Ben begins with the opening of Erich Auerbach’s famous book on Western Literature, Mimesis. Auerbach contrasts Homer and Moses - in particular the story of Abraham in Genesis 22. He says that Moses’ narrative is deep and mysterious, in contrast to Homer which is shallower and eloquent. For Ben (and Auerbach) this suggests the unique way that Scripture works - as in invitation to the reader to enter the text and start a conversation with God about what is going on.

The picture that emerges from Ben’s ideas is really important for us today. It defies the view that Scripture is a flat text with clear and precise meaning which we are called to excavate. Rather the scripture is like a deep ocean with the surface visible but the depths hidden and attractive. So in this view our ‘reading’ is part of the inspiration process.

Enjoy this talk. Between Mark and Ben, they offer rich depth to the idea of what ‘scripture’ and ‘inspiration’ mean.

Greg is a respected author and speaker who is gifted in bringing new perspectives on things that we often take for granted.
We have asked him to tackle some thorny topics where people of faith have often ventured and uncovered difficult questions that all too often elicit weak or problematic responses. If you want to go beyond and dig deeper we encourage you to spend the Saturday with us.

Greg will also be speaking at a number of other events whilst in Sydney -

• Wednesday evening, 4th Nov - St James Institute

• Thursday, 5th Nov - Academic Symposium at the Alpha Crucis University, Parramatta

• Friday, 6th Nov - One day event run by the Jesus Collective. To be held at Alpha Crucis University College, Parramatta

Whilst the St James Institute talk is free to attend the other events will be ticketed as we have incurred substantial costs. Details for all of these events, including how to book your attendance will be published soon.

The event will be recorded and made available on our regular channels in the months following the event.

We encourage you to come and be present for the conversation.

This Talk is adapted from a paper entitled, “Responding to a crisis of hope- Gregory of Nyssa in dialogue with contemporary psychology” presented at the John Behr conference at Alphacrucis College last year. Ben Myers and I co-wrote the original paper, and I am grateful for Ben’s theological input. This version also reflects some of my further reading and thinking.

I offer it as an example in my life of the ‘So What’ question we are exploring this year in Gospel Conversations. How might the more expansive theological landscapes of the Church fathers and mothers reshape not only our understanding of God himself, but our intellectual and professional life? As a Clinical Psychologist with an academic interest in the psychology of hope, I have been reflecting on how patristic theology intersects with my own work. The content is therefore quite ‘niche’ but hopefully illustrates the ‘So What’ exercise. As Ben more eloquently puts it (as always), it is an exercise in ressourcement – returning to ancient texts to illuminate contemporary questions.

An important personal caveat is that, until recently, I have spent my Christian intellectual life in the undulating lowlands of the reformed evangelical world. It has only been in the last few years, through Tony’s encouragement via Gospel Conversations, that I began reading the towering figures of patristic theologians. I have read many of Gregory of Nyssa’s books and writings, but I am by no means an expert on his grand theological vision, which has its own assumptions, internal coherence and historical situatedness.

In drawing on those aspects of Gregory’s fourth century thought that connect to my own, I know I do not yet fully inhabit his intellectual and theological landscape. I haven’t done the full pilgrimage - it feels like I’ve been flown in to hike the last few kilometres of Everest! I may not have done the full ascent from basecamp, but I can still glimpse some of the rewards of the final view. His mountaintop concepts- epektasis, apokatastasis, the mystery of God - have provided a rich new vantage point to view my theological and psychological homelands.

I understand, for example that for many universalist theologians like Gregory (and more recently Bulgakov and Bentley Hart), the reconciling of all things in Christ is the natural consequence of other ‘basecamp’ foundational understandings of scripture and cannot be simply be ‘an option’, as I present my own position in this talk. Like many GC listeners, I am still working out which hermeneutic makes the best sense to me and how new thinking integrates with my existing frameworks. That pilgrimage itself involves quite steep and rocky terrain and will take time.

I am thankful that relationship with Jesus himself doesn’t require theological acumen or certainty on such matters, and only that I come to him as his child. On this challenging and exciting journey, I rest in that.

We think this is an important topic for our world today and fits in with the ‘so what’ theme of the creation gospel. I often mused while I was a strategy consultant, how different the world would have been if more women were leaders than men. I think we might have had more compassionate organisations. Instead we got a patriarchy.

So I also wonder how theology might have been different if more women were given the prominence they deserve? Would we have a more beautiful gospel and a more maternal view of the cosmos, creation and the creator?

Tony Golsby-Smith

July 24, 2025

Following on from last year’s successful John Behr book club, we’re thrilled to invite you to join this year’s book club, launching ahead of Dr Greg Boyd’s visit November 4-7.

