfulness requires a new, even rare kind of courage among Christians who appreciate not only the urgency of our reconsideration of how things are, but our sacrificial investment in how things should be.To discuss these weighty things we are pleased to welcome back once again friend and minister of Word and sacrament, Pastor Jesse Crutchley, pastor of Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a PCA congregation in Millersville, MD, and member of Greystone’s ministerial council.

Alongside the important place of training, encouragement, and counsel or advice, is there also a need, not only for pastors but for all thoughtful Christians, for being pastored intellectually and theologically?Much is said in our day of the great need for church planting and for evangelism, and rightly so. We do need more faithful churches throughout the world, near and far. Understandably, this need ordinarily receives a good bit of attention in ministerial training contexts, as do missions, church or congregational principles of ministry and problem solving, preaching, and the like. Seldom do we hear, however, of the need for pastors, and all thoughtful Christians, to be pastored alongside or beyond their training in an intellectual and theological way. We might put the matter differently. Seminaries and divinity schools are often maligned, though usually in at least partial jest, for not teaching about everything a minister faces in the ministry. Of course, seminaries can’t do so, and in fact shouldn’t aim to do so. But if we do justice to the properly theological nature of the ministry of Word and sacrament, and of the nature of many, if not all, of the challenges and questions pastors and Christians do face throughout their service to Christ, we will recognize the need for ongoing edification and instruction regarding the Scriptures and important questions in theology. At Greystone, this is easily the most frequent need we hear expressed and the most frequent reason people appreciate our efforts, thanks be to God. One facet of our need to be pastored intellectually is the fact that so much on offer to Christians retraces very familiar and well-covered ground, and one could easily get the impression from publication lists that we are in the same place in theological and biblical understanding that we were one or two or even three generations ago, but we are not. Much important work has been done since then, much continues to be done, and engaging this work can be invigorating and deeply edifying, not only for ministerial purposes narrowly but for us all as Christians who seek to know our Lord better. Being pastored intellectually, and not only emotionally or—to use an oft misused word—practically, is very important to spiritual well being and fruitfulness.The term we’ve been using, “being pastored intellectually or theologically” is an expression that arose in a recent conversation with two ministers in Reformed churches, Pastor Nick Smith of the United Reformed Church, who serves in Idaho, and Pastor Daniel Doleys of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church who ministers in Ohio. Nick and Daniel were here on site at Greystone recently for the last section of our Order of Reality full course module, and wanted to talk together about why this dimension of pastoral formation and fellowship is so important to their work and their lives as ministers. That conversation is today’s episode of Greystone Conversations. One more thing before we turn to today’s episode. With today’s conversation Greystone launches a major fundraising appeal, something we try to do as infrequently as possible, and have not done for some years. What we think you’ll hear from Nick and Daniel is that what Greystone is doing is not only important but urgently needed. Many others say the same, and we are delighted to see how the Lord has blessed our work with such enthusiasm and effect. But now we must turn to you and earnestly ask if you might consider supporting our work. If you detect a sense of urgency here, you are correct. We have needs, as well as opportunities, before us right now, and there is simply no way Greystone can continue to do our work and serve our growing network of friends without support. We’ve done much with very little by God’s grace. By that same grace we pray he will lead you to begin to support this work as our needs have caught up to us. Please pause this episode even now and pray that the Lord

Last time, we suggested that to recover our humanity in an increasingly inhuman world, we must recover what Ivan Illich called the tools of conviviality. But this requires, at least in part, that we recognize the difference between cultural tools and modes of life which deskill and those which, increasingly, simply cultivate greater dependence.The difference just noted between cultural tools and modes of life which deskill and those which, increasingly, cultivate dependence may be reconfigured another way: The Church has long confessed and taught that our Creator has blessed us, his image bearers, with unique capacities to mirror him in love and productive self-donation, with self-giving service that generates God-glorifying things in others and in the world at large. Capacity, along these lines, is a helpful index to calling. This skill in thoughtful and productive service belongs to our root identity and vocation as human beings—vocation, that is, in comprehensive life terms, not merely in the sense of the job we do for a paycheck. It therefore finds expression in the myriad ways we creatively, productively, and thoughtfully use, manipulate, and configure the gifted stuff of creation and providence, especially in terms of time, space, and our callings as male and female, as laborers and worshipers, as persons with natural affinities and with spiritual ones. But to the extent our God-given vocations, along these basic lines, are blunted, weakened, even deadened by increased dependence on others, and especially large others like the state, we find ourselves, corporately and individually, becoming less human.In today’s episode, Michael Sacasas and Dr. Mark A. Garcia conclude their conversation from last week on the life and work of Ivan Illich. The first five minutes of today’s episode repeat the last five of the first episode, to help listeners with a bit of context for what follows. If you haven’t yet listened to Episode 42, we encourage you to do so first and then continue with today’s conclusion.Please also note that Mr. Sacasas has also taught a ten-lecture micro-course for Greystone which reflects many of the themes and concerns captured in these conversations. Called “Technology, Faith, and Human Flourishing,” you can access this series of lectures and many others at GreystoneConnect.org If you can graciously bear with my saying so once again, if you are, or become, a Greystone Member at GreystoneConnect.org you of course already have access to this series and all other Greystone full courses, microcourses, study days, special lectures and more.Thank you once again for spending some time with us today to reflect together on the shape and direction of greater faithfulness to our triune God. And now, the continuation and concluding part of a two-part conversation with Mr. Michael Sacasas on Ivan Illich, conviviality, and the way of faithfulness and wisdom, which is episode 43 of Greystone Conversations.

