CATA-NES 2017 Paper Abstracts

Evangelical Theology—New Challenges, New Opportunities

A Conference of the Canadian-American Theological Association and Northeastern Seminary at Roberts Wesleyan College, Rochester, NY

ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS TO BE PRESENTED

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2017

Listed alphabetically by presenter surname Andrew Barron Jews for Jesus Canada

New Challenges, New Opportunities: A Representation of the Beliefs, Experiences, and Ideas of a Group of North American Jewish People who Believe in Jesus

This paper presents data on the beliefs, experiences, and values of a group of Jews who believe in Jesus in their social and cultural settings. This material was part of a doctoral thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Ministry awarded by Wycliffe College and the University of Toronto in May 2016.

These beliefs, experiences, and values point to an association with what Paul calls the hardening of Israel (Romans 11). Paul understands this phenomenon as a warning (v25a), a mystery (v25b), partial (v25c), and temporary (v25d and v26a). My research attempts to understand hardening as a genuine and current experience, which I identify as part of what I call an Implied Social Contract (ISC) in the Jewish community. This hardening has manifested itself in this unspoken agreement: “Jews do not believe in Jesus. If they do, they are not part of the Jewish culture or the Jewish community.”

Today there are boundless challenges and even more opportunities to impact this ISC. This paper:

1. Shows how the ISC came to be a defense and coping mechanism 2. Shows how the ISC operates in our contemporary setting 3. Shows how the ISC changed the Jewish perception of the culture of the people of Jesus. 4. Presents a strategy for impacting and transforming the ISC.

Lee Beach McMaster Divinity College

An Evangelical Social Gospel: The Way Forward for the Mission of the Church

The twentieth century saw a stark division arise in the North American church between a commitment to emphasizing the practice of social justice and a commitment to emphasizing the verbal proclamation of the message of personal conversion. In many ways the emphasis that you chose defined the difference between the Liberal/Progressive wing of the church and the conservative/evangelical wing. Emerging movements within the church today seek to provide a fusion of these two aspects of Christian theology and praxis.

This paper will explore a theology that seeks to bring together a deep commitment to proclaiming a gospel of personal conversion and a commitment to social activism as the appropriate way to express the Gospel of the Kingdom that Jesus espoused. The paper will briefly examine the historic struggle between these two aspects of the Christian gospel, offer examples from current emerging church practice that seek to address this false dichotomy and offer a theological and pragmatic paradigm for fusing these ideas in a way that provides a way forward for the mission of the church in twenty-first century North American culture. Ultimately this will call for both liberal/progressive Christians and conservative/evangelical Christians to embrace change in order to forge a new way forward and address the challenges of bearing the Christian gospel in our evolving Post-Christian context.

T. L. Birge McMaster Divinity College

False Worship as a Gateway to Social Injustice and Moral Decay in Jeremiah 7:1–8:3.

During the Babylonian incursion, Israel learned the hard way that fidelity in worship is paramount for the people of God. Yet, what exactly is false worship and why is it so important? Did Israel simply misunderstand the nature and character of Yhwh? Furthermore, couldn’t a God of love and grace overlook the misguided religious gestures of his people whom he claims to love?

This paper will utilize narrative analysis, particularly narrative characterization, to understand the way idolatry is manifest in Jeremiah 7:1–8:3 (a series of oracles devoted to this subject). What exactly were the people doing in worship that warranted punishment? The paper will then use those developing characterizations to understand the rhetorical shape of the text. Judah was not simply singing the wrong songs, or demonstrating piety the best (though mistaken) way they knew how. According to this passage, there is no such thing as innocent idolatry. What may begin with children gathering wood (7:16–17) ends in the fires of Topheth (7:31).

Jeremiah 7:1–8:3 demonstrates the manipulative power of idolatry, whether understood as fully accepting and worshiping another deity or allowing such worship to distort our picture of the one true God. By articulating the powerful hold of false worship, in that it has the power to shape (and thus distort) the lives of the worshipers, this text serves as a caution to people of faith in both the ancient and the modern worlds.