This is a wonderful opportunity to engage deeply with Greg’s work and prepare for rich conversations when he joins us later this year. Rob Robayna will be hosting the online book club on Microsoft Teams. We will make the e-texts available for everyone who registers.

To ensure everyone has a meaningful chance to participate, we’re keeping the group small and interactive. Spaces are limited, so we encourage you to register soon to secure your spot.

How to Join:

email Rob at robert.robayna@outlook.com to sign up for the book club

Dates: August 20; September 17; October 8; October 29

Readings:

August 20. The Problem and the Cross (Cross Vision, pp. 1-80).

September 17. Biblical, Historical and Cultural Evidence (Cross Vision, pp.81-132).

October 8. Rethinking God’s Judgement (Cross Vision, pp. 133-174)

October 29. Seeing through the Cross (Cross Vision, pp.175-251)

Format: Online @ Microsoft Teams

Whether you’re a longtime friend of Gospel Conversations or new to our community, we’d love to have you be part of this journey.

Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions. We can’t wait to explore these conversations together!

Warmly, Tony and the team

This is the huge topic that we asked Mark Strom to address for us. It really is one of the ‘so what’ questions for our day and age. Mark is uniquely qualified to give us some wisdom on this because, among things, he wrote a significant book on how to read the Bible called ‘The Symphony of Scripture’. (Still readily available and if you have not got a copy - buy it). So at first we just expected him to give us a summary of the book. But he went further.

He decided to give us a story of how his relationship with the Bible - the way he interpreted what ‘scripture’ meant - developed over the years. He gives us nine different perspectives he went through. They are not ‘right or wrong’ but rather growing perspectives on the Bible, his experience of reading it, and how we should respond to it. Marvellous stuff and very very thought provoking. More than that - very wise and we can benefit from Mark’s long, and at times, torturous experience.

He used slides in the talk - if you watch on youTube you will see them spliced into the talk. If not, here they are to download.

Gc Symphony

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That is what I address in this talk. This year we are taking a ‘so what’ view for the Creation gospel… in other words, what are its consequences and how does it help us see the world and serve? One of our precious themes in Gospel Conversations is a high view of humanity. I have thought for years that we need to get a higher view of humanity if we are to have any chance of grasping the incarnation and indeed the whole gospel. So if we start from that mountain top - how do we view the threat of AI - and it is scary. Very scary.

As I explain in this talk my perspective is pretty unique on this particular topic for a couple of reasons. Firstly I have spent my professional career helping people ‘think’ better in the face of complex problems. So I have a lot of ideas about what ‘intelligence’ means. My consulting company spent years helping some very large clients address ‘wicked’ problems, and we pioneered design thinking on a global scale. And secondly I am now the chair of one of the most innovative tech start ups in genAI - so I have a front row seat on what it means and on the new economy that is emerging. So my views on AI come from the front line of experience not from reading articles about it.

I end up in a very different place from the quote of our friend that I began with. So our job is not to surrender in the face of AI but to discover at ever deeper levels the mystery of thought and of being human and to stand beside Shakespeare after all those years and say “What a piece of work is man - how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving; how express and admirable in action; how like an angel in apprehension; how like a god; the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals.”

I used Powerpoint slides when I first delivered this talk at the St James Institute in Sydney. Here they are if you want to download them.

Ai And Image Of God 2

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So we need a better model of what we mean by ‘sin’.

In this interview with Rob, Tony develops a different ‘theory of sin and evil’ - one that emerged years ago mainly in conversations with Mark Strom. Mark and Tony both were deeply dissatisfied with traditional models - but felt that the ball was in our court to develop and explain an ALTERNATIVE model of sin, not just critique the old evangelical models.

This talk is based on a paper that I (Tony) wrote years ago which we upload here.

A Theory Of Sin And Evil

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The first 20 minutes seem to be a slow start. You could skip them - but the point I make there is quite helpful. The Gospel is an argument and the critical foundation of any argument is to find the deep structures of the problem. That is what I am doing in this talk, and the opening explains why that is so important.

In our 2026 theme of the ‘so what’s of creation gospel, we are going to look at this big question over the next couple of months. Two profound thinkers will help us to do that - Mark Strom and Ben Myers. We start with Mark and he will give a talk at the St James Institute in Sydney on Friday May 29th.

Mark will base his talk on some of the themes he wrote about in his book popular ‘The Symphony of Scripture’ - though his thinking has developed further since it was published. This is an incredibly important topic for Christians - but one that is pretty universally neglected. What does this unique ‘genre’ of ‘being inspired’ mean?? Both these guys have rich perspectives to offer us all.

