BWJ 14. Allegory; were the Patristics right or badly wrong?

Tony Golsby-Smith

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.

Tony Golsby-Smith

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.

John Walton

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.

John Walton

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.