Aaron M. Bouwens Upper New York Conference, United Methodist Church, Syracuse, NY

Worship: Intersection of Transcendent and Immanent

There are many places the intersection of the Holy and the ordinary can be found. Quite possibly the height of intersection is found in the discipline of worship. Through the act of worship the Holiness of God meets with the ordinary life of the people. Significant energy about organs, rock bands, video screens, and liturgical presence has been expended; however, there is far more at stake than style. At the heart of the struggle is a person’s primary connection to God.

To engage a conversation about connection with God two key words need to be employed, transcendent and immanent. Theologian Stanley Grenz offers perspective of what it means to use these two words, “God is transcendent. God is self-sufficient apart from the world… On the other hand, God is immanent in the world. This means that God is present in creation.” As the act of worship is engaged there is an attempt to facilitate the intersection of the transcendent and the immanent. Complicating the attempt is the continuum of the primary connection with God. Some tend toward a transcendent God, while others tend toward an immanent God.

The church in the twenty-first century will need to help people navigate an encounter with God that is encompassing of the fullness of God. I propose the way forward is through greater understanding of how people connect with God, and the implications for the components of a worship celebration. It is possible to create worship interactions that provide an opportunity for the intersection of a transcendent and immanent God.

Michael Brain Wycliffe College, University of Toronto

Revisiting Perfection: A Constructive Approach to the Wesleyan Doctrine of Sanctification

For Wesleyan-Methodist evangelicals seeking inspiration from their Wesleyan roots, the doctrine of Christian perfection presents a significant challenge. Christian perfection faces neglect in Wesleyan circles, and among the most pressing problems confronting the doctrine is how the believer knows that they have achieved the state of perfection, since Wesley originally rooted the knowledge of entire sanctification in the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. Rather than dispensing with the doctrine, these challenges indicate the need for a constructive approach to sanctification.

The current study engages in this task using the theology of Karl Barth, arguing that a fresh articulation of the doctrine, faithful to Wesley’s intent, can be found in the Christologically focused doctrine of sanctification in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. An analysis of Wesley’s writings reveals that while perfection sought to explain the full extent of the scriptural witness to the believer’s holiness and parse out the relationship between justification and sanctification, Wesley oriented Christian perfection heavily towards subjectivity by locating it in the inner witness of the Spirit. Barth offers an alternative explanation of sanctification in CD IV/2 that is focused concretely on the person and work of Jesus Christ, thus removing the problem of subjectivity in Wesley’s original doctrine. This Christologically redefined understanding of perfection is compatible with Wesleyan Christianity, particularly Wesley’s original desire for a practical holiness of heart and life, as demonstrated by Barth’s vision of the Christian life in his reconciliation ethics.

Alexander Breitkopf McMaster Divinity College

The Re-Sacralisation of Our Desecrated Cities: A Biblical and Ecological Perspective on Urban Renewal

Drawing from my work in the Old Testament (OT) and my work with the Christian conservation group A Rocha Canada working in the largely post-industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario, I argue that one possible way of ecologically renewing our urban centres can be found in the Israelite law code, particularly the holiness code.

Drawing from the works of John Walton, Iaian Provan, and Wendell Berry I start from the presupposition that there is not a secular/sacred divide in the world, but rather a divide between that which is sacred and that which is desecrated. Moving from this presupposition, I argue that our urban centres in North America largely represent desecrated space before turning to the OT law code for possible guidance of how one could re-sacralise these desecrated urban spaces.

Using Christopher Wright’s steps of ethical appropriation for OT law, I note that the objective of the holiness code was the fostering and flourishing of life (values inherent in the OT conception of holiness) and, thus, turning to contemporary urban centres I argue that the way we re-sacralise our urban spaces is by promoting the flourishing of all life (human and non-human). I will conclude by noting ways that this has happened in the city of Hamilton, including: restoration of waterfront areas, encouraging the flourishing of pollinators, and urban gardening/farming.

Jonathan Case Houghton College

The Newer Atheists versus the New Atheists: Opportunities for Conversation?

