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Julie Hanlon Rubio, Hope For Common Ground: Mediating The Personal And The Political In A Divided Church. Reviewed By Travis Ryan Pickell., Travis Ryan Pickell

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

Review of Julie Hanlon Rubio, Hope for Common Ground: Mediating the Personal and the Political in a Divided Church Moral Traditions series (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016). xxi + 242 pp. ISBN 978-1-62616-306-5

It is no secret that we live in a time of intense polarization, perhaps especially in the American political context. This situation may be explained in a number of ways. Some will point to increasing economic inequality or socioeconomic and racial ‘sorting’. Others may point to the concurrent rise of ‘identity politics’ and the ‘politics of resentment’. Others will highlight the effects of technology, including the …

Forty Years Of Celebration Of Discipline: An Interview With Richard Foster, Paul N. Anderson, Richard J. Foster

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

Interview between Paul Anderson and Richard J. Foster. They discuss the best-selling book that they published together, how God has moved them, and spiritual reformation in the local church.

The Lord's Prayer As A Transformative Pattern, Paul N. Anderson

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

Do you struggle with your prayer life? I do, and I think most people do as well. Jesus challenged his disciples in the garden: Could you not wait with me [in prayer] one hour? I have trouble with five minutes! If you’re like me, upon entering a time of personal prayer you might find your mind wandering or yourself thinking about the demands of the day. Things to do, concerns about loved ones, pressures of the day, a twinge of guilt about an insensitive remark or a selfish deed —these distractions interrupt my prayer time; I imagine I’m not alone. …

Is Liberalism The Problem? Review Of Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Ross W. Mccullough

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

A specter is haunting conservatism — the specter, indeed, of Marx. Those conservatives too young to remember the Cold War are increasingly suspicious of the economic and political prescriptions of the older anticommunism: capitalism as opposed to socialism; individual rights as opposed to collectivism. If they are not sure of Marx’s solutions, they at least share with him a sense of the problems, especially the meaninglessness and atomization of our social order. The alternative right is an alternative to precisely this fading consensus, wagering that race and nation have survived the ravages of liberal capitalism and can be a home …

Christ, The Karamazovs, And Compensational Theodicies, Ross W. Mccullough

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

This article draws from Ivan Karamazov a two-fold challenge to the goodness of God: that no one can forgive the infliction of suffering upon the innocent and that, even when forgiven, this suffering costs more than any good brought out of it. It then looks to Alyosha for a response to these challenges, suggesting that Christ can forgive because of the cross and that his doing so puts the innocent to a choice: either to join their suffering to his – and so maintain God’s goodness – or to lose their innocence. This response helps supply another defect of theodicies …

A Three-Fold (Homiletic) Lesson From Dr. King’S Pastoral And Prophetic Preaching On Violence, Sunggu Yang

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

In 1992 when Walter Wink stated in his Engaging the Powers, “Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world,” he was more than right.1 Nowadays, we experience violence everywhere we breathe, walk, and look, even though not every violent case is visible or directly felt. In his statement, Wink was referring specifically to two aspects of violence that make us particularly uncomfortable or sad living in the twenty-first-century North American context. He made the statement in 1992, twenty-four years after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. A great deal had changed over …

Saving Students: European Student Relief In The Aftermath Of World War I, Benjamin L. Hartley

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

The World’s Student Christian Federation established the European Student Relief (ESR) organization in 1920 in order to respond to the refugee and hunger crises emerging in the wake of World War I in Europe. Although nearly forgotten today, it was the first truly international ecumenical relief agency in the world. This article tells the story of ESR in reference to its efforts at building interorganizational coalitions and as a force for “internationalism.” The ESR’s story is instructive as the world marks the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I and is once again confronted with refugee crises.