To recover our humanity in an increasingly inhuman world, we must recover tools of conviviality. So what makes a tool convivial. For Ivan Illich, tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used by anybody as often or as seldom as desired for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. That is, convivial technologies are accessible, flexible, and most importantly noncorrosive. But this runs hard against the grain of a world in which we've been catechized from our youth to believe that without the tools of the professional guild, especially the credentials that they alone can give, we are uneducated, worthless, anonymous, even meaningless. Is there a better way? Unless we find it, we risk destroying one another and ourselves.In an earlier conversation, and in other Greystone contexts, we've suggested the importance of appreciating the exodus event as liberation not from oppression in general, but oppressions of various particular sorts clarified, identified, and addressed throughout the canon of Christian scripture. One of which is the oppression of the endless demands of productivity. In the Egyptian's sabbath-less world--a world as real now as it was back then--work is a 24/7 reality yielding a mode of life driven by productivity, commodification, and, of necessity, competition. In such a world, you can only have competitors since you need a Sabbath space of rest and rejoicing without labor in order to have a neighbor. To put it differently, if nobody can work in sabbath time and in sabbath space, then, because of that time and space, your neighbor is your neighbor and not your competitor, and life as a result is clearly more than work and productivity. The world in which we live now appears to be very similar to that world from which Yahweh liberated his people, and is thus a world in constant tension with what we are and who we are for as human beings made in the image of God. But how do we articulate the nature of this problem, how do we better understand the way things should be and how we ought to be by reflecting wisely on how and why things are the way they are? Is the solution as simple as opting for traditional liberalism or traditional conservativism? Or is it perhaps a matter of tweaking this or that minor feature of every day life for a better end? Or is the diagnosis and thus the solution far deeper than this and more wide-ranging? As an organization and institution, Greystone is driven by a unique mission that includes recalling the ways it used to be valued in ministerial and theological formation contexts. The way, that is, communal, slow, thoughtful, textual, conversational, theological, focused on quality rather than quantity, hospitable, realistic, and humble. And we endeavor to bring these old ways into the new world in which we now live. Taking our cue from the role of the Sabbath in the exodus event, we see our mission as a call to renewal not in the form of revolution but of courageous and thoughtful resistance to the commodification and hypeindustrialization of relationships and processes in our world, believing that this resistance is quite key to the church's welfare and success in the world. Along side which we commend a better way--the better way--of the biblical world and the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Today's podcast, part one of a two-part series, explores and reflects upon hyperindustrialization and the influence of Ivan Illich on much of what might be considered The Greystone Way. To discuss the life and work of Ivan Illich, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, President and a Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, sits down with Greystone's Associate Fellow in Ethics and Culture, Michael Sacasas.The Skill of Hospitality: Ivan Illich on technology and the human future

Is there an order to reality and does Holy Scripture commend that reality to us to believe now or does it only record the way the ancients saw things? From time to time in Greystone Conversations, we feature selections from full-course modules, micro-courses, and other events that we run in the Greystone context. Today we are pleased to make available to you the opening lecture in one of the most portent of Greystone's full-course module offerings. It's a course called The Order of Reality, featuring examinations of time, space, and vocation within the Biblical world. It's among the most important modules in Greystone because it touches on many of the central and animating concerns that have driven Greystone's vision and mission since our formation. At the heart of that mission is a conviction that the world commended to us in Holy Scripture--as the real world to be inhabited by faith--is, in fact, a properly theological reality which is grounded in the Christian confession of the Triune God and of His good and holy purposes for His creation--purposes which come to realization, of course, by the way of redemption and the consummation of all things in the Lord Jesus Christ. What does the order of reality have to do with that? One way of looking at the question is to note the highly influential lectures on philosophy delivered by Hegel in which he infamously and very influentially insisted that the start of the story of Philosophy is with the Pre-Socratics, and that anyone before the Pre-Socratics were, in the nature of the case, pre-philosophical and to be dismissed as preoccupied with mythologies and the like. Over against that dominant stream of reading the history of ideas, an increasing number of scholars have demonstrated the properly philosophical nature of the cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean and the other cultures leading up to the time of the Pre-Socratics. Among the many benefits of this surge in interest in Philosophy before the so-called philosophers is the appreciation of the possibility that what we are looking at in Holy Scripture is not pre-scientific or pre-philosophical, and certainly not pre-theological. But theology in a different mode from perhaps what we have come to expect it to look like. Essential in that development is the rediscovery of the central importance of the book of Leviticus, which in this course Dr. Mark A. Garcia suggests should be seen as a catechism for reality—particularly as it commends to us a way of understanding the order of things in terms of time, space, and vocation.In this opening lecture, we begin to think about what some of those most fundamental structures of reality might be. These are concerns classically connected with theory, and as this is only the first lecture in a series of lectures, it will partake of a provisional character. We encourage you to consider listening to the rest of the series as soon as it becomes available on Greystone Connect.The chart mentioned in the lecture can be found here.

Is the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son of God evidence of the Church's departure from the simplicity and straight-forwardness of the Scriptures? Does it confirm a penchant for arid, confusing, and unhelpful metaphysical and speculative argument? Can we speak of the doctrine of eternal generation as truly biblical and, even if we may, does it matter much to the Church's faith and life?In 2004, Paul L. Gavrilyuk published a book with Oxford University Press exploring one of the most frequently misunderstood and maligned of classical Church doctrines: the impassibility of God. In his work, The Suffering of the Impassible God, Gavrilyuk recalls his readers to the impassibility doctrine of history, not of myth, and along the way reminds us how Christian theology works and, as a result, what it is. The doctrine of divine impassibility was not articulated and defended as a way of resolving apparently contradictory truths, namely, that God is unchanging and yet that God the Son suffered. No, divine impassibility was articulated to reject efforts at such resolution. Recognizing the inherently paradoxical nature of Christian theological claims, and refusing the temptation to dissolve all mysteries by proposing an exhaustively explanatory formulation, divine impassibility affirms the truths we know from Scripture concerning God and speaks faithfully about those truths while rejecting unfaithful ways of speech and of forcing resolution of apparent tensions. In other words, Christian theology does not aim at fully explaining things that are beyond our understanding—the things that belong to the Lord, as Deuteronomy says. Christian theology is an exercise in speaking receptively and humbly in order to speak faithfully of the God who has revealed himself truly and clearly, allowing that speech of God to be properly ordered by its relation to other truths as well as with a view to things we reject. That speech is especially ordered by God's revelation of himself in his gospel.What is true of divine impassibility holds for other doctrines as well, including the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, our topic for today's Greystone Conversations episode. Like divine impassibility, the doctrine of eternal generation has fallen on hard times. In recent decades, a significant portion of evangelical Christians, including some Reformed Christians, have assumed that this doctrine is evidence of the defiling influence of ancient Greek philosophy, or evidence of the church's departure from the simple Christian faith of the Bible and teachings of Jesus. Today's Greystone Conversations episode addresses many of these concerns as Dr. Mark A. Garcia, Greystone President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology, sits down with Dr. Charles Lee Irons.Dr. Charles Lee Irons has written extensively on eternal generation and contributed to the book, Retrieving Eternal Generation (Zondervan Academic). He is currently writing a book on this topic, and will be teaching a Greystone Micro-Course this month on the eternal generation of the Son. For more information, and to register for this upcoming course, click here.

