Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Newman, Millennials, And Teaching Comparative Theology, William L. Portier

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Chapter Abstract:

On the face of it, John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and contemporary students of what is called the millennial generation make an incongruous combination. Nevertheless, this essay enlists Newman to make the case that recent generational developments, often described as disaffiliation or post- denominationalism, put comparative theologians in an epistemologically advantageous position to teach religion and theology to contemporary students. Newman’s categories of “notional” and “real” apprehension and assent help to articulate how this might work in twenty-first- century classrooms.

Book Summary:

This volume explores the twenty-first century classroom as a uniquely intergenerational space of religious disaffiliation, and questions …

If God Didn’T Satisfice, We Could Still Exist, Rick Repetti

Publications and Research

Theodicies of satisficing – defenses of God’s goodness that justify creating minimally satisfactory beings/worlds – originate with Robert Merrihew Adams (1972, 1979). Adams (1972) argued that in creating imperfect beings God was graceful in giving the undeserved gift of life. There have been many objections to Adams’s argument; e.g., Jerome A. Weinstock (1975) objected that God still would have been graceful in granting undeserved life to superior beings, and, among others, E. Wielenberg (2004) objected that grace doesn’t erase the imperfection of creating imperfection. However, Adams’s theodicy arguably maintains two points: (a) non-existing superior beings cannot be harmed by not …

Mission Statements: Evaluating Faith-Based Organization’S Missional Effectiveness In Monrovia, Liberia, Jessica Kryzer

Masters Theses

Mission statements of faith-based organizations in Monrovia, Liberia are essential to carrying out the Two Great Commandments and the Great Commission within the work of the organizations. By presenting and evaluating the presence of the TGC and the GC within the statements it can be determined whether the programs and funding are sufficiently affected by the solidity of the mission statement and core values.

A Strategy Of Ministry For Small Korean-American Church Growth: Centered On Tallahassee Korean Community Presbyterian Church, Ju Yang

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Many small Korean-American churches have difficulties. The small number of members causes financial problem and causes member burn out. Also a lot of church members have difficulty which comes from the difference of language and culture in America. The purpose of this thesis project is to provide a strategy to help small Korean-American churches to grow and be more effective. Tallahassee Korean Community Presbyterian Church will be used as a model. Even though this is not an exceptionally successful church, it has potential for growth. First, literature research about church growth, worship, homiletics, leadership, and discipleship will be processed based …

Public Theology In The Face Of Pain And Suffering: A Proletarian Perspective, Florence Juma

Luther Faculty Publications

A basic understanding of theology is the quest for knowledge of the Divine—the study of God. But why, one may ask, undertake such an endeavour, and to what end? My simple response would be, to know God is to enhance and enrich my life and service. To know God is to understand His creation – humanity and, the created context. I practice theology to learn more about God and His creation. In the process, that knowledge serves to improve my professional practice as a spiritual care provider in a public health institution. Thus, originates the burden of this task – …

Computational Methods For Coptic: Developing And Using Part-Of-Speech Tagging For Digital Scholarship In The Humanities, Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

This article motivates and details the first implementation of a freely available part of speech tag set and tagger for Coptic. Coptic is the last phase of the Egyptian language family and a descendant of the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Unlike classical Greek and Latin, few resources for digital and computational work have existed for ancient Egyptian language and literature until now. We evaluate our tag set in an inter-annotator agreement experiment and examine some of the difficulties in tagging Coptic data. Using an existing digital lexicon and a small training corpus taken from several genres of literary Sahidic Coptic …

Spirited Pioneer: The Life Of Emma Hardinge Britten, Lisa A. Howe

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Emma Hardinge Britten’s life encompassed and reflected many of the challenges and opportunities afforded to women in the Victorian world. This dissertation explores the multi-layered Victorian landscape through the life of an individual in order not only to tell her individual story, but also to gain a more nuanced understanding of how nineteenth-century norms of gender, class, religion, science and politics combined to create opportunities and obstacles for women in Britten’s generation. Britten was an actor, a musician, a writer, a theologian, a political activist, a magazine publisher, a spirit medium, a lecturer, and a Spiritualist missionary. Taking into account …

What Is A Human Being?, Neal Deroo

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Our religious relationship to God is nothing other than the entirety of the life we live, and our life is nothing other than a spiritual or religious act, from start to finish."

