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In this episode John and Gregg consider a comment by listener Melinda to episode #35, Love is more than grace.  Melinda makes three points/questions:

1. That internalizing God’s love seems crucial, but sermons and the Bible often don’t seem to support this
2. Gregg expressed that “grace is that mode of expression by which God most truly expresses Godself: grace shows God’s love in its truest and best light.”  Is grace given too much weight over love?
3. Can you offer more discussion on “self-love”?  A Bible teacher recently said that self-love is not biblical because none of the ten commandments relate to loving oneself.   This teacher thinks that the ‘as yourself’ (i.e., love you neighbor as yourself) is just a reference point, such as, don’t harm others because you wouldn’t want to harm yourself.

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In this episode John and Gregg discuss Donald Miller’s Sept 25 blog post.  While John usually appreciates Donald’s posts, John is critical of Donald’s view that Jesus valued people who blindly trusted him: that we should trust without reasons to do so (or even against having other reasons not to). Gregg had similar thoughts and left a comment where he suggested two problems that he saw in Miller’s approach.

First, Gregg expressed concern with Donald’s view of the biblical passage he references (John 6), because it seems that for Donald the Bible’s meaning amounts to “how it strikes me” on a given day.  Instead, Gregg argued that Christians should rely on biblical scholarship to help us understand the Bible better.  For Gregg this does not imply that we seek to eliminate faith (because we need faith!) but underscores that there are better and worse ways to express faith / engage faithfully.
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In this episode John and Gregg discuss Gregg’s recent lecture at Swiss L’Abri, where Gregg began lecturing on his graduate thesis.  Gregg explains that his thesis concerns a problem within recent, biblical hermeneutics, on the part of several evangelical scholars, and that this problem is twofold.

First, some Christian scholars have preferenced the positive effect of the Holy Spirit over the negative effect of sin and finiteness, such that they then view Christians as being naturally better readers of the Bible than non-Christians.  Second, some Christian scholars have also preferenced the importance of biblical truth over the need (and indeed, command) to love our fellows as ourselves.

Gregg argues in his thesis that there are natural tensions in life and that the preceding represent real tensions for Christians, yet that Christians also should not seek to collapse these tensions into hierarchies (i.e.,  Spirit over sin, truth over love), but should rather seek how the conflict inherent within these tensions can be made productive.
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In this episode John and Gregg discuss Gregg’s view of love and how / to what degree he believes that experiencing God’s love is necessary to embracing Christianity.

Gregg notes that through some of his interaction at Swiss L’Abri he is coming to see several things more clearly.  First, that he needs to do more research on the nature of emotions.  For instance, Gregg finds Margret Nussbaum‘s description helpful.  Nussbaum partially defines emotions as “intelligent responses to the perceptions of value,” such that emotions are “acknowledgements of our neediness and our lack of self-sufficiency.”  Finally then, “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the parts of a reasoning creature, they are parts–highly complex and messy parts–of this creature’s reasoning itself.”
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