If the Church is facing a multifaceted and complex challenge in theology, hermeneutics, and liturgy, what does this challenge look like on the ground in the context of actual and continuing Church ministry? Not long ago Greystone Conversations hosted a series of conversations with Drs Mark Garcia, Garry Williams, and Robert Letham about the concerning state of theology and of distinctly Christian practices for reading and interpreting Holy Scripture in churches across the UK. In those conversations, we explored the various causes for what we agreed is an urgent state of affairs threatening the very integrity of Christian orthodoxy in our day and for generations to come, as well as prospects and practices for the renewal of a properly Christian ministry of Word and sacrament. This renewal must include the recovery of theology for ministers in training but also in practice, of a canonical spiritual reading and use of Holy Scripture, and of a self-conscious focus on the liturgical rhythms, practices, and aspects of Church life as they invariably form God's people as his own. In all three respects—theological, hermeneutical, and liturgical—this amounts to a call to courage: the embrace of being perceived as strange and odd. The result of such courage is the cultivation of a Church community which is nothing less than an act of resistance and the joyous proclamation of an alternative to the ways of the world in our day.In those earlier conversations, we enjoyed the input and reflections of expert scholars in theology and Christian history who have had extensive experience in the service of Church congregations. Today, the conversation continues a bit further, as Dr. Mark Garcia sits down with three ministers who are actively serving the Church in this context: Philip Haines in Cardiff, Andrew Young at Oxford, and Steve Hayhow in London. Cardiff, Oxford, and London are three gleaming gyms on a belt of Greystone's UK presence as we work in all three of these key cities to advance confessional Reformed catholicity in the faith and life of UK churches and institutions. 

I am who I am largely because of my biography, that is, the way people, places, and things have shaped me. I am not an idea but a storied creature with flesh and blood and history. But who am I if I lose my memory of others--and even myself--as a consequence of dementia? Can I still be who I am at all if I do? If so, how?For today’s episode of Greystone Conversations, we pause over a small portion of the full Greystone course module, Theological Anthropology, which features, among many other things, several lectures on the phenomenon of dementia. In the small section featured here, we wrap up some reflections on the philosopher Robert Spaemann and tease out some rich and helpful insights on dementia from John Swinton and Rowan Williams. Along the way, it is suggested that the challenge of dementia in relation to the human person, and to the stability of our identity, is a focal point of the Gospel of God and the God of the Gospel. Among the blessings of that Gospel is this simple and profound truth: we are constituted in our identity, and stable in that identity, not because we remember, but because we are remembered. If that sounds a bit like the popular 2007 Pixar film, Coco, I agree: in fact I think this is the chief reason that film is so compelling! But the remembering we are considering for our purposes is far grander and more powerful than the bond we have with those who came before us and who will follow us. We are stable and secure in who we are not because we remember but because God remembers us. That apparently quite straightforward observation in fact invites, perhaps even requires, some patient reflection and meditation, and I hope today’s selection will help us all a step or two down that path.If you enjoy today's Greystone Conversations episode, the Theological Anthropology course module is available to all Greystone Members at Greystone Connect, along with many other modules available in our growing course library.

What do we mean--or what should we mean--by the term "biblical theology"? Is it the same as the New Testament use of the Old Testament? Is it more biblical than systematic theology? And is there a reading of Holy Scripture that is demanded by and provoked by its very nature as Scripture rather than just a book of books?In our last two episodes, Drs. Garcia, Williams, and Letham reflected on particular challenges facing the church in the United Kingdom and throughout the West—including North America. That challenge, we noted, is two-fold as it has to do not only with theology but also with the way Holy Scripture is perceived, spoken of, interpreted, and proclaimed in relation to the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. The relationship of Christ to Scripture, particularly the Old Testament, is a key area of significant concern among conservative Christians. To refer again to a common expression, a high view of Scripture which insists on important attributes such as inspiration and inerrancy tends too often to exist independently of a high use of Scripture. What then might the high use of Scripture entail? One way this question has been answered in recent generations is with reference to so-called "biblical theology." But almost as quickly as the term was introduced it has required explanation and has been used in a wide variety of ways. Do we mean, by biblical theology, something different from or even the opposite of systematic or dogmatic theology? Does the term mean a theology that is more biblical than other approaches? Does it refer to a largely descriptive and historical enterprise characterizing how various biblical authors or later editors understood the subject matter they deal with? More common in conservative circles, does biblical theology essentially mean how we can find anticipations of Jesus in the Old Testament that are confirmed explicitly in the New Testament—or more generally, the New Testament use of the Old Testament? And should our reading rules and strategies start with and even end with our reading rules for any other kind of text? Or does the fact that Scripture is God's Word play a difference in how we read from the start?At Greystone, the use of Scripture connected to a properly high view of Scripture serves as a key aspect of our mission for the renewal and re-invigoration of the Church in faith and life. Understanding this Greystone mission can be approached by way of the reasons why Greystone answers "no" to all of those aforementioned approaches to or models of biblical theology. What then do we want to say about biblical theology?Dr. Don Collett, Greystone Fellow in Old Testament and professor of Old Testament at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA (USA). He has been teaching course modules and participating in rich conversations with us at Greystone from the beginning, and has often provided stimulating and compelling explanations of biblical theology as it ought to be carried out against a backdrop of not only modern critical and evangelical approaches to Scripture, but more importantly against the backdrop of the Church herself and her particular faith-claims and commitments concerning Lord Jesus Christ. In today's Greystone Conversations episode, we are pleased to invite you to listen in on the first lecture segment in Dr. Collett's new full-course module with Greystone called Hermeneutics of Christian Scripture which was recently run live at Greystone and is nearly ready to be posted in fully produced form for Greystone Members at Greystone Connect. In this opening lecture, Dr. Collett introduces many of the concerns of the course module as a whole, remarking on many of the concerns addressed above.