Posting about the "God-human-creation" relationship from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/what-is-a-human-being/

Exploring The Relationship Between Attachment Style, Stress Perception, And Religious Coping In The Evangelical Missionary Population, Laurie Tone

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This cross-sectional survey design study examined the relationships between attachment style, stress perception and religious coping in a sample of 267 cross-cultural, evangelical missionaries. No significance for effect for attachment style on perceived stress was found. However, both age and gender demonstrated significant effects on perceived stress. There was also a significant association between perception of stress and religious coping, independent of attachment style. Religious coping accounted for a small amount of the variance in perception of stress. The vast majority of the sample reported patterns of positive religious coping, which was not influenced by attachment style. A new tool …

Can We Still Believe The Bible? An Evangelical Engagement With Contemporary Questions By Craig L. Blomberg, Craighton T. Hippenhammer (Reviewer)

Faculty Scholarship – Library Science

This book is an apologetic treatment of six questions most often asked these days about the reliability of the Bible. Those questions are: Aren’t the copies of the Bible hopelessly corrupt? Wasn’t the selection of books for the canon just political? Can we trust any of our translations of the Bible? Don’t these issues rule out biblical inerrancy? Aren’t several narrative genres of the Bible unhistorical? And don’t all the miracles make the Bible mythical?

Vinculum Caritatis: Bond Of Love, Susan K. Wood

Theology Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

How Should We Read The Bible?, Benjamin J. Lappenga

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Embrace the fact that passages have a range of valid interpretations."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­ways to read the Bible from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/how-should-we-read-the-bible/?

How Can We Become Biblically Literate?, Jay Shim

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"The Bible is to be read as a single book of progressive revelation moving from the Old to the New Testatment."

Posting about acquiring Biblical knowledge from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/how-can-we-become-biblically-literate/

Objectivity, Story, And The Bible, Neal Deroo

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"The power of these stories comes from the unique way they plug into human living."

Posting about the truth of Christianity from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/objectivity-story-and-the-bible/

Paralysis And Sexuality In Medical Literature And The 'Acts Of Peter', Meghan Henning

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This paper focuses on the story of Peter’s daughter that is found in the Berlin Coptic papyrus BG 8502.4 and is associated with the apocryphal Acts of Peter. Research on the story of Peter’s daughter has primarily focused on its interpretation of the theme of chastity, or whether the story was originally included in the Acts of Peter. In the course of these investigations, scholars have taken for granted the curious assumption of the text that paralysis renders Peter’s daughter unfit for marriage, and thus safe from Ptolemy’s unwanted advances.

This paper explores the underlying understandings of paralysis and sexuality …

Review: 'Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction', Mark Ryan

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

One of the central aims of the work of Stanley Hauerwas has been to combat the tendency of modem academic theology to see the tasks of theology and of Christian ethics as fundamentally separate in their nature. This separation results in abstraction on both sides, with theology addressing itself to a set of disembodied beliefs and ethics cataloguing behaviors that are perfectly intelligible without God as their backdrop. Nicholas Healy’s book can be viewed and assessed as a kind of grappling with this basic Hauerwasian motive, and its manifest ramifications in Hauerwas's writings, including the latter’s rhetorical style, occasionalism, engagements …

An Examination Of The Prosperity Gospel: A Plea For Return To Biblical Truth, Aaron Phillips

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The prosperity gospel teaches that the Bible promises health, wealth and uncommon success to all believers. A problem surfaces when the prosperity that is promised does not materialize to all members of the congregation. In examining the validity of this teaching, extensive writings, books, articles and sermons by leading proponents, have been reviewed. Additionally, interviews with at least one hundred pastors inform this writing. The purpose of the research is to furnish contemporary, active insight to this project. The conclusion of this writer is that the prosperity gospel offers an unbalanced application of scripture, which results in a departure from …

Thomas Hooker, Martin Luther, And The Terror At The Edge Of Protestant Faith, Baird L. Tipson

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Unlike their Roman Catholic counterparts, early Protestants insisted that individual Christians could be certain that they personally enjoyed God’s favor and would be saved. Their faith in Christ’s redeeming work would give them “assurance of salvation,” and their ministers insisted that every Christian ought to feel that assurance. This article argues that Protestant assurance did not – and could not – banish believers’ anxiety that God’s saving promises had never been meant for them. “Behind” the God who promised salvation lurked a “hidden God” who had decided the ultimate fate of every individual before the beginning of time. Even the …

Intertextual Reception: Re-Thinking The Concept Of Revelation In Light Of Divine Immanence And The Dignity Of The Person And The Cosmos, Thomas Hughson

Theology Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Canonical Development And The Early Church Fathers: Establishing The Validity And Elevating The Weight Of Accurate Textual Citations, Chris Davis