So you are welcome to come. Of course we will post this for our on-line audience shortly afterwards.

Here it is for everyone to enjoy.

Have a great weekend!

Do Christians withdraw or engage?

This talk is in a sense ‘unfinished’ - as Ben says, they never got to a simple clear position and there were conflicting positions on this question. What I found illuminating and relevant to us, is that how they confronted this question varied according to the changing circumstances in which they found themselves. So our lesson would be that we have the same task - understand our circumstances and then work out how our faith should work out in today’s world.

Ben finishes with St Augustine’s ‘City of God’ where Augustine developed the theory of our ‘double citizenship’ in two very different kingdoms. And Ben laments how later centuries turned some of this thinking into forms of ‘Christian nationalism’. Finding God or the echoes of the divine in the public square is a vital concern for us all - and particularly relevant as we realise the Christ is Lord of the cosmos not just individual lives. In fact, his Lordship was expressed in very political terms for the first century church - something that Edwin Judge and Mark Strom have stressed in previous talks.

So this is challenging topic and one for which there are probably no easy answers. But Ben’s talk gives us a great perspective to think it through. This year we will be following a ‘so what’ theme in Gospel Conversations - ie what are the ‘so what's for the Creation Gospel so this talk is a great door opener for our year.

Our next talk will address the question of evangelism and how we frame the ‘creation gospel’. I will give this talk and it will focus on our ‘theory of sin’ - a vital topic. I will critique the dominant mental model of sin (or at least the one I grew up with as an evangelical) and offer what I think is a much richer and more biblical model of what this critical thing called ‘sin’ means.

If you haven’t already, we’d also recommend starting with the recent introductory episode, where the grand themes of this series are laid out.

3 Maximos The Confessor Handout

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March 27th
St James Institute,
Sydney 6:30pm

You are welcome to attend our next GC Forum. AI is a hot topic everywhere - and it’s very relevant to theology since it appears to challenge the uniqueness of humanity and how we think. If machines can ‘think’ then it suggests that the mind is just a machine after all and that diminishes the wonder of being made in the image of God. I will give some helpful frameworks to think about the AI revolution (and it is a revolution) - some of them based on my experience chairing a startup technology company that is pioneering the use of AI to augment human decision making. So I have a front row seat on this revolution! (I am not a technical person, but some of our team are the brightest around).

My main theme though will be on the ‘image of God’ which is the heart of my new thesis with Ben Myers. I will use my remarks on AI as a segue into that debate - ‘What does this extraordinary claim - that we are somehow ‘like God’ - mean???’

Look forward to seeing you there - and of course we will post the talk later.

Tony Golsby-Smith

I just want to say what a privilege it has been to have John join us on Gospel Conversations as he is the leading scholar on the Church Fathers - but he is more than a scholar, he is a philosopher and a theologian. And more than that he is pastoral - as challenging as his material is, he always wants it to change our lives. And studying these profound thinkers has certainly had that effect on me.

You see, I think we need a big God and a big story to confront the modern world - and by that I include the modern world in our hearts and minds. We are really stuck in a materialist paradigm courtesy of the Enlightenment which has systematically robbed creation of its mystery and its magic. In a very real way, Maximus puts all the mystery back and he goes further, he reimagines all of creation as the ‘big idea’ of God. If you read Maximus through the lens of the new physics, he actually appears very modern.

But Maximus does something else - he puts ‘humanity’ right back at the centre of creation, and the model of humanity he takes is Christ. (By the way, ‘humanity’ or imago dei is the theme of my current doctorate - and John suggested to me that I make the final chapter on the text of Maximus that he discusses in this talk - ie Ambiguum 41).

So my summary will help you absorb John’s talk. Make no mistake, it is a paradigm shifting talk, and that is why a summary to get your mind ready, or an ‘antipasto’ to whet your appetite is helpful for the ‘digestion’. You will see that I centre my introduction around a comparison of how Maximus’ gospel reframes and contrasts with the way we often hear the gospel today. Basically he moves it from a law court scenario to a cosmic scenario.

Enjoy, and thanks for your support. We will post John’s talk in a week or so after my introduction.

The ‘creation gospel’ is exciting - but what are the ‘so what's’? This is the theme we want to explore together in 2026, and in this short talk I give a snapshot of our agenda and topics. The monthly talks will come in ‘couplets’ - one at the St James Institute in the city of Sydney, and the second one more intimately at our home. Both will be ‘salons’ or ‘forums’ where we EXPLORE rather than pontificate.

