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.

Tadionally we treat salvation as an individual event, but Ezekiel has a far wider scope. He sees the object of salvation is the whole cosmos not just individuals, and he sees the cosmos as the temple of God.

We have an amazing backlog of great talks from great speakers and thinkers going back over a decade. So we've decided to republish some of them to supplement our ongoing offerings. We're going to begin with some seminal talks by Ian Proven.

Did Paul have an introspective conscience over sin? The answer is “no”’according to a classic article and Tony explains the reasoning in this podcast.