The ‘Nones’ (people having no religious affiliation at all) are on the rise around the world. This phenomenon is complex; some Nones remain ‘spiritual but not religious’ while others eschew completely any belief in a transcendent reality, yet do so for a variety of reasons. Atheistic rationalism and scientism constitute the most serious intellectual challenge to religious belief, but in this area Christians may find unlikely allies in the Newer Atheists (e.g., John Gray, Julian Baggini, Alain de Botton) and their critique of the (now old!) New Atheists (e.g., Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris). Newer Atheists (e.g., Gray and Baggini) are critical of a naïve faith in reason and the scientific dogmatism maintained by thinkers like Dawkins, and some of the Newer Atheists (e.g., de Botton) recognize the social and psychological benefits of organised religion. While welcoming these opportunities for dialogue, we should further engage the Newer Atheists in three areas:

1) The relationship between reason, faith, and doubt. Some of the Newer Atheists, while critiquing scientific dogmatism, still talk too glibly about “rationality” and what it means to lead a “rational life,” as though this should be evident to anyone with eyes to see. A diverse range of thinkers have offered substantive critiques of the nature and limitation of rationality (e.g., John Henry Newman, Herbert McCabe, Jean Francois Lyotard, John Polkinghorne, George Ellis) and we should bring these resources to the conversation.

2) The truth of theological language. Most of the Newer Atheists are Britons, and I suspect that their suspicion of theological language has been shaped in no small measure by the British analytical tradition. While it may be unfair on the Newer Atheist’s part to criticize everyday theological language as naïvely literalist, but then turn around and accuse Christians of obscurantism when more sophisticated accounts of the faith are offered, explaining how theological language (metaphor) is true remains a legitimate and ongoing challenge for us.

3) The question of miracles. For all their severe appraisals of the New Atheists, the Newer Atheists still work under the long shadow of David Hume when it comes to the question of miracles. This area is tricky even for Christians, since many of us often utilize Hume’s arguments (in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) to deflate religious chicanery. Nevertheless, both Hume’s appeal to uniform experience as the sole criterion underwriting the “inviolable laws of nature” and his idea of calculating probabilities so as to arrive at the most reasonable explanation when confronted by miracle stories have been rightly criticized by a host of philosophers and scientists (e.g., Alvin Plantinga, Ard Louis, John A. Cramer), and we would do well to bring these critiques to the conversation.

These are three substantive areas for discussion, but after studying the Newer Atheists for several years now, I’m convinced that establishing a substrate of trust with them remains the most important component for future dialogue. Trust is more difficult to develop than arguments, and much easier to lose, but - given the church’s checkered history in responding to atheists and agnostics- we have a particular obligation in this area.

James Clark Yale Divinity School

Benedict’s Wager: What Evangelicals Stand to (Re)Gain from the Benedict Option

In Rod Dreher’s new book The Benedict Option, the author claims that the American church is undergoing an existential crisis, wherein we may witness “the effective death of Christianity within our [Western] civilization.” In order to survive this crisis, he warns, we must practice the “strategic withdrawal” of what he calls the Benedict Option, in which we

have to develop creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them. We…have to choose to make a decisive leap into a truly countercultural way of living Christianity, or we [will] doom our children and our children’s children to assimilation.

The amount of attention that has been directed at Dreher’s claim that we are in a crisis—perhaps more than has been devoted to the merits of the concrete practices that constitute the Benedict Option— reflects a pervasive assumption that our response to his ideas on how we should therefore live hinges on the reality or absence of such a crisis. Case in point, several critics doubt that the state of American Christianity is as dire as Dreher thinks. Therefore, they conclude, the Benedict Option can be safely dismissed as unnecessary or irrelevant.

However, I believe the more pertinent question is this: even if Dreher’s warnings of a crisis are inaccurate, what reason do we have for not adopting his suggested practices? We stand to gain much in the way of spiritual renewal by adopting the Benedict Option (or something like it) with or without a crisis, whereas if we dismiss the Benedict Option we will either maintain the status quo or lose as much as Dreher predicts, if not more.

