Catalyst Conference 2024 Day 3

Day 3 has lived up to the promise of the first two days. We had the same speakers as before and all four of them did well. Sinclair Ferguson took us to the New Testament for the final part of his triptych, focusing powerfully on Romans 8. David Filson, as dapper as ever, then spoke on the whole gender question. After lunch, Matthew Mason gave a long but helpful esposition of the matter of mrtification of sin. For the fonal session Kent Hughes took us to the final verses of 1 Corinthians 13. Very helpful. He began with this quote from David Brown

"Remarkable it is that an Epistle written under a tempest of conflicting emotions, breathing in some places indignation, reproach, and sadness, at being driven to self-vindication against worthless detractors who should never have been listened to that precisely this Epistle is the one that closes with the richest and most comprehensive of all the benedictions in the New Testament, the one which the Christian Church in every land and of every age has found, and will find as long as the world lasts, the most available for public use, as a close to its worship."

Catalyst Conference 2024 Day 2

 

So Day 2 was perhaps not quite up to Day 1 but then in the afternoon Matthew Mason was really quite scintillating on the temptation of Christ. Kindly but definitely rejecting several current Christian theories on this subject, he argued that we must see Christ's temptations as unlike ours because, of course, he is sinless. This was quite moving at times. The other messages were worth hearing too - Sinclair Ferguson's next triptych from Job 16, David Filson on critical race theory and Kent Hughes on Paul's paradoxes from 2 Corinthians 4. Lots of good things once again then. This quote from Calvin was striking "Satan’s aim is to drive the saint to madness by despair". Lots of other good things too.

Catalyst Conference 2024 Day 1

Some 280 are booked in for this year's IPC Conference. It was good to be there once again. We followed the usual pattern of two messages before lunch and two after. Sinclair Ferguson started us off looking at Genesis 3 and seven aspects of Satan's rebellion (the first part of a three part triptych, as he described it). We had lots of wonderful things here - eg the importance of the atmosphere of a text of Scripture, the importance of the affections, the way the references to the LORD God disappear when Satan comes in (he never refers to the LORD) and the idea (drawing on Alfred North Whitehead's similar statement about Plato) that the whole of the Bible is really a footnote to Genesis 3:15. We then had a wonderfully flamboyant man called Dr David Filson, Pastor of Theology and Discipleship for Church and Academy at Christ Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Nashville, Tennessee. He gave a wonderful introduction to Westminster Seminary style apologetics and the whole matter of our battle with the world that was gripping.

After lunch with my father-in-law, Geoff Thomas, and fellow Aber graduates Ed Collier and Emyr James, we had Matthew Mason from the Pastors Academy on the flesh and this whole matter of concupisence, which has come into our thinking again mainly due to the whole question of how to regard same sex attraction. Like Matthew Roberts he rejects the idea of John Stevens and some of the advocates of the view that to be same sex attracted is not wrong in itself. Very helpful. The final message was from R Kent Hughes, very well known by reputation but rarely seen this side of the Atlantic I believe. He took us to Paul and his thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan. A helpful exposition.

So a good day. I headed off after it to visit a member in hospital.

A quotation from day one

“But there are some people, nevertheless - and I am one of them - who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them” (G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, in The Complete Works of G. K. Chesterton, ed. David Dooley, vol. 1, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986, 41).