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A Genealogy Of The Confession Of Faith In Mennonite Perspective, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

This essay offers a genealogy, in the Foucauldian sense, of the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective. Thus, it provides an account of the origins of the document and its uses over time with attention given to the politics of both. The essay argues that the Confession was critical for the merger of the General Conference Mennonite Church and the Mennonite Church especially as it took on the function of the "teaching position" of the church. By way of a case study, the essay explores recent uses to which the Confession has been put. The essay concludes by …

The Aesthetic Hermeneutics Of Hans-Georg Gadamer And Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Jason Paul Bourgeois

Marian Library Faculty Publications

This book compares two figures that are not often associated together within the field of Roman Catholic theology, namely Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This work attempts to find deep structural affinities in the aesthetics and hermeneutics of both thinkers, as expressed through shared metaphysical and anthropological assumptions about the dialogical nature of truth and interpretation. The body of the work will be devoted to analyzing these assumptions of Gadamer and Balthasar, both individually and in comparison with each other. However, this preface is necessary to place the concerns of this book into a broader theological context.

A Comparison Of The Aesthetic Approach Of Hans-Georg Gadamer And Hans-Urs Von Balthasar, Jason Paul Bourgeois

Marian Library Faculty Publications

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1901-2002), the German philosopher of hermeneutics, has exercised a powerful influence on post-Vatican II Roman Catholic fundamental theology, especially regarding questions of the development of doctrine and the appropriation of tradition. There is a tension in interpreting Gadamer's thought between his concept of "fusion of horizons," in which the horizon of the past is fused with the horizon of the present to yield new interpretations of past texts, and his defense of "prejudice, authority, classics, and tradition," in which Gadamer upholds the enduring truth-value of received wisdom from the past. … This article will broadly point out the …

The Visible Church In A Visual Culture, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

We live in a visual culture. To say that is to say, in the most obvious sense, that we live in a culture that is saturated by images. They are everywhere. We see them in the expected places: on our television and computer screens, in newspapers and magazines, on billboards, in our scrapbooks and photo albums, in picture frames and coffee table books. Increasingly, we see them in unexpected places. They show up on the floors of grocery stores, the backs of ATM receipts, the sides of tractor trailers and school buses, and even on the otherwise bare stomachs of …

Defending Hauerwas, Brad Kallenberg, Terrence W. Tilley, M. Therese Lysaught

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The commentary begins: Jeffrey Stout and Stanley Hauerwas have long been friends and conversation partners. One would not know that from reading Stout’s “Not of This World” (October 10). Nor does one emerge from Stout’s essay with an accurate sense of Hauerwas’s position.

Stout’s presentation is incomplete in many ways. For example, he labels Hauerwas’s ethic as “perfectionist,” implying that it is, in the words of the article’s title, unrealistic or “not of this world.” However, Stout fails to mention Hauerwas’s untiring emphasis on human sinfulness and-most crucially- the subsequent centrality of the practices of forgiveness and reconciliation. This is …

The 'P'-Word: Conversion In A Postmodern Environment, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Allow me to write frankly about the “P”-word. There is great concern about the proliferation of the “P”-word. In the past decade, over 1,500 articles and 2,000 books have come into print bearing the "P"-word in their titles. Nearly 1,000 of these books are still in print. Everywhere we turn we find that we have been inundated with the “P”-word. And so we have come to fear for our culture. The "P"-word? “Postmodernism.”

Granted, postmodernism is a slippery concept; there are many versions, many postmodernisms. But should Christians fear postmodernism? To be sure, the modern era proved to be no …

Virtues And Practices In The Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics After Macintyre, Nancey C. Murphy, Brad Kallenberg, Mark Thiessen Nation

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Using Alasdair MacIntyre's work as a methodological guide for doing ethics in the Christian tradition, the contributors to this work offer essays on three subjects: description of MacIntyre's approach; reflections on moral issues; and selected essays on family, abortion, feminism and more.

Seeking The Rhetoric Of Jesus, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

I come to the questions posed by this volume from a somewhat different background than one might expect. Whereas one might anticipate that I was an Anabaptist first and a scholar second, just the opposite was the case. I Before beginning my graduate studies I had never heard of Anabaptism. Indeed, I was poring over Aristotle's Rhetoric before I was even a Christian. I thus went through much of my graduate studies (not to mention all of college, high school, and elementary school) without giving a thought to how my studies were impacting my faith-never mind how my faith might …

Balthasar's Theodramatic Hermeneutics: Trinitarian And Ecclesial Dimensions Of Scriptural Interpretation, Jason Paul Bourgeois

Marian Library Faculty Publications

Hans Urs von Balthasar developed a unique style of biblical interpretation. This paper discusses four elements of his scriptural hermeneutics, a topic that offers glimpses of his fundamental theology and his ecclesiology as well. The first element of Balthasar’s hermeneutics is aesthetics. Balthasar’s aesthetic approach to scriptural interpretation stands in contrast with the commonly employed historical-critical method, which he found to be potentially limiting. The second element is theodrama. In Balthasar’s notion of theodramatic hermeneutics, the interpreter is already participating in the very salvation history that is being interpreted. The third and fourth elements of Balthasar’s hermeneutics involve the Trinitarian …

All Suffer The Affliction Of The One: Metaphysical Holism And The Presence Of The Spirit, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

When Copernicus and Galileo proposed that the earth circled the sun and not the 217 other way around, Christian believers faced the difficult prospect of surrendering a long-held belief that had seemingly undeniable support from the biblical text. After all, Joshua reported that the sun, not the earth, stood still; what could this mean if not that the sun orbited the earth? Today, centuries later, believers unanimously hold a heliocentric view of the solar system and are somewhat embarrassed by the ignorance of our pre-Enlightenment brothers and sisters. Ironically, however, such embarrassment masks the possibility that we ourselves may one …

How John Nelson Darby Went Visiting: Dispensational Premillennialism In The Believers Church Tradition And The Historiography Of Fundamentalism, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In the United States the history of John Nelson Darby's dispensational premillennialism is intimately tied up with the history of fundamentalism. It is difficult to talk about dispensational premillennialism in the believers church tradition in the twentieth century without making some reference to the fundamentalist movement. In fact, the two distinguishing marks of fundamentalist theology have been the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and the eschatological schema known as dispensationalism. It is thus rather surprising that historians have de-emphasized dispensational premillennialism in explaining the history of fundamentalism. I think that this is a mistake. But to explain why I think this …