In our last Greystone Conversations episode, we asked the question of how long can the Christian Faith survive in recognizable form in a Church context where the work of theology is held in suspicion and the priority of divine authorship of Holy Scripture plays little to no role in biblical interpretation? We asked if there is not a true sense in which the frontlines of the Church's spiritual warfare today is in the library? As we turn our attention to possible remedies for this situation, does our concern for ideas suggest a new kind of Gnosticism or is there another way to think about the rehabilitation of the theological life of the church in relationship to Scripture and the ministry? Last episode, Drs. Letham, Williams, and Garcia explored the issues at hand regarding the questions above. Today's episode explores what the solution or solutions might look like. That solution we suggest includes at least three elements: 1. the recovery of properly theological interest in the faith, life, and ministry of Christ's church, and one which we recognized has both exegetical roots and exegetical consequences. Our theology shapes how we read Scripture, whether we intend this relationship or not. And it is in fact quite unbiblical to divorce faithful, biblical reading and interpretation from the work of Theology. Theology is in fact the disciplined and ordered reading of Holy Scripture which attends to its anchor in the trinitarian God of the Christian faith, and the purpose of that God in history. A purpose brought to its fullness, beginning to end, in the Lord Jesus Christ. 2. Attention to the institutional and organizational contexts in which such a recovery might be advanced. This requires exploration of the successes and failures of traditional institutions but also openness to the ways non-traditional and newer entities might be well equipped to serve as vehicles for further reformation of the church according to the word of God.3. Liturgy. We are Gnostics, and so we must not allow ourselves to indulge the temptation to think that the remedy is simply more ideas or better ideas whether about doctrine or the Scriptures. No, it is, in fact, a refusal of the scriptures themselves to imagine that orthodoxy can long survive in a church context where it is detached from the worshipping and common life of God's people; where the routines, rhythms, cadences of the sacred assembly cannot repeatedly reorder us toward our life in Christ including our thinking.To discuss this and more Greystone President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, is joined once again with Greystone Fellows, Dr. Garry Williams and Dr. Robert Letham. Dr. Robert Letham is Greystone Fellow in Theology and History and professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Union School of Theology. Dr. Garry Williams is Greystone Fellow in Theology and History and director of the Pastor's Academy in London. Drs. Garcia, Letham, and Williams have extensive experience teaching and writing theology in the UK, and are therefore keenly aware of the challenges facing the church in that context.

How long can the Christian Faith survive in recognizable form in a Church context where the work of theology is held in suspicion and the priority of divine authorship of Holy Scripture plays little to no role in biblical interpretation? Is there not a true sense in which the frontlines of the Church's spiritual warfare today is in the library? The heart of the challenge facing the church in the UK may be approached by one or the other side of the current state of affairs. On one side is a challenge to Christian theology. There is among self-professed evangelicals in the UK (and of course in many other countries in the West) a palpable suspicion of serious theological study and thinking. The roots of this suspicion are predictably complex, but the fact that serious theological study was for a long time linked with university contexts where higher critical and atheistic rejections of orthodoxy prevailed and matters of Christian piety were ignored, does certainly account for a lot of the rather curious absence of theology in British churches and in the work of ministers--even in how ministry is understood. Theology is assumed by many to be at odds with warm piety, evangelism and mission, and biblical Christianity, and so it is held in suspicion. On the other side is the challenge to orthodox biblical hermeneutics posed by a thoroughgoing biblicism which is quite unbiblical. Again the critical work of the universities is a factor here as critical rejection of the Bible as inspired Holy Scripture provoked evangelical reactions that prioritized, ironically, the very human authorship and intention which lead those higher critics to reject orthodox theology. Alongside this phenomena, and related to it, is a transformation of the rules of Christian reading of Scripture including a very narrow and modernist set of criteria by which we are supposed to evaluate the legitimacy of typological, figural, or allegorical and spiritual senses of biblical texts. Lost in that transformation, and that new way of understanding what qualifies as biblical, is the very reading of Scripture that yielded the key tenets of orthodox Christianity including the Trinity, the person and work of Jesus Christ, the nature of the Gospel, and more. For this reason--among many others--the trajectory of anti-intellectualism and naive modernism in British evangelical circles warrants the greatest possible concern about the prospects for a recognizable Christian faith in this former bulwark of orthodoxy. Socinianism, Marcionism, and other classic heresies seem to be crouching at the door--if not halfway through it already. How might we think about the nature of, and background to, this urgent state of affairs where Christian faith and gospel seem empty of any theological concern or content and we have a Bible that is treated much as a book but not as Holy Scripture? To discuss this and more Greystone President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, is joined with Greystone Fellows, Dr. Garry Williams and Dr. Robert Letham. Dr. Robert Letham is Greystone Fellow in Theology and History and professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Union School of Theology. Dr. Garry Williams is Greystone Fellow in Theology and History and director of the Pastor's Academy in London. Drs. Garcia, Letham, and Williams have extensive experience teaching and writing theology in the UK, and are therefore keenly aware of the challenges facing the church in that context.