The object of this paper is thus twofold: first, to apply the philosophy and logic of Pascal’s Wager to our assessment of the Benedict Option in order to show that, given the possible gains and losses, it is more rational to adopt the Benedict Option than to dismiss it; second, by drawing on a combination of theological and exegetical resources, to demonstrate that the concrete practices of the Benedict Option, and Dreher’s concept of “strategic withdrawal” more broadly—far from being spiritually unsound or an abdication of witness, as some evangelicals fear—are perfectly consonant with Evangelical theology.

Matthew Davis & Doug Milne McMaster Divinity College

Bringing Jesus to the World: A Contemporary Analysis of John Wesley’s “The World as My Parish”

This paper will present a contemporary analysis of John Wesley’s eighteenth-century theological concept, “I look upon all the world as my parish.” Despite the challenge of our different contexts, both in time and in geography, Wesley provides meaningful and significant evangelical and missional theological opportunities for today’s church. This paper will argue for the viability of the “world as parish” missional model in our contemporary context. It will also offer pastoral implications and applications for the church’s participation in the missio Dei.

It is the authors’ understanding that the church’s participation in the missio Dei includes evangelical outreach, salvation, restoration, holiness, and service. As God continuously ministers to and works in humanity and the world, so the church dedicates itself to this sacred mission by preaching and teaching the gospel of Christ and serving humanity in his name. Faith and service work in connection to the mission of God and so the call for all believers is to participate fully in that mission.

For this study, Wesley’s writings provide a significant source of information concerning the practice of Christian mission. For Wesley, believers’ faith in Christ resulted in inward holiness and the outpouring of grace. That inward holiness could not stay within, but it had to find ways of getting out. Inward holiness resulted in outward activity. In order to connect Wesley with contemporary Christian practice, this paper will focus on the following three-fold structure: 1) Wesley’s mission in historical context; 2) Wesleyan mission in the twenty-first century; and 3) Pastoral implications and applications.

Robert Dean Tyndale Seminary, Toronto

Ecclesiological Developments in Canadian Evangelical Theology

Ecclesiology has long been recognized as a thorn in the side of evangelical theology. However, recent years have marked the publication of several significant monographs engaging with ecclesiological themes by a new generation of Canadian theologians. This paper will probe three such recently published monographs in the attempt to discern signs of an emerging ecclesiological consensus within Canadian evangelical theology. The works to be considered will include:

 Participating Witness: An Anabaptist Theology of Baptism and the Sacramental Character of the Church (Eugene: Pickwick, 2013) by Anthony G. Siegrist, formerly Assistant Professor of Theology at Prairie Bible College;

 Division, Diversity, and Unity: A Theology of Ecclesial Charisms (New York: Peter Lang, 2015) by James E. Pedlar, Assistant Professor of Wesley Studies and Theology at Tyndale Seminary;

 Being Human, Being Church: The Significance of Theological Anthropology for Ecclesiology (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2016), by Patrick Franklin, Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at Providence Seminary.

Through engagement with these works by authors representing the emerging generation of theological scholarship in Canada, this paper will aspire to provide an orientation to the state of the contemporary ecclesiological conversation in evangelical theology, while also simultaneously honoring the heritage of CATA and its historic orientation towards the renewal of theology and the church in Canada.

Patrick Franklin Providence Theological Seminary, Otterburne, MB

Canadian Evangelicalism: What is it and Where is it Going?

Canadian evangelicals presently face a number of challenges concerning their identity and future, such as negotiating differences with American evangelicalism, articulating what it means to be ‘Canadian,’ and navigating the shifting values and expectations of religion within the Canadian context of secularism and religious pluralism. To give a provisional answer to the question my title poses, I will suggest a multifaceted description that incorporates four lenses.

These include: 1) identifying a common ‘family resemblance’ of shared values, ethos, and an emphasis on a personal relationship with Christ; 2) identifying core characteristic beliefs and practices shared with classical evangelicalism (e.g., Bebbington’s quadrilateral); 3) identifying core characteristic beliefs and practices within a distinctly North American historical context (e.g., Tim Larsen’s ‘pentagon’; the work of Canadian historians of evangelicalism in Canada); 4) identifying, describing, and reflecting upon common values, ethos, shared practices, core beliefs, and contextual mission identity amongst key evangelical institutions in Canada.

