Digital Commons Network^™

Good Samaritans: Applications Of Social Christianity By Southern Baptists During The Early Twentieth Century, Alyson Marie Fagan

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

In the early twentieth century, the Social Gospel movement sought to spur Christians to serve their neighbors through social and political reform, often through ecumenical groups. However, Southern Baptists remained distant from this movement because they were weary of the liberal Christianity expressed by Social Gospel leaders that appeared to replace the power of the Gospel with acts of service. Instead, the Southern Baptist Convention formally addressed social reforms and civic engagement by creating the Social Service Commission and Committee on Civic Righteousness. These groups expressed the need to reform the home and advocated civic engagement while remaining true to …

Response To Frederick L. Ware, Kimberly H. Belcher

Spiritus: ORU Journal of Theology

Response to Frederick L. Ware, "Initiation (Water Baptism) in North American Pentecostalism."

Initiation Sacraments And Directions For Catholic-Pentecostal Dialogue: An Essay For The Exploratory Usccb/Pccna Dialogue, Kimberly H. Belcher

Spiritus: ORU Journal of Theology

This article surveys Roman Catholic understandings of initiation sacraments. It traces historical developments and current practices for the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and Holy Communion. Throughout attention is paid to the areas where convergences and issues for further discussion between Roman Catholics and Pentecostals emerge.

Heretic, J. Barton Scott

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Heretic (2024), directed by Scott Beck and Brian Woods.

Wisdom City: Towards A Political Reading Of The Wisdom Genre, James E. Golec Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The contemporary conversation surrounding the wisdom genre shows a lack of consensus regarding the origin, nature, and biblical use of wisdom. This situation can be improved through reading the biblical wisdom genre politically, revealing the principles that create and sustain a God-fearing society. The hermeneutical key to accomplish this task begins with the claim that the book of Proverbs presents itself as a ‘city in a book.’ The outline of Proverbs, especially via the first nine chapters, introduces coherence between the concept of wisdom and an archetypal city. Second, the book provides a transformative engine, which can be found in …

A Womanist Narrative Ethics Of Survival: An Exploration In African American Meaning Making, Lashaunda Janeice Reese

Dissertations

This project creates a womanist narrative ethics of survival framework using literary analysis, sociological and theological comparisons, and reflections on moral dilemmas in fiction and history. Steeped in the African American woman’s experiential perspective, this framework provides an alternative viewpoint through which to examine and analyze ethical issues arising in the context of marginalized bodies. Integrating the Christian faith, the history of chattel slavery in the United States, and the expanding field of African American literature and literary theory, this work posits that fiction provides a rich platform to work through thick moral dilemmas, affording a concrete ethical framework to …

Educational And Charitable Activities Of Baptist Christians: On The Example Of The Religious Organization Of Evangelical Christians Baptists, Called 'Church Of The Nativity,' In Zhytomyr, Nataliia Kovtun, Iryna Vitiuk, Olena Polishchuk

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

Over the past three decades, and especially in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war (2014-2024), Ukrainian Evangelical Christian Baptists have been actively engaged in charitable and educational activities. The article examines this activity through content analysis and statistical analysis of the statutory documents, website, and YouTube channels of the Church of the Nativity of Evangelical Christians Baptists (ECB) in Zhytomyr (Ukraine).

The study found that the church's charitable activities are carried out in several areas: the ministry of parishioners and elders of the Nativity Church of the Baptist Church of Zhytomyr within the framework of the Christian Center for Social …

Q & A: Pastor, Professor, Scholar, And Leader: An Interview, Linda Gray

Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning for Christians in Higher Education

In a Q&A format, pastor, professor, scholar, and leader Eric Newberg talks about his forthcoming book, Paradigms of Global Spirit-Empowered Leaders. It is organized in four parts: (1) defining characteristics of Spirit-empowered leadership, (2) notable Spirit-empowered leaders, (3) global paradigms or models, and (4) benchmarks for leadership development. Spirit-empowered leadership is a type of leadership distinguished by a primary focus on the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit. While leadership is a spiritual gift, it also requires practical skills that must be developed. Spirit-empowered leadership can be categorized five paradigms of charismatic leadership (apostle, prophet, healing evangelist, “pastorpreneur,” and teacher/scholar). …