Masters Theses

The predominant theory of textual criticism known as “reasoned eclecticism” often engages the NT manuscripts in a manner that is not truly eclectic. Instead, the modus operandi is often to overlook textual witnesses from manuscript families that do not agree with the favored Alexandrian text-type. At the same time, in cases where the early church fathers seem to cite passages from these other known families, their words are often discounted and removed as evidence for a particular reading. This thesis deals predominantly with the second issue, and it addresses a number of foundational issues that lead to such a flawed …

An Organic Model Of Leadership Development For The Rural, Traditional Church, Douglas Brooks

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This thesis project examines the nature of leadership development relating to an organization known as the local body of Christian believers. This study reveals that the average believer lacks confidence in his or her ability to clearly define what it means to be a Christian, what is required of a believer in the areas of discipleship and leadership, and how to be a disciple maker. Pursuant to completion of this thesis project, the pastor will progressively develop each member of the local body of believers at Woodland Trails Baptist Church into servant leaders who make disciples. The questionnaire results of …

Mere Christian Theism And The Problem Of Evil: Toward A Trinitarian Perichoretic Theodicy, Ronnie Campbell

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

There is perhaps no problem confronting Christian theism more than that of the problem from evil. Evil in the world is not merely a problem for the Christian worldview, however, but also for various other metaphysical systems. This project takes up a comparative analysis of four major worldviews—naturalism, pantheism, process panentheism, and theism—and argues that of the four, theism provides not only the best explanation for the phenomena of evil in the world but it also gives an overall thicker worldview response to the challenges that evil presents. But theism in-and-of-itself is not enough. A specific form of theism is …

Walking Together: Living Fearlessly, Loving Boldy, Anna M. Malone

Student Publications

In this paper, I give an account of my capstone for the Religious Studies major. I tell about the research project-turned-applied-learning, and how my research as a Mellon Summer Scholar ’15 led me to start a prison ministry between Gettysburg students and the Adams County Adult Correctional Complex. I reflect on what I have done, how God has worked, and what I have learned. This is far from a typical research paper; then again, this was far from a typical research project.

Our Technological Past And Future: From Predigital To Postdigital Apocalypses, Michael J. Paulus Jr.

SPU Works

An exploration of technological hopes and fears in apocalyptic literature.

Finding Aid For Herald Of Truth Records, Mcgarvey Ice

Herald of Truth Documents

No abstract provided.

Evaluating The Authenticity Of The Gospels, James O'Brien

Spring 2015, Faith and Science

Today, moderns, as well as biblical scholars, have a hard time accepting the possibility that the Gospels are authentic. The idea that a document composed two thousand years ago could be trusted is dismissed as absurd. However, this assumes that there is no evidence suggesting the contrary. Richard Bauckham, in his book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, rejects this “gratuitous doubt” and provides a novel contribution to our knowledge of the historical Jesus. This book has awakened scholars to the possibility that the skepticism of form criticism is not only uncritical but also unwarranted. Contra to popular opinion in the …

Answering Your Question: Creeds And Confessions, Wayne A. Kobes

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"The church could well benefit from a clear, contemporary statement of the essentials of the Christian faith in language that speaks to 21st century people."

Posting about the value of new creeds and confessions in the church from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/answering-your-question-creeds-and-confessions/

Should Southern Baptists Baptize Their Children?: A Biblical, Historical, Theological Defense Of The Consistency Of The Baptism Of Young Children With Credobaptistic Practices, Robert Matz

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Southern Baptists have expressed increasing degrees of alarm over allegedly rising rates of child baptisms. As a result, an increasing number of Southern Baptists have argued that the baptism of young children is inconsistent with Southern Baptists’ understandings of credobaptism and a regenerate church membership. Against these allegations, this dissertation asserts that children can be converted and when converted they should be baptized. The first chapter of this dissertation argues that water baptism is prescriptively contemporaneous with Spirit baptism. It establishes such based on the relationship between water and Spirit baptism as seen in the seven direct references to Spirit …

Andrews University And Seminary Respond To G.C. Vote, Becky St. Clair

Lake Union Herald

No abstract provided.

Peacemaking And Victory: Lessons From Kant’S Cosmopolitanism, Philip J. Rossi

Theology Faculty Research and Publications

In the texts in which Immanuel Kant discusses the principles governing international relations—including texts explicitly dealing with the sources leading states to armed conflict and the circumstances enabling its cessation—he does not directly engage the question “What constitutes victory in war?” This should not be surprising, given that Kant’s treatment of war may be read as consonant with just war thinking for which victory seems an unproblematic concept Yet there are elements in the tone and the substance of his discussion that destabilize a placement of his views as unproblematically part of that tradition. The mordant tone of his dismissal …