While the literature on evangelicalism is extensive on items (1–3) above, I suggest that more attention to item 4) could lend significant insight and contextual thickness to our attempts to describe a distinctly Canadian evangelicalism. This paper provides an initial step in that direction and invites further research and conversation along these lines. It employs historical description, theological analysis, and reflection on practical strategies and guidelines to do this.

The presentation will include results from my recent survey of Presidents and Deans at Canadian evangelical seminaries (affiliated with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and the Association of Theological Schools) conducted during the spring-summer of 2017 (this task is presently about 70% complete, with a few more interviews lined up).

David Fuller McMaster Divinity College

Reading Redaction in Habakkuk: Comparing the Cohesion of Various Proposals

Although there was a period of time in which the single-authorship theory of the text of Habakkuk enjoyed scholarly popularity, partition theories have been on the rise in the last ten years of research, aided in no small part by the larger interest in the stages of the formation of the Book of the Twelve as a whole. Whatever the logic driving a particular reconstruction, the identification of apparent disjunctions in the text is the primary motivating factor leading to the creation of proposed compositional layers, each claimed to be more lucid than the canonical text in its final form. Generally, this analysis done with mostly intuitive criterion of theological themes.

Cohesion analysis is a methodology within the larger field of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It provides a process for the rigorous statistical tracking of various related elements across a text in order to meaningfully quantify how “cohesive” a given text is. While linguistic cohesion analysis has been utilized previously in biblical studies to argue that the final form of a text could plausibly originate in a single situational context, it has not been used to evaluate various source-critical proposals themselves.

It is the intention of this study to use cohesion analysis to compare the cohesiveness of select reconstructions of the compositional layers of the book of Habakkuk, with an eye to determining if any of these proposals create a text that is more cohesive than the final form itself. While most proposals are based on a projection of an original text oriented around a singular theological purpose, it can also be plausibly argued that the results of cohesion analysis demonstrate that the resultant theology of the final form of Habakkuk is just as coherent as that of reconstructions with narrower theological purposes. The paper will conclude by exploring the implications of this theological reading of Habakkuk for evangelical theology and the contemporary church.

Meg Giordano Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto

Toward a New Vocabulary of the Literal Sense of Scripture, A Conversation with Evangelical Theology

The modern evangelical family of faith traditions (including my own faith community) has a relationship with the literal sense of scripture that is both intimate and uneasy, even at times awkward. This paper reflects an engagement with the evangelical perspective of scripture that seeks to enrich it with a different vocabulary of the literal sense, inspired by the work of Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury), while showing how such a vocabulary can be consistent with evangelical theological priorities.

This paper considers the following construction of the nature of the canon of scripture and its literal meaning:

 Each human biblical author reflects a specific community—a community with central, unifying characteristics and a narrative of the community’s relation with the divine. The biblical narratives are the record of that community recognizing the essential elements of their own story in “prior episodes” of the divine narrative (i.e., inherited sacred texts/narratives)—episodes that are at the same time external to their own and yet also profoundly internal to it. The human authors, and their communities, thus appropriate the sacred narratives, participating in and even re-ordering them in their turn.

 The canonical project thus has an inescapable aspect of discourse and even conflict, undergirded with a unity generated by discernment of and faithfulness to the divinely-authored narrative.

 This overarching narrative is driven by the act of divine self-revelation, and self-gift, and is thus intrinsically Christological.

 The Church as a sacramental body is the contemporary context for the continuation of this canonical-narrative project. Further, each community’s submission of itself to sacramental expressions of the divine narrative (baptism, Eucharist, even the rhythms of the church year), in spite of historical disagreements or failures, is a following after the cruciform life of Christ.

 A literal reading of scripture is thus one conducted with the conviction that the biblical authors’ divinely-inspired project is a real one, and one that we may take up and enter.

