Gospel Conversations podcast

• Hope and Hell; how I came to a larger vision of redemption

  As promised here is the talk that I gave last Sunday at the St James Institute in Sydney. It was well received, and I was surprised by the audience and their reaction. Most were older people - not young radicals - and they were clearly bothered by this doctrine of hell but had no alternative ways to think about it. So for many the talk was a relief that there was a viable alternative to having to believe that eternal conscious torment is an essential part of the gospel. People also appreciated the journey idea. They liked me sharing about my experience, and the situations that provoked me to challenge my beliefs on hell. Let me quickly explain what I mean by a ‘journey’ and by ‘experience’ as it frames the talk. I don’t mean merely a chronicle of events. I mean instead a meaning making narrative. I see life in some ways as an interaction between situations we encounter and the mental models that we use to make meaning out of those situations. We are ‘meaning making’ creatures not merely sensate ones and this makes the narratives we tell ourselves vital and crucial. I see growth therefore as the ‘amplification’ or ‘enlargement’ of those narratives - an enlargement that in my experience keeps going on. This enlargement however is not alway easy. More often than not it requires a cycle of ‘unlearning’ and ‘disordering’ before we can move to a new ordering. In Second Road we captured this learning cycle in the ‘Frames’ model - we begin wth ‘freeze frames’ that we are comfortable with, then for some reason we are challenged and go through a time of ‘unframing’ which can be tough. But grace - and reflection - takes us through this phase to a ‘reframing’ which results in a new frame.That is what happened in this journey to me. I think that is the work of the Holy Spirit not merely an autonomous human faculty. My experiences stretched me outside my theological models and I had to let them be challenged and reframed. The talk finishes with a couple of great questions. Can I also give St James Institute a plug. Go to their website as they have some great talks coming up on their monthly Sunday afternoons. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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• Beyond 'easy grace': Universalism and the Call to Discipleship

  One of the main objections to universalism is that it opens the door for spiritual laziness. It is the easy way out. Why bother with the hard work of discipleship if everybody gets saved and there are no consequences for bad behaviour? Ilaria confronts this challenge in her final interview with Robin Parry. Of course this is the tip of a big iceberg - what do we mean by growth? How are human beings motivated to grow? As I have done before I bookend Ilaria’s talk with an introduction to give you the coat hanger to absorb her rather dense material, and then I add a postscript that builds on what she has said. Warning: There is an ‘R rated’ part of this talk - and that is my description of exactly what kind of torture Origen was subjected to as an old man - tortured on the rack ‘to four spaces’. Stomach churning. But what is more sickening is the comparison with the Emperor Justinian who eventually ‘condemned’ him in the anathemas. How on earth did the church prefer a dictatorial tyrant to an old man who defied torture for his faith??We are going to build on the topic of growth in upcoming interviews/talks with Ben Myers. He will explore the model of growth in Patristic theology: his first series was pretty exciting on the Patristic model of the Atonement. This next one will be the natural extension - the Patristic model of growth. Juicy stuff and likely to open up new perspectives on what ‘discipleship’ can mean today. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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  35:14
• Is hell a pagan concept?

  The answer is ‘yes’ - hell was a concept deeply ingrained in the pagan mind. And that is the surprising landscape that Ilaria opens up for us in this next episode in Robin Parry’s interviews with her on apokatastasis. In this interview, Robin asks her about a recent accusation that belief in '‘apokatastasis” was actually a pagan idea that crept into Christianity. Of course, that kind of accusation works well to stigmatise apokatastasis and condemn it to the heresy corner! This critique assumes that such a benevolent view of destiny must have its origins in human optimism not in any revelation. Ilaria dismisses this out of hand - and says that the idea of apokatastasis originated in the scriptures. But in so doing, she makes a brief but intriguing point - that Plato did NOT believe in apokatastasis but in fact believed in hell as ‘eternal conscious torment’. This clip is very short - so I decided to expand Ilaria’s comments. (Plato’s views on hell are found in his Socratic dialogue “Gorgias” which I analysed as a source text in my doctoral thesis some years ago). It turns out that Plato’s views on hell - and divine judgment - are remarkably similar to lots of traditional Christian views. The implications of this are significant: lots of our so-called “Christian” views on heaven and hell are not unique to Christianity but are shared with the pagan world. This is not to say that they are wrong - or right - but it does say that they are common sense ideas that spring from human reasoning not revelation. So in my comments I compare and contrast the shared landscape between Plato’s ‘pagan’ views on hell (and heaven) and typical Christian views. The results are illuminating because they shine the light on what is really unique about the Christian view of human destiny and what seems to be just human reasoning. As Ilaria declares apokatastasis was one of those features that was unique to early Christianity. For the pagan mind, it was just too good to be true, and too wondrous for unaided common sense to apprehend. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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  35:34
• The breathtaking Patristic vision of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15

