On our last episode Ilaria explained her half of the twin books on A Larger Hope which was the early church. Robin Parry wrote the other half which was about more recent history. Fortuitously we found a great video Robin did highlighting some of these experiences of how prominent theologians and pastors ‘changed their minds’ and embraced the doctrine that God in the end will be ‘all and in all’.

This is the second of our tapes of Robin Parry’s interviews with Ilaria Ramelli in 2019 on behalf of Gospel Conversations. It focuses on the book that she had just then published, “A Larger Hope;Universal Salvation from Christian Beginnings to Julian of Norwich.”

Ilaria Ramelli is a formidable pocket rocket of a thinker. She famously wrote the breakthrough defence of the doctrine of ‘apokatastasis’ or universal salvation in her massive 900 page tome ‘The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis’.

Ben takes us into another world that the early church fathers inhabited. They were not ‘soft’ on sin, or on ‘evil’ - but they fundamentally believed that evil was not a substance but a deprivation.

Why the early church fathers did NOT believe in penal substitution. It was not so much that they disagreed with that model, but rather that it did not cross their minds. They were, theologically, altogether elsewhere.

Here is the second part of my talk on Jesus as the Two way Door. The first talk opened up the whole landscape of reality that the Christian message opens up – not just the ‘religious’ experience but the whole experience of how we approach life.

Our religious jargon around “Jesus” positions him as the entrance to a club or religious clique. How can we see ‘Jesus as the two way door that leads from a dark room into an expansive world of sunlight.

Sin is obviously animportant word, and central to the Christian doctrine. But it is also a loadedword, and one that works like a sinkhole to suck in streams of meaning – someof which may not be helpful.

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.

In this final talk, I summarise five profound ways that the Exodus narrative reframes and stretches the traditional gospel of Penal Substitution.

Here is the third talk in our journey through Exodus as an analogy of redemption. In this talk we explore Exodus through the lens of drama. Of course, the whole Bible is in essence a drama in that it is a narrative or story grounded in events rather than abstract ideas.

In this talk I present Exodus as a 'paradigm' through which we can look at the gospel in broader ways. In this talk I use literary features to the Exodus event - and how it is handled by the prophets much later in the OT.

These talks explore difficulties in the traditional ‘Penal Substitution Model’ but in a sense they left us with a void – what can replace the Penal model. We look to the Exodus narrative for broader alternatives.

In this talk I ask a question that might seem obvious but in fact is not – ‘What is glory?’ I confess that I never much asked this question for most of my early Christian life, so I just skated over the word and let it become a cliché.

In this talk Iain concludes his magnificent trilogy of talks positioning the vast Mosaic vision of God and reality in contrast to the prevailing Ancient Near Eastern worldviews.

With his characteristic understated Scottish style, Iain brilliantly lays down the most basic foundation for our faith – the notion that God is not only eternal and sovereign but that he is fundamentally good and on our side.