Jamin Hübner John Witherspoon College, Rapid City, SD

The Evolution of Evangelical Theology in Creeds, Confessions, and Statements of Faith: A Chronological and Discursive Appraisal

Evangelical theology in contemporary discussion often involves a heavy dose of socio-political, ecclesiastical, and cultural analysis. These various contexts and angles are necessary for understanding the nature of evangelical theology. But they are anything but sufficient.

As surprising as it is, few have undertaken even a brief chronological study of evangelical theology as it is explicitly stated—and how it has been changed—in creeds and confessions. This paper surveys the theological landscape of evangelicalism in the 1800s until the last revisions of evangelical and protestant confessional theology in the 1900s, tracing the developments in vocabulary and rhetoric from the emergence of Methodism to the World Evangelical Alliance to Fuller Seminary to the new ecumenism and new monasticism of “post-evangelical” millennials.

In addition to revealing general trends and changes, the survey reveals that a number of perceptions about what theologically constitutes “evangelical theology” are mistaken—such as, for example, how prominent (or absent) the stress of “evangelism,” “penal substitutionary atonement” and “inerrancy” really are in “official” declarations.

August Konkel McMaster Divinity College

A Time for War: Theological Implications of Conflict in Chronicles

War is a part of the human condition; theologically, war is brought to an end with the coming of a kingdom of peace. For the Chronicler this was manifest in God bringing the rule of David, a man who had shed much blood, to fruition in his son Solomon, who would receive rest from all his enemies (1 Chr 22:8–9). Solomon would sit on the throne of the kingdom of God (1 Chr 28:5), a kingdom of peace as manifest in his name. Israelite history as told in Chronicles abounds in military conflict, but it never serves the purposes of the preservation of state. War in Chronicles serves to establish, maintain, and legitimate a united Israel at peace in their land under a descendent of David.

The Chronicler’s views on war have an important analogy for the Christian church. In Chronicles, engagement in war cannot be avoided but the outcome of war is never related to military strength; it is entirely dependent on divine purpose and the response of the faithful. Christians in the present time can learn from the Chronicler’s perspective on war. Christians may not be able to avoid violence and conflict, but they must learn the perspective that war is part of the process by which the kingdom of God is realized. Faith in the kingdom of God is to confess that the immediate purposes of war must not determine the conduct of citizens of the kingdom. The purpose of this paper is to show the contribution that Chronicles can make to help citizens of the kingdom respond to violence.

Mark Lack Trinity College, University of Toronto

Cherishing the Trees, as Christ is Lord Over All and the Center of All Things: Martin Luther’s Eco- theological Ethic

Evangelical Christians are often accused of willingly exploiting the earth’s natural resources while being reluctant to support ecological sustainability. As a result, their actions or inaction toward the environment are seen to have contributed to its degradation. Instead of being concerned with earthly matters, orthodox Protestants tend to fixate on ‘heavenly’ matters. Does this attitude stem from the Reformation, and did the Reformers’ emphasis on soteriological and eschatological concerns contribute to the contemporary neglect of God’s earthly creation and indifference towards its environmental condition? This paper contends that such neglect does not reflect the thinking of the seminal figure of the Reformation.

Martin Luther, the progenitor of the Protestant tradition and founder of classic evangelicalism, did not endorse an indifference towards the environment. Rather Luther admired nature’s beauty and intricacy—although he observed how people ignored it while at the same time they greedily consumed its resources. Luther contended that humanity’s fall into sin had distorted its obedience of the command of Genesis 1:28 such that humanity and its dominion over the earth was now incurvatus in se ipsum. Luther understood that only Christ has true and proper dominion over Creation, while his Eucharistic theology contends that Christ is ubiquitous in all of Creation. Luther’s theology of divine immanence and his embrace of Creation therefore can be a call to admirers of other aspects of his evangelical theology to sustain the environment and preserve our earthly home.