The Church's faith is held, confessed, and lived invariably in a friction-full relationship to the world. What then can we learn about Christian identity and faithfulness now by considering such faithfulness in an older era? We may find it difficult to name many figures or events in the Church of the third century. This is understandable as this is a period bracketed on one side by the close of the apostolic era and the first years of the church's expansion and on the other side by the famous and critically important councils of the fourth century. But it was in the third century that the Church arguably started to gain a true sense of its call to follow Christ inasmuch as it had started to see and to experience the differences between the demands of the Christian faith and the demands of Roman culture. Here in the friction between being Roman and being a Christian, the faith began to take on a more stable form as, in a real sense, counter-cultural. The cost of discipleship, therefore, also started to become clear. Not only in the more famous context of persecution, but also in mixed families, the workplace, and in the political and economic spheres. The third-century may seem to be a strange world compared to our own, but it is one with which we may find we have a lot in common. Like episode seven in our series a number of months ago, today's episode features a selection from Dr. Mark Graham's Greystone full-course module on Christianity in Late Antiquity. Dr. Graham's module explores the backdrop and context, as well as key figures, major historical moments, and central practices of Christianity during this watershed period of history. As you listen to these lecture segments included as today's episode, remember they are selected out from a larger series of lectures, which will provide the context for the things said in today's episode. But as you listen, also consider what difference these reflections might make to you in your grasp of the Christian faith, including the Reformed faith in particular, and of the work of God and the Church throughout history. Imagine too what difference it might make to what you already do know. If you enjoy today's content, please consider listening to the full course which is available with all other courses and events at greystoneconnect.org. 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.

Do the particular truths of the Christian faith generate options for the faithful exercise of the Church's mission to the world, and at the same time rule out some missionary efforts, models, and approaches as not in keeping with the Christian faith?Twenty years ago, in his book The Gagging of God, D.A. Carson titled one of his chapters “on drawing lines when drawing lines is rude.” The Church has long understood that effective missionary work throughout the world requires clearly understanding the line beyond which our effort to reach the lost on their own terms quickly and easily becomes a compromise of the Gospel itself. Drawing those lines, however, in the context of missionary work does seem rude, especially in a world and in a culture where having good motives is supposed to be more than enough. In recent years, the work of Christian missions has been further complicated not only by a rapidly changing world, but also a rapidly changing Church, and the result has been a great deal of concern—sometimes a rather urgent concern—that the truth of the Gospel is being lost in well-intentioned but misguided efforts to reach the lost.These few simple but important observations about the state of missionary work throughout the world prompt the introduction in today's episode of The Southgate Fellowship: “In the summer of 2016, a group of theologians, missiologists, and reflective practitioners convened to discuss the state of missions within the evangelical world. Drawn from Europe, Canada, and the US, participants reflected a variety of backgrounds and church denominations. Following the success of this initial symposium, it was decided to establish a formal identity with a clear mission. This group began to meet again under the title of The Southgate Fellowship.”These lines of description are taken from the Fellowship's website. It continues: "The Southgate Fellowship is a fellowship of theologians, missiologists, and reflective practitioners fully committed to the visible church and her Christ-appointed mission. In obedience to Christ and his Word, TSF exists to advance biblical thinking and practice in world mission, as captured in the solas of reformational theology. The summum bonum of mission activity is the glory of God. This ultimate aim—under Jesus Christ, Head of the church and Lord of the nations—must retain uncompromising primacy for each and every missionary and mission endeavour. In order to bring glory to Christ in the fulfilling of his mandate (Matt 28:18–20), we must let God’s authoritative and sufficient Word define the design and execution of mission strategy. In short, all mission activities must draw upon Scripture and its self-interpreting authority. To heed Scripture is to obey the voice of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Head of the church and the Head of her mission."In the text above, The Southgate Fellowship explains itself, and on their website readers can find a set of 100 affirmations and denials regarding the state of Christian missions in the world today. It may be surprising to discover that this statement of affirmation and denials surveys the vast terrain of basic theological topics and explores contemporary questions and challenges in the Church's mission in light of the key commitments of the Christian faith itself. But this is a reflection of what The Southgate Fellowship is concerned about when it comes to the Church's mission in the world. A number of recent models and initiatives for disciple-making and outreach have, according to the Fellowship, compromised some of the key tenets of the Christian faith and how the Church exercises her calling in the world. For today's episode, Dr. Mark A. Garcia speaks with Dr. Flavien Pardigon, a Greystone Fellow and council member of The Southgate Fellowship, about the Fellowship and the pressing questions of faithful missionary activity in this rapidly shifting international and cultural situation.

Why have professional historians of the Reformation and post-Reformation era of Reformed theology and confessionalization argued that "Calvinism" is not only a misleading term but--somewhat provocatively, perhaps--practically useless? And how do distinctions help us not only to separate truth from error, but also enrich our grasp of the truth and aid us in Christian love?Calvinism is popular today in certain evangelical circles, but it is arguably not the Calvin or Calvinism of history. The disconnect, and the resulting confusion attaching to the term, is evidenced by the fact that many who identify themselves as Calvinists today would not welcome the historical Calvin to their eucharistic table or allow his teaching on baptism and other topics in their communions. It is also unfortunate that, for a generation or so, many ministers in Reformed church contexts received not only their first introduction to so-called Calvinism and Reformed theology, but also the principal part of their ministerial training, from the influential conference circuit of the 1980s and 1990s which provided a great service to formerly non-Reformed believers but also provided a skewed portrait of what “Reformed” means (and meant) historically). As a result, some Reformed Christians, even ministers and teachers, are startled to learn later in life that there are in fact not five points of Calvinism in the ordinary sense of that expression, that predestination and election are not distinctives of the Reformed tradition, and that the Christian tradition is in fact a source of authority in Reformed churches, though not the norming norm.It is worth asking, therefore, when we say “Calvinist,” what we mean by the term. There are some misunderstandings about Reformed theology that need to be corrected. To discuss this topic, Dr. Mark A. Garcia sat down with Dr. Mark Jones, Greystone Fellow in Theology and History, who recently delivered a series of 8 lectures for Greystone under the title, “We Distinguish: Scholastic Distinctions in Reformed Theology and Ministry," which is available for individual and group study at Greystone Connect.