Review Of On The Resurrection: Evidences Volume 1, Brian G. Chilton

Liberty Theological Review

Dr. Brian Chilton reviews the first volume of Dr. Gary Habermas's magnum opus On the Resurrection: Evidences. Chilton summarizes Habermas's work, offering key themes found throughout the book. Then, he analyzes the methodology of the book and confronts the possible objections offered by popular naysayers of the minimal facts approach. Chilton ultimately deduces that the naysayers objections are overblown and that Habermas's approach stands on its own.

New Paths In Jewish And Religious Studies: Essays In Honor Of Professor Elliot R. Wolfson, Glenn Dynner, Susannah Heschel, Shaul Magid

Purdue University Press Books

The work of Elliot R. Wolfson has profoundly influenced the fields of Jewish studies as well as philosophy and religion more broadly. His radically new approaches have created pioneering ways of analyzing texts and thinking about religion through the lens of gender, sexuality, and feminist theory. The contributors to New Paths in Jewish and Religious Studies: Essays in Honor of Professor Elliot R. Wolfson, many of whom are internationally renowned scholars, hearken from diverse fields. Each has learned from and collaborated with Wolfson as student or colleague, and each has expanded the new scholarly directions initiated by Wolfson’s groundbreaking …

The Secrets Of Christian Others: Hungarian Catholic Intellectuals Debate Ecumenism At A Transylvanian Pilgrimage Site, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

Claims about a shared Christian tradition animate European debates about religious otherness, but more remains to be known about how Catholics on Europe’s near-margins understand ecumenical unity among churches. I analyze contemporary Hungarian Catholic intellectuals’ publications about a controversy at the Hungarian national shrine, Our Lady of Csíksomlyó, in Transylvania. When a priest wrote that Csíksomlyó’s annual pilgrimage commemorated sixteenth-century Catholics’ victory over an invading Unitarian army, Transylvania’s Unitarian bishop denounced the origin as an undocumented myth. Prominent Catholic ethnologists, historians, and theologians agreed that, in the name of ecumenism, intellectuals should not publicly mention the origin narrative. But they …

An Examination Of The Geographical And Archaeological Evidence Which Supports The Historical Reliability Of The Gospel Of John, Alan R. Peterson

Masters Theses

The question of the historical reliability of the New Testament is one of the central issues in Christian apologetics. This is an area that keeps agnostics and atheists from believing in the Bible and hence God. Few are willing to undertake an in-depth study to ferret out the truth; a simple Google internet search to confirm their secular presuppositions. For example, the top search result using Google for “historical reliability of gospel of John” brings up the following reply “The Gospel of John is a relatively late theological document containing little accurate historical information that is not found in the …

The Book Of Ruth: Its Didactic Wisdom Themes, Brian Corn

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation proposes and argues that the Book of Ruth is better situated in Wisdom literature because of its didactic wisdom themes. Prominent wisdom themes will be analyzed and compared intertextually with the Book of Ruth, which provides Ruth’s understanding of YHWH. The research methodology evaluates the intertextuality, or inter-themes, between the Book of Ruth and the Wisdom literature (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes), the primary source. Peer-reviewed sources (scholarly commentaries, academic peer-reviewed journals, and scholarly biblical dictionaries) are used to evaluate and support the findings uncovered in the primary source. Semantic field and range studies are performed with the help …

The Evidential Problem Of Assurance: Textual Approach From The Johannine Literature, Derick A. Adu

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Assurance of salvation is an existential issue that has occupied the center stage of theological deliberations in the Church's history. This dissertation is a quest for epistemic justification. The dissertation examines the conditions that justify and validate claims of assurance of salvation. The research is partly an epistemological quest as well as a textual inquiry. This study utilizes evidentialism, the epistemological concept that what provides epistemic justification is evidence, to reach a reasonable conclusion. The data for the analysis consists of the Johannine literature, that is, the Gospel of John, the three Epistles of John, and the book of Revelation. …