Chris Landon Northeastern Seminary

Screaming for Truth: A Study of “Sorrow” and Psalm 13

For the Israelites, lament was a natural form of communication with their God and incorporated into their worship in both public and private forms. The Psalter shows that pain, suffering, and loss are unavoidable parts of life, which must then be expressed by the faith community. In the same way, the music of the Christian Church reflects their understanding of God and humanity and acceptable forms of communication between the two. Notably, ancient Israel and the modern Church differ significantly in the role that lament plays in worship. In his recent article “Recovering the Language of Lament for the Western Evangelical Church: A Survey of the Psalms of Lament and their Appropriation Within Pastoral Theology,” James Harrichand notes that lament is conspicuously absent from the worship of the modern Christian Church, despite being an appropriate speech form in both the Old and New Testament. He argues that the recovery of this language is urgent, especially for pastoral theology.

As the language of lament is lacking in the worship of the Church, it is appropriate to look outside the walls of the Church for a more fitting expression. Ibraham Abraham, in “Punk Pulpit: Religion, Punk Rock, and Counter (Sub)Cultures,” analyzed the way the religion and subcultures interact within the context of punk rock and suggests that, despite popular perception, religion and punk may not be antitheses. This paper will analyze the basic message and use of Psalm 13 in Israel’s worship, then compare it to the punk rock song, “Sorrow,” by Bad Religion. After comparing the structure and meaning of both Psalm 13 and “Sorrow,” this paper will suggest that Punk Rock offers a viable option to reclaim the lost voice of lament for the people of God in the modern world.

Wayne Lott Toronto School of Theology

The Natural Law as an Important Tool for Evangelical Theology in the Face of Some of Today’s Challenges

The longstanding idea of the natural law has been a part of the Christian tradition from very early in its history. This idea implies that all humans as creatures uniquely gifted with reason have some inkling of what good is to be done and what evil is to be avoided.

Within the evangelical tradition, the idea of the natural law has met with a mixed reaction for both theological reasons and philosophical reasons. The aim of this paper is to re-present the idea of the natural law and to provide some reasons why evangelical theology ought to give more consideration to its value as a theological and philosophical tool, especially in the present world with all of its unique challenges.

Three very important challenges that we now face include 1) the defacing of human dignity within much of contemporary western culture, 2) the loss of any sense of universally true moral values, and 3) the blindness to the need for developing virtuous individuals and citizens capable of living in society together.

I will argue first for how the natural law points to the uniqueness, value, and dignity of human beings as moral beings; second, that there are universally true moral values that every society must recognize in order to thrive; and third, for the role the natural law plays in the formation of important personal and social virtues that stand at the heart of any good society, including both Church and civil society at large.

Within the context of making these arguments, I will address how an understanding of the natural law that advances human dignity, values, and virtuous character would buttress our understanding of the Christian gospel and, with the Holy Spirit’s assistance, becomes a dynamic impetus to live out its calling.

Paul Lubienecki Christ the King Seminary, East Aurora, NY

Protestants, Catholics, and Progressives: An Evolution of 19th Century Theology in the Quest for American Labor Reform

As the Nineteenth Century concluded, Catholics and Protestants competed to be the voice of the worker, the guardian of the marginalized, and the defender of the “American way.” Both vied to be the spiritual and moral representative of the nation as each wanted social and labor reforms that accentuated their ideological and theological discrepancies.

The Protestant Social Gospel movement sought its place with the worker and as a reformer of the transgressions from the Industrial Revolution. The emergence of the Social Gospel movement did not necessarily constitute a bifurcation of social reform into Catholic and Protestant theologies. Yet, separate strategies did evolve.

America’s Catholics came to base their reforms on Papal social encyclicals to establish labor schools and fight for better working conditions. The Social Gospel movement became, in a sense, more than the introduction of Christian evangelical or rather Protestant principles into society. It was also the application of social principles to Christianity.

American industrial society in the Nineteenth Century manifested a pluralistic urban culture that placed value on success not religion. Into this medley, both Protestants and Catholics sought to make large- scale changes in society as a link between personal holiness and social reform echoing the revival traditions in American religious history. But which theology was viable?

This paper examines the impact of the Industrial Revolution on American labor and social reform movements that sought to meld religion and labor. This analysis considers what functioned and what hindered the continuation of these efforts by both Protestants and Catholics as theology and economic mobility influenced their reform movements.