What do the Westminster Catechisms mean by speaking of our chief end as glorifying God and enjoying him forever? What difference does it make if we read the word "enjoy" here against the background, not of modern notions of happiness or enjoyment, but of Augustine's famous and deeply influential distinction between "enjoy" and "use"? A distinction established even more firmly in the Western Christian tradition in Peter Lombard's decision to begin his widely used Sentences with that same distinction.The opening words of the Westminster Shorter and Larger catechisms are among the most well known in the history of the church's catechisms. "What is man's chief end," asks the Shorter Catechism, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." The Larger Catechism opens almost identically yet more fully saying, "Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God and fully to enjoy him forever." But the use of "enjoy" in these catechetical statements is not likely what we as moderns assume it to be. We use the word "enjoy" to say we take delight in or pleasure in an activity, person, or occasion—and ordinary with at least a slight preference for the pleasure sense. We hear the word "enjoy" and think of our desires and of happiness. Perhaps when we hear the word "use" we think of negative misuses of people or things. But the traditional meaning of "enjoy" in Christian literature reflects a distinction between "enjoy" and "use" introduced by the great African theologian Agustine in his opening section of On Christian Doctrine. Reflecting on what Augustine meant by this distinction, which is easily misunderstood by contemporary Christians, can greatly enrich our appreciation of what the Westminster Catechisms likely intend by their famous opening words. To explore Augustine, Lombard, "enjoy" and "use," the Westminster Catechisms, and the difference all this makes to Christian faith and life, we are pleased to welcome back to the podcast, friend of Greystone Theological Insitute, Pastor Jesse Crutchley. Jesse Crutchley is pastor at Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church (PCA) and member of Greystone’s Presidential Ministerial Council.

What do we mean by the conscience, and how have our assumptions about the conscience changed as our perspective of the person and the moral life have changed?Today's episode is the opening material of a full class module called Reformed Casuistry and Moral Theology. Casuistry is a very old word but continues to be a very popular way the Bible is used--focused as it is on case studies. Casuistry is, in brief, the application of Scripture and distinctly Christian principles and commitments to the particular concrete and often messy or complicated questions of moral life. Casuistic ethical inquiry is something the early modern Reformed tradition excelled at, though there was a great deal of development among the theorist and practitioners over time as well. Some of the great names of the Reformed tradition from this period--particularly William Perkins and William Ames--were also highly influential casuistical theologians who bequeathed to the confessional Reformed tradition a whole framework for thinking about and using the law of God in ethical life.This course module explores Reformed casuistry by examining the nature and (perhaps surprising) differences between these lions of the Reformed tradition, as well as the nature of Scripture, how Scripture works ethically, and similar questions. But the course module begins with the material made available in today's podcast--material which explores the nature of the conscience and the ways that the very idea of the conscience underwent a major shift in keeping with changes in theological anthropology. The result, at least in these opening lecture segments, is a call to retrieve something lost in the turn from the pre-modern to the modern world: the notion of the conscience as communal rather than exclusively individual; the idea, that is, of a "common sense" that is ecclesial. To see what this means and how this might be important for Christian ethics you'll have to listen not only to the following selection from the module but to the series as a whole which is available at Greystone Connect. Still, we trust this one selection may provide at least a glimpse into what is involved. This and many other offerings are available at Greystone Connect, along with the group study option for many of these courses, micro-courses, and series.

Do Reformed Christians believe in baptismal regeneration? How do Reformed Christians classically relate baptism to the Church and to faith, and is faith required for baptism?Today's Greystone Conversations episode is the last study in a series featured at Greystone Connect called We Distinguish: Scholastic Distinctions in Reformed Theology and Ministry. This is a series led by Dr. Mark Jones, a Greystone Fellow in Theology and History who is also pastor of Faith Vancouver (PCA) in Vancouver Canada, and who is a specialist in post-reformation Reformed theology. This gives rise to his special contribution in this series. Dr. Jones' experience in academic scholarship includes having edited, with Michael Haykin, A New Divinity: Transatlantic Reformed Evangelical Debates during the Long Eighteenth Century, writing with Joel Beeke A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life, and his own book, Why Heaven Kissed Earth: The Christology of the Puritan Reformed Orthodox Theologian, Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680). He is also the editor, with Dr. Haykin, of Drawn into Controversie: Reformed Theological Diversity and Debates Within Seventeenth-century British Puritanism.In this series, again called We Distinguish, Dr. Jones takes to task the often confusing uses of the word Calvinism today. In the opening talk of this series, Jones explains how "Calvinism" is popular today in certain Evangelical circles, but there is a great deal of uncertainty as to what we mean or should mean by the term. Arguably, the term has lost its usefulness altogether. And yet, even that is a complicated story. There are certainly some misunderstandings about Reformed theology that need to be corrected, and the use of the word "Calvinism" has made this need quite clear. And so this short course explores how the scholastic method used by several generations of Reformers and their diverse followers can still help students and practitioners of theology today in our quest to know and to promote theological truth, as well as to better understand what we mean by "Reformed."The final lecture of this series, the one featured in today's Greystone Conversations episode, is Dr. Jones' explanation of the relation of covenant, Church, baptism, and faith. How have the Reformed classically understood the relationship of covenant, regeneration, faith, the Church, the sanctification of Christ himself, and the status of children? The answers may surprise you. Understanding why these answers are in fact not only surprising but also quite diverse may go a very long way in helping us better understand the nature of differences--today and historically--among those who claim the name Reformed but have different understandings of the relationship of baptism to faith and to the Church. This series of lectures is available now on Greystone Connect for free for Greystone Members and is also an optional resource for Group Study. Become a Greystone Member today to gain access to this series and the growing library of Greystone modules.