Christ’S Hallel And The Christian’S Hallelujah: A Comparative Analysis Of Jesus’ Last Supper Hymn With Contemporary Worship Songs, Maria Rica Silbol

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The Last Supper of Jesus Christ and his disciples is one of the most iconic events in Christendom. One of the fewer talked-about scenarios in this historical event is Matthew 26:30 and Mark 14:26, when Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn before his crucifixion. This study examines the Hallel or Psalms 113–118, which Bible scholars believe was the hymn that Jesus sang with his disciples. The primary themes and emphases of these psalms are identified and coded. The goal of this research is to provide a metric for how the teachings from the Hallel may serve as a reference …

The Stratified Leadership Model Of The First-Century Christian Church, Barton Schuyler Garratt Edsall Iv

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

As Christianity enters its third millennium, it faces the sharpest decline in the number of people attending church congregations compared to the total population. In Romans 1:13, the Apostle Paul states that God’s people should not be ignorant that the purpose for leaders within the collective church body, beginning with himself as the example, is so the people’s lives would be fruitful–spiritually enriched and productive. Logic dictates that if the lives of those who attended Christian churches in the twenty-first century experienced and displayed such spiritual quality, attendance would not be declining but contrarily on the rise. Regarding church clergy …

Ego Eimi And The Surpassing Greatness Of Jesus Christ In The Gospel Of John, Keith Kekoa Pang

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

When it comes to the "ἐγὼ εἰμι" statements (translated as "I am" in English), in the Gospel of John, there has been a heavy emphasis from scholarship on the seven declarations which contain a metaphor. These are the ἐγὼ εἰμι statements such as “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35, English Standard Version) or “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). However, there are seven other ἐγὼ εἰμι statements in John’s Gospel which do not contain a metaphor, such as, “I who speak to you am he” (John 4:26, emphasis mine). Consequently, scholars have tended to separate …

Initiated Reading: Occult Hermeneutics In Helena Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, Diana Brown

Dissertations - ALL

In this dissertation, I argue that Theosophical Society co-founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s first major work, Isis Unveiled (1877), describes an occult hermeneutic of myth based on the privileging of intuition, theorized especially in Neoplatonic terms, and premised on a tripartite spirit-soul-body constitution of the human being. Her hermeneutic also privileges initiation, construed as experiential gnosis often produced by ritual, and she opposes both intuition and initiation to reason and empiricism. Theorizing global myths as allegories revealing elements of a universal religion, or secret doctrine, traceable to India, she brings together an esotericism premised on a combination of Indian religion and …

Full Issue

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.

Preface, Peter Wright

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

The eminent Russian humanist and novelist Leo Tolstoy once quipped, "Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them." Although Tolstoy intended this to be a criticism of contemporary historical trends, his thought reveals an important truth about the value of historical studies: historians often investigate questions that others never think to explore and thus provide new and unique perspectives on past human experience. Does the fact that the majority deigns not to entertain these questions decrease their significance? On the contrary, I believe that this is precisely what gives historical inquiry its …

Toward An Affective-Rhetorical Approach To Biblical Interpretation, Sophie R. Beal

Yale Divinity School Theses

No abstract provided.

“They Can’T Just Stamp Out This Faith”: Cold War Anti-Communism And International Evangelism At The Appalachian Preaching Mission, Braden Lay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Appalachian Preaching Missions (1955-1981) occurred annually in Northeast Tennessee, with their predecessor, the Bristol Preaching Mission, dating back to at least 1949. Local churches, primarily Protestant, organized and convened these annual ecumenical gatherings. Nationally known clergy and laypeople from various denominations spoke, with up to several thousand congregants attending each mission. These individuals provided sermons and speeches on spiritual, domestic, and international issues. Among the most consistently repeated sermon themes was Christianity’s spiritual conflict with atheistic communism. This work addresses the missions’ origins and how the speakers spoke on international Christian missions in decolonized or developing nations as threatened …

Reading Disasters: Science, Literary Devices, And The Culture Of Reassurance In Children's Nonfiction Literature On Natural Disasters, Emily Willis