  If the scripture is like a land of hills and valleys, then 1 Corinthians 15: 22-28 was the Mount Everest of the terrain. Or so thought Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, according to Ilaria Ramelli. In this short nugget of a talk Ilaria explains with her typically profound mix of big picture and detail, just why the claim that in the end “God will be all and in all” was treated so seriously by Patristic theologians. It is no ordinary claim. By this I mean that it simply does not fit into our normal conceptual landscape of reality - it redraws the whole map of reality. That is how the great minds of the early church treated it - they allowed it to chart out a vision of the end of all things that draws a new map of reality - a map of reality forged and pioneered in the death and resurrection of Christ. Since Ilaria’s talk is so condensed, I have attached a beginning and end bookend to the talk. In the beginning I introduce and expand a couple of the new conceptual frameworks that Ilaria assumes and works with. One is what ‘submission’ means and the second is what she means by extending the term “logos” to the adjectival term '“logikon” - both of which are describing not just the qualities of the Son of God but also of his relationship with creation generally and humanity in particular. At the back end, I append a ten minute discussion of how a typical ‘evangelical’ reading tries to explain away the pretty obvious universalism in this text. I use the commentary notes in my English Standard Version as examples of the ‘yes-but- it doesn’t mean what it looks like’ interpretation of this passage that is quite typical of the struggles that traditional hell doctrines have with the persistent use of the word ‘all’. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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  32:22
• Robin Parry's journey to universal salvation

  After a slow start we are ready to get going in Gospel Conversations for 2026. We will kick off with this fascinating interview I did with Robin Parry about his personal journal to universal salvation. Robin has led the vanguard for universal salvation since the publication of his landmark book in 2006 “The Evangelical Universalist” which probably did what no other book had quite done in the modern era - it put universalism on the table as a genuine option in the gospel not as a heresy. So it is really intriguing to get the story behind the book, and his journey. I have always been fascinated by seeing how poets or writers actually crafted their works, and developed their ideas. In Robin’s case we get the story - including his early years as an agnostic and his conversion to a pretty fundamentalist form of Christianity. But then he shares the doubts that led to his changing mind. But we get more than that. We also get his feelings about the book and his position - did he feel precarious being out on a limb so far? And in a fascinating section, he explains why the book was so well received in the end - including by its critics. We also get a feel for Robin the person - his lovely combination of measured thought, synthetic thinking and very irenic disposition which has commended him to many including his opponents. So all this makes his journey one for our times, I believe. In the course of this interview, he mentions a couple of key texts - here are the details of you want to get hold of them. Firstly, Eric Reitan whose book “Troubled Paradise” was recently published by Wipf and Stock. It addresses one big issue around hell - how can anyone be happy in paradise if they know others, including their beloveds, are in hell. Secondly he mentioned Al Kimel’s book “Destined for Joy” and in particular the chapter on whether the Fifth Ecumenical council really did condemn Origen and universal salvation as heresies. This book is a profound defence of universal salvation but you need to read the last bit first to grasp its power: the 2012 funeral oration that Kimel delivered on the death (by suicide) of his adult, unbelieving, son. This event made him ‘come out’ as a universalist. Soon we will post the last of the talks by Ilaria Ramelli, and then I will repost a short talk I gave on my personal journey towards cosmic restoration. Get full access to Gospel Conversations at gospelconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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