Why should the first steps of a Reformed Mariology begin with the Scriptures rather than tradition? Today's episode of Greystone Conversations is the second study in a series delivered in London called "Rescuing Mary from Rome: The Virgin in Scripture, Theology, and the Church." It is that time of year when many evangelicals and Protestants have Mary very much on the mind, and so we thought it would be a good time to explore Mary and the Old Testament together. In this second lecture of five in a series, the perhaps surprising observation is raised that Roman Catholic Mariology is rooted not only in tradition but also in a reading of the Bible--in particular, the reading of the familiar Marian passages in the Gospels against the background of, and with a view to, the entire canon of Holy Scripture. In other words, many distinctively Mariological themes that we recognize as Roman Catholic draw not from the Gospels exclusively and not from post-Biblical tradition exclusively but from a variety of Old Testament figures, teachings, narratives, and themes that have long been recognized by Roman Catholics and Protestants alike as belonging to the gospel portraits of Mary. This series aims to demonstrate not only that certain Roman Catholic Mariological themes are rooted in one way or another in legitimate Scriptural motifs, but that the legitimate connections between the Old Testament and Mary are in fact misused and distorted in Roman Catholic teaching, and that this happens by way of what is here called a "leap": the leap from those legitimate connections that are there in the Bible between Mary and the Old Testament to the illegitimate Roman Catholic Mariological conclusions. This leap amounts, in short, to an ascription to Mary of what belongs, by way of Mary and other biblical figures, to the church or the eschatological kingdom of God. The Roman Catholic Church traditionally places this relationship in reverse so that the churchly and kingdom figures found throughout Scripture resolve in some way in Mary herself rather than the other way around in which the biblical motifs that do converge in Mary give way to a greater convergence in the truth of the glorified and consummated Church: the Body of Jesus Christ, the motherly city-bride described as the kingdom of God in glory in the Book of Revelation. A curious feature in all this--the story of Mary and the Old Testament--is that many evangelicals, wanting to reject Roman Catholic Mariology as strongly and as visibly as possible, tend to suspend the Old Testament hermeneutic that they are quite happy to deploy for many other topics and themes when it comes to Mary. For instance, many readers of the Bible argue quite strenuously for the Old Testament roots of infant baptism, church government, and certain aspects of the atonement--all quite rightly. But they either deny or altogether overlook arguably stronger and more visible Old Testament roots for Mary's unique role in salvation-history. The fear appears to be that to recognize the Old Testament backdrop and deep roots for what the Bible says about Mary might lead inevitably to Roman Catholicism. This series is designed to explain why that is not the case.To listen to more lectures from this series, become a Greystone Member today! Greystone Members not only have access to this series, but they also gain free access to all the courses, modules, and lectures available at Greystone Connect.

How should we understand the relationship of the Septuagint to what we traditionally mean by Holy Scripture? What difference does it make to biblical interpretation and the vocabulary of theology if we work with the Septuagint alongside our Hebrew and Greek Testaments? And what does the field of Septuagint studies look like now, and where is it going?Today's Greystone Conversations episode is the continuation of a conversation between Matthew Albanese and Dr. Mark A. Garcia regarding the Septuagint--the translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek. In the first part of their conversation, Mr. Albanese and Dr. Garcia discussed how complicated--indeed how fraught with risks--such language is since there is no single Septuagint and it is far more than a translation in the modern sense of that word. They explored, in particular, the importance of approaching the Septuagint as the first commentary on the Hebrew Bible.In this second part of the conversation, Mr. Albanese and Dr. Garcia discuss the vexed question of the status of the Septuagint in relation to the Hebrew and Greek Testaments, which the Church identifies, by creed and confession, as Holy Scripture. They also move more substantially into the rich topic of the New Testament use of the Old Testament in light of the Septuagint, including the heavy use of the Septuagint by the New Testament. To zero in on particular case studies for these grand and sweeping questions, they then discuss Mr. Albanese's own research project in Greek Isaiah and the fascinating ways in which Greek Isaiah displays internal ordering and various important intra-textual features--an ordering and features which signal not only the important unity of Isaiah but also the remarkable hermeneutical moves made by the Septuagint within a single book. After this, Mr. Albanese and Dr. Garcia turn to the current state of Septuagint research, directions that research is going, and promising but largely untapped areas for future work. Finally, Mr. Albanese offers some suggestions for where any thoughtful Christian can begin in one's practical appreciation of the Septuagint.Now in the last stage of finalizing his Doctorate of Philosophy at Oxford University, in which he worked on Septuagint Isaiah, Matthew Albanese is also one of Greystone's recently appointed Associate Fellows focusing his Greystone activity in the large area of what has long been termed "Oriental Studies." In the months and years to come, our Lord willing, we can look forward to Matthew teaching series and modules for Greystone in Christian Syriac, Aramaic, the Septuagint, and various portions of the canon of Christian Scripture.