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

September 21, 1938, dawned chilly but calm on the Northeast coast of the United States. Weather forecasts indicated the possibility for rain and high tides from a storm brewing somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, but nothing prepared Northeasterners for the nightmare that would be upon them that afternoon. By three o'clock p.m., the "Long Island Express," a category three hurricane, barreled across New York and other parts of the New England coast, causing nea rly $400 million in damages. "While forecasters attempted to stay one step ahead of the storm, they were caught off-guard," states Sean Potter in a vignette …

Place In Luke-Acts: A Geocritical Reading Of Synagogue, House, And Temple, Daniel Mueller

Dissertations (1934 -)

The subject of this study is place in Luke-Acts. Unlike previous studies that examine single places, either large regions or individual types of places in the narrative, I approach place with both a particularized and an integrated vision. I study places that are small enough to participate in the narrative and then integrate them into a coherent narrative map. I examine place as it is written by Luke and as it is read by the reader. This study is guided by the relatively new method of geocriticism and, deriving from this, five working hypotheses about narrative place: 1) the author …

The Experience Of Religious Organizations In The Formation And Development Of The Chaplaincy Movement In Ukraine, Oleh Sokolovskyi, Vadym Sluysar, Olha Hordiichuk

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The formation and development of relations between the Armed Forces of Ukraine and religious organizations, as well as the conditions and factors that influenced the formation of the institution of military chaplaincy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, were analyzed. It was determined that Russia's military aggression against Ukraine actualized the issue of urgent reform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The modernization of the Ukrainian army required not only structural changes in the military administration, the transition to NATO standards, but also the creation of qualitatively new conditions for meeting the religious needs of Ukrainian servicemen. With the beginning …

Harvest Workers Ministry: Creating Passionate Life-Long Disciples By Nurturing Faith Development And Individual Callings Of Adolescents, Sam Wolowski

Christian Ministries Senior Capstone

“6 out of 10 twentysomethings who were involved in church during their teen years will fail to maintain their active spirituality during their years of adulthood” (Robbins 17). Even the majority of adolescents involved in the church eventually separate from their faith and faith community. David Kinnaman, the president of Barna Group, explains that more than 50 percent of teenagers and young adults who are not committed Christians report that their former faith community (e.g., church, parish, etc.) did not help them understand their purpose and view their gifts and passions as part of God’s calling (159). The separation of …

The Nature Of Beauty And Its Objective Manifestation Serve As Evidence Of The God Described In The Bible, Michael S. Libby

Masters Theses

In exploring the concept of objective beauty in nature, a strong argument emerges for the existence of a divine creator as described in the Bible. This thesis, titled “The Nature of Beauty and its Objective Manifestation Serve as Evidence of the God Described in the Bible,” proposes that the intricate design and objective manifestation of beauty in the world are indicative of a higher transcendent being, prompting us to contemplate the profound mysteries of creation and the interconnectedness of aesthetics and spirituality. Through this lens of beauty, we are challenged to engage in a thought-provoking discourse that encompasses apologetics, philosophy, …

Gladstone And Kuyper: Ireland And Revolution, Africa And War, Keith C. Sewell

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Miscellaneous, Bruce R. Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Announcements:

Call for papers (The Abolition of Man 80 Years On)

The C. S. Lewis Correspondence Project

The Inaugural Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference (George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon September 5-8, 2024)

Submission guidelines, style guide, copyright notice, and order form.

Some Aspects Of The Theology Of The City In Ane Literature And Biblical Protology And Eschatology: A Comparative Study, Vlatko Dir

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The city is an essential accomplishment that is embedded in the foundations of human civilization. From its mature appearance in Sumer and its developed forms throughout the ANE world, the city held a high place in cosmology, cosmogony, and anthropogony. The ideology and theology of the city created by the ANE peoples were built around and presented through the interplay of the triangle of influences and dependencies formed by the city, the temple, and kingship in conjunction with the gods. The question is whether the same construct is ingeminated in the Bible. This dissertation strives to provide an appropriate context …