Jesus, The Eschatological Prophet In The Fourth Gospel: A Case Study In Dialectical Tensions, Paul N. Anderson

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

Central to the presentation of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel is his association with the Eschatological Prophet, anticipated within first century Judaism. Rooted in Jewish agency typologies cohering around such prophetic figures as Moses and Elijah, these primitive associations reflect historical proximity to Jesus of Nazareth, who as a Galilean prophetic figure continued in the trajectory of John the Baptist while also challenging Jewish institutions and religious conventions in Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. From his prophetic demonstration in the temple to his healing on the Sabbath, the Johannine Jesus furthered the social concerns of the Hebrew prophets, and when challenged …

John: The Mundane Gospel And Its Archaeology-Related Features, Paul N. Anderson

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

Jesus of Nazareth is the most important figure in human history. Yet, an ironic fact of biblical scholarship over the last two centuries is that the one gospel claiming first-hand knowledge of the life of Jesus has been pervasively disparaged as ahistorical—off limits in the historical quest of Jesus. This, of course, is because the Gospel of John is different from the Synoptics and also theological in its thrust. However, in addition to these features, the Fourth Gospel is also the most mundane of the gospels. John has more empirical (sensorily attributed) references, topographical details, and archaeologically attested features than …

A Hermeneutic Of Hope – And Faith And Love: A Thomistic-Liberationist Rule, Ross W. Mccullough

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

The early church bequeathed us two rules for interpreting Scripture: the rule of faith and the rule of love. This paper argues that these should be complemented with a rule of hope. It uses Thomas Aquinas to suggest how a hopeful reading might complement a loving and a faithful reading, and it suggests that we see this sort of reading in contemporary liberation theologians.

The Social Conscience Of The Saint John's Bible (Chapter Nine Of The Saint John's Bible And Its Tradition: Illuminating Beauty In The Twenty-First Century), Paul N. Anderson

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

One of the amazing features of the striking new artwork in The Saint John's Bible is the way that so many of its images capture the social concerns of biblical texts in ways that speak to twenty-first-century issues in gripping and prophetic ways. Especially powerful are the ways the artwork in these seven volumes addresses issues related to women, ecology, globalization, violence, poverty, well-being, healing, and redemption. As historic artistic contributions to society in the new millennium, many of its 160 pieces of art thus speak powerfully to contemporary issues in ways that convey timeless truths in timely ways. Tolstoy …

Encounter, Dissonance, And Reflection In The Dialectical Development Of Paul's Theology (Chaper In Anatomies Of The Gospels And Beyond), Paul N. Anderson

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

Excerpt: "Since the publication of Gerd Theissen's Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology, Pauline scholars have taken renewed interest in experiential factors in the formation of Paul's theology, but few have approached the issue in terms of Paul's own faith development in cognitive-critical perspective.I Just when Pauline scholarship had been "liberated" from "psychologizing the text" by Krister Stendahl's analysis of Paul and the "introspective conscience of the west,"2 Theissen's monograph might have been seen to be threatening the "New Perspective on Paul,'' signaled by James Dunn in his essay by that name.3 However, a sustained consideration of the sociological dynamics of …

Infinite Cardinalities, Measuring Knowledge, And Probabilities In Fine-Tuning Arguments (Chapter 5 Of Knowledge, Belief, And God: New Insights In Religious Epistemology), Isaac Choi

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

This paper deals with two different problems in which infinity plays a central role. I first respond to a claim that infinity renders counting knowledge-level beliefs an infeasible approach to measuring and comparing how much we know. There are two methods of comparing sizes of infinite sets, using the one-to-one correspondence principle or the subset principle, and I argue that we should use the subset principle for measuring knowledge. I then turn to the normalizability and coarse tuning objections to fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God or a multiverse. These objections center on the difficulty of talking about the …

The Promised Land: A Postcolonial Homiletic Of Promise In The Asian American Context, Sunggu Yang

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

Asian American Christians carry within them a triple consciousness by being Asian, American, and Christian. Being Christian specifically means being a pilgrim bound for the Promised Land. The Asian American pilgrim preacher’s message issues from this triple consciousness and from a spirit of postcolonial liberation. Such a preacher’s message is therefore a declaration or assurance of God’s liberative promise of the Promised Land for Asian Americans, the Land already being realized here and now in the foreign land. By being this-earthly and other-worldly, the pilgrim preacher’s message is synthetic-ethical in nature. This article shows that the triple consciousness is a …