What difference might it make to our relationship to the Septuagint if we saw it not only as a translation of the Hebrew OT into Greek and as a translation often used in the NT, but also as the first true commentary on the Hebrew Old Testament? How might this approach to the Septuagint illuminate our understanding of biblical hermeneutics and the nature of Holy Scripture?In the exilic or early post-exilic period, Hebrew gave way to Aramaic as the lingua franca and classical Hebrew started to fade from use. Then, when the Jews became Hellenized on account of the diaspora provoked by the rise of Alexander the Great and of the Greek empires, Greek became the primary language for Jews. This combination of historical developments helps explain why the Septuagint became the Old Testament for many Jews leading up to and into the New Testament era, especially those living in Ptolemaic Egypt and other deeply Hellenized areas.The Septuagint is primarily a translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek--this much is common knowledge. But what is less known and appreciated is that the Septuagint may also be viewed as the first commentary on the Hebrew Old Testament. To be sure, this is true along the lines of what translation necessarily is: not simply a wooden replacement of one word in one language with the allegedly equivalent word in another language. Rather, all translations involve a measure of commentary, of explanation and sense-making, given the way languages work. And yet the ways that the Septuagint provides explanations of the Hebrew Scriptures disclose not only ancient views of how the biblical text works as text but also valuable insights into how the Scriptures read and interpret themselves, including the long-standing curiosity of how the New Testament writers read the Old Testament. Given that the month of December has just begun, this is an excellent opportunity for us to think a bit about the Septuagint since an interesting example of its importance comes to us in Matthew 1:23 as a citation of Isaiah 7:14--those famous words of the Prophecy of Isaiah that he spoke to Ahaz, which in Hebrew says "behold the young woman shall conceive," but in the Septuagint reads, "Behold the virgin shall conceive." Matthew is citing the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew Old Testament. This suggests that the language of the "virgin birth"--the virgin birth of Jesus of Nazareth--is not only a faithful rendering of the meaning of the Hebrew word for a young woman but, in what is often overlooked even by the most enthusiastic defenders of the virgin birth among evangelicals, the very notion--which is to say the very vocabulary--of the "virgin" birth of Jesus is something we owe specifically to the Septuagint which uses the word virgin to clarify the nature of Mary's state when she brings us the Messiah. Despite this rather key role in reading Scripture, the Septuagint has strangely enjoyed precious little serious attention among seminary students and writers in biblical and theological studies. With this in mind, today's Greystone Conversations episode is a conversation on this very subject with Matthew Albanese. This conversation will be a two-part series, with today's episode introducing the subject. Now in his final stage of finalizing his Doctorate of Philosophy at Oxford University, in which he worked on Septuagint Isaiah, Matthew Albanese is also one of Greystone's recently appointed Associate Fellows focusing his Greystone activity in the large area of what has long been termed "Oriental Studies." In the months and years to come, our Lord willing, we can look forward to Matthew teaching series and modules for Greystone in Christian Syriac, Aramaic, the Septuagint, and various portions of the canon of Christian Scripture.

Imagine that leading Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians sit down at a table to discuss justification by faith. And imagine that those Protestants are not nominal liberals but are among the most celebrated, reliable, trustworthy, and representative theologians in history. Now imagine that this assembled group reaches an agreement on justification by faith. In 1541 leading Catholic and Protestant negotiators did in fact agree on a brief statement on justification by faith — Article 5 of the Regensburg Colloquy. Luther, however, described Article 5 as an inconsistent patchwork of contradictory ideas, while Calvin stated that it contained the substance of true doctrine. Both views have been held ever since. This presentation by Prof. A. N. S. Lane, drawing on his 2019 book with Oxford University Press, argues strongly for Calvin’s assessment. It does so by examining carefully the views expressed at the time by the participants and other interested parties. Article 5 fell from favor because of misrepresentations of its teaching and because what was being sought was not agreement on one point only but agreement across the board, which of course did not happen.This presentation was originally delivered as part of Series 1 of Greystone's Postgraduate Seminar Series, available at Greystone Connect.

What difference might it make to Reformed systematic theology if we were to recover and deploy the fundamental importance of the Trinity, the incarnation, the ascension, and especially the Church, rather than expend all our energy only on the (certainly indispensable) doctrines of justification by faith alone, epistemology and revelation, theological method, the cross, and the atonement?In the 19th century, Presbyterian minister and professor Stuart Robinson wrote a book entitled The Church of God as an Essential Element of the Gospel. Not only would such a title certainly fair poorly in terms of sales today, but its very thesis would draw accusations--maybe even charges--of clericalism, traditionalism, and any number of others epithets expressive of the often irrational and even violent distaste amongst western Christians for the Church as organization rather than only organism--the Church as a defined body, with authoritative rituals and patterns of life, practices, and officers, apart from which the notion of an individual Christian life and faith is traditionally meaningless.Some will no doubt fear that such a book title and theology, making the Church an essential of the gospel, is a slippery slope towards Rome. But this is really only an indication of how very far we have fallen in our day from the biblical and traditional Christian teaching regarding not only the Church but the nature of saving faith and of the Christian life. The truth is that the ordinary necessity to salvation of our relationship to the real-life flesh and blood worshipping assembly--the organization we call the Church--exists in a friction-full relationship with our modern default mode of almost rabid individualism. And so we are unable often to appreciate the teaching of the Westminster Standards about the preaching and the sacraments of the Church as means of saving grace rather than only nice and helpful edifying addenda to the central thing of the Christian's individual cognitive disembodied faith in Jesus. Reformed theology has a rich tradition of clarity on this matter, and Robinson's book is only one of many expressions of the biblical commitment to the Church as the "ark of safety."Another work in this vein is the work of Dr. Robert Letham, who's recently published Systematic Theology explicitly teaches, and attempts to recover, the traditional Reformed understanding of the Church as essential to the gospel. How might today's church recover such a view of the gospel? And what difference might that make to Reformed systematic theology?Today's Greystone Conversation episode is a discussion on these very questions between Dr. Mark A. Garcia and Dr. Robert Letham. The Rev. Dr. Robert Letham is a Fellow at Greystone in Theology and History. Dr. Letham is an eminent theologian and historian, and an example of Greystone's commitment to careful patristic scholarship and confessional Reformed catholicity. He will be teaching a Greystone course module this winter on the doctrine of the Trinity and its outworking in history. Register today!

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.