We are starting up a new series in Breakfast with Jesus based on conversations that Anne and I enjoyed as we walked some of the famous El Camino trail recently. Let me say that I do not use the word ‘conversation’ lightly. Anne has been my thought partner all our lives together – and in a really productive way. I mean that she brings intuition and experience and truth-telling to our talks – and I tend to be the academic philosophical one. It is a great – and at times tense – interaction! In this first talk, I am calling ‘Jesus as the two-way door’. It began on the third morning of our walk at the now-famous Hotel Akerretta which was featured in the movie ‘The Way’. This meditation began as Anne was praying for a young friend of ours. It was ignited by a sudden illumination as she prayed – which I recognised as the Spirit speaking since the thought came from nowhere – there was no cognitive trajectory in my mind that morning. But there was a festering unease to which this sudden illumination spoke. The unease was our religious jargon around “Jesus” which seems to position him as the entrance to a club or religious clique. And the sudden illumination was ‘Jesus is the door – and two-way door’. I felt like I stepped out of a dark room into the sunlight. In this talk, I wander into the wondrous world of Maximus the Confessor a little. This foreshadows a later Camino conversation. I also intend to focus more on Maximus by interviewing Jordan Wood who is the current new master of Maximus and has just written a breathtaking book on Maximus called “The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor”. I can remember David Hart telling me that for all his boundary-stretching thought, Maximus was actually only taking seriously the implications of the oft-repeated NT phrase ‘in Christ’. Anyway join us on our walking and talking !!

Here is the second part of my conversation with John Walton on how order not sin frames the book of Genesis – including the Fall. In this talk John gets more specific about the order spectrum of order, non-order and disorder.

‘Sin’ is obviously an important word, and central to the Christian doctrine. But it is also a loaded word, and one that works like a sinkhole to suck in streams of meaning – some of which may not be helpful. It is not just an intellectual word, but an existential one because it so easily tugs into deep feelings of guilt and unworthiness that plague many people – indeed all of us from time to time if we are honest. That is why being as ‘biblical’ as possible to get behind the word into the conceptual frames that inform it, is so important. And John’s talks here are among the most helpful ‘paradigm shifters’ that I know.

I wrote an article some years ago on ‘sin’ and what I thought about it. I might change some of the thinking now – and I wrote it before I had the benefit of this talk with John. Nonetheless I think it is worth posting it on our website so we will do that soon after this talk.

If you want to dive more in some of John’s thinking, a good place to start is his book on Genesis called “The Lost World of Genesis One”.

Of course you can also dive into more of John talks on our website. John gave a wonderful series on Genesis and also Deuteronomy in 2013. Both are worth listening to, but here is a link to his first talk on Genesis 1 – “The Cosmos as God’s House”. So if you integrate the ‘order’ series with his “God’s house” you get a powerful mandate for our jobs on the earth: bring order to God’s house and make it a ‘home’ not just a ‘house’ (John’s words not mine). https://www.gospelconversations.com/series/genesis-the-cosmos-as-gods-house

We continue our reposting of some gems from our past library of talks. This episode is highly significant partly because of the big idea but also because it is John Walton who espouses it. John as you know is a legendary Bible scholar and author, and is the major voice for putting the OT back into the worldview of the Ancient Near East. That gives a fair bit of weight to the rather innovative ideas in this conversation. In essence, John says that it is ‘order’ (and what he calls the ‘order spectrum’) that frames the thinking in Genesis – not ‘sin’. He implies (what I would say more boldly perhaps) that the ‘sin’ framework is a modern anachronistic reading – whereby we are reading our modern paradigms backwards into the text. What this does is to deny us some of the rich meaning in the text, and stop it extending our faith and minds. None of this is to deny that ‘sin’ is not an absolutely core part of Christian theology – but it does modify just what that word might mean for us. And it is a bigger word than ‘sin’ because the order spectrum includes chaos that does not come from a moral failure – and lots of our lives fall into that category. We make a big mistake by sucking everything back into the moral/sin category. It can really distort our understanding of life and how to react to it. This talk is a real conversation between John and I. There is a lot of back and forth, and of course it is exploratory and unscripted.