There are six main topics. Here they are ….

1. Creation gospel - core principles (including ‘new’ evangelism)

2. AI and the ‘image of God’ - what does it mean to be a human being?

3. Voice of women in theology through the centuries

4. How to read the Bible? “Inerrant” or ‘Inspired’?

5. Mental health and religion - why we need dialogue not dogma

6. Violence in the OT (Greg Boyd)

And like an informal domestic drumbeat underneath, we will revive the ‘Breakfast with Jesus’ channel - reflections on books of the Bible based on the morning conversations between Anne and I. And in keeping with our theme of honouring women - Anne might join in to keep me honest… and tie my philosophy to the real world.

God bless you,

Tony

Anyway, to refresh our minds. This is the third talk John gave at our Gospel Conversations conference in 2025. The theme of them all is the Patristic vision of what it means to be a human being (the last talk was on Irenaeus). Both Irenaeus and Gregory thought about humanity not just in terms of salvation from sin, but more broadly in terms of what is the role of humanity in the creation? One of the problems with the sin-based view of redemption is that it begs this question - why did God create humanity in the first place? That is where Gregory’s mind goes, and thankfully Gregory had a profound and godly mind to help us answer that question!

When I interviewed David Bentley Hart on Gregory, he claimed that he was the most innovative theologian of the Patristics world (a big prize given the competition!!) and it was around exactly the point of this talk that David made that claim. It takes a bit to wrap your head around… (or at least that is my experience) largely because in our modern theology we don’t ponder the problem that they pondered. For us the problem is the problem of sin - how can a holy God save sinners? But that was not the primary problem of the Patristic thinkers - rather it was the ‘creational’ problem of how can a divine - ie unchanging - God relate to a created - ie changing - creation? This is not just a philosophical problem - it gets to the angst of life today. We are bound on a wheel of change and this change makes meaning hard to find. Where is the ‘still point of the turning world’??? Hopkins captures the poignancy of the problem best in his painful lines on the ephemeral nature of beauty…. (‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’)

‘How to keep - is there any, any, is there none'
Such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or
braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty …
from vanishing away?

Gregory’s stunning answer to this dilemma, according to David, was to see in humanity’s very ‘changeability’ the terms of our ultimate destiny with the divine. Somehow we are called to link the changing with the unchanging - and to take changing ‘nature’ with us! It is this paradox that John untangles in this talk. so it is a golden treasure of a talk. I know of no-one more qualified than John to help us dive into this.

And to tease you further, I think this is theme of Ecclesiastes… (Anne and I are studying it at present using Iain Provan’s profound commentary - so I may include a talk or two on this later in the year).

First up I explain simply just why Gregory used Plato as a platform to communicate the ‘imago dei’ gospel - and what we can learn from that. He and his colleagues had very open minds and were able to recognise the ‘eternity’ in the hearts of ‘pagan’ philosophers like Plato, much like Paul did on Mars Hill in Acts 17. I think that is a big lesson for the church today.

Then I dive into the major theme of Gregory’s work according to John. Gregory’s question is the profound Psalm 8 question - ‘What is a human being?’ His answer takes up the whole of his majestic work, ‘On the Making of Man’, and John’s talk unpacks that answer. It is an answer, according to both John and David Hart, that is ‘mind-blowing’ and that offered the world a new conception of humanity ‘in the image of God’. I try to give you the big picture of that answer in this talk.

I finish off with a summary of the flow of John’s talk - how he has arranged the talk and the sequence he follows. John is an old finished ‘literature’ teacher so he uses the text (which he translated) a lot - and when we publish John’s actual talk in coming days we will also upload a copy of his handouts for everybody to download.

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This is a special newsletter - more an invitation than just a post. We have decided to revive our face to face meetings and put the ‘conversation’ back into ‘Gospel Conversations.’ Our first event for the year will be on Friday December 5th at the St James Institute in the Sydney CBD. Ben Myers will give his second talk on the ‘Patristic model of growth’.

It became apparent at our recent GC conference with John Behr that a fair few of you would like to meet periodically for a more face to face communion. So here is our first one. Think of it like a salon - a combination of food, wine, lecture and discussion.

We meet at 5;30pm and Ben will give his talk around 6. Then we break for some pizzas, sushi, wine and nibbles etc,..around 7pm. We then quickly regather for discussion and questions to build on the talk. We would like some indication of who is coming so we know what to cater for. (It is all free by the way - our gift to you all).

I know that everyone loved Ben’s recent talks so this does not need much advertising. In this talk he will discuss how the Patristics saw growth in the public sphere.

We look forward to seeing you there.

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