Jeffrey McPherson Roberts Wesleyan College

Evangelical Panentheism: Contradiction or Possibility?

Panentheism literally means “all-in-God.” Typically, this term is used to find a via media between classical theism and pantheism. Its most famous protagonists are, no doubt, process theologians who follow the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne.

Most recent discussions of panentheism agree on two basic elements that must be part of any system to be properly panentheistic. The first is that the world must be in God (in some sense) and secondly the world must affect God (once again, in some sense). As such, Panentheism is a dynamic conception of the God/world relationship that embraces organic rather than mechanistic metaphors to describe this relationship. This model helps us to recognize the interrelations between God and world and to better conceive how God works in the world.

It is seen by many, though, as a threat to traditional conceptions of God’s attributes, especially God’s aseity and omnipotence. In a panentheistic model God is no longer thought to be radically independent of the world. Likewise, this model no longer conceives of God as exercising exhaustive sovereignty over the world.

This paper will examine whether Evangelical theology should consider panentheism as an adequate or effective model for articulating the God/world relationship. This paper will argue that both Jonathan Edwards and Clark Pinnock, two prominent Evangelical scholars, develop different versions of panentheism in their theology. On the strength of their insights this paper will further argue that Evangelical theology should be broad enough to include an Evangelical panentheism.

Christopher O’Brien Fuller Theological Seminary

Becoming the Good News in Mark’s Gospel: A Proposal for Reorienting the Discussion on the Use of the Label “Evangelical”

With the recent U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump, the evangelical church has experienced increased scrutiny because a large portion of self-identified evangelicals supported and voted for Trump. The evangelical support for Trump has caused many – both within and outside of the Christian church – to question evangelicalism, not least because there are notable and identifiable differences between the good news of Jesus and the message and actions of Trump (who in many ways does not represent the historic Republican party).

On the one hand, many evangelicals who oppose Trump, and what has come to be associated with his political campaign, have responded to the challenge of Trump’s election by renouncing the “evangelical” label. On the other hand, others, like theologian Dr. Richard Mouw, continue to identify as evangelical, even in light of its shortcomings, because of the tradition’s emphasis on God’s redeeming work in the world in and through Jesus Christ. However, should Christians be focused on whether to retain and employ the label “evangelical”? What is gained from defending and using this label when how it is expressed and/or embodied is inconsistent with the good news of Jesus as communicated in Scripture?

In this paper, I will argue that the current contention for the continued use of the label “evangelical” is misdirected because the testimony of Scripture itself is focused on God’s people becoming the gospel (see Michael J. Gorman, Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission [Eerdmans, 2015]), rather than identifying with a particular description or marker. Scripture invites the church to embody the gospel by participating in the life and mission of God as incarnated in the life and work of Jesus.

Since I will not be able to cover the entirety of Scripture in this short paper, I will narrow the scope of my study to how Mark’s Gospel approaches the cultivation of becoming the gospel as following the way of the cross (Mark 8:34). For Mark, the way of the cross entails identifying with and caring for the marginalized, holding those in power accountable, living a self-sacrificial life by serving others, living a life that embodies forgiveness, and loving God and one’s neighbors completely. As I will demonstrate, Mark’s Gospel teaches its readers to focus on how one responds to and lives out the gospel, rather than what labels to associate with.

Allison Quient Fuller Theological Seminary

Eve Christology: Embodiment, Gender, and Salvation

Scholarly interaction with the position of Eve in relation to Christology has tended towards relegating Eve to an absent, subordinate or implicit position from the standpoint of the typological significance of Adam in relation to Christ. The result is a question framed with the assumption of the presence of only a particularly male representation of salvation with an inadvertent question mark when it comes to where a female body fits in the scheme of salvation. Does the Adam-Christ paradigm entail the inability for a male Christ to save women since humanity in all its diversity is not represented in Christ?

In response, I will be delving into the discussion of how Eve figures in Christological significance and may subsequently transfigure our notions of the embodiment of salvation. I will be arguing that far from her being absent—or merely present in her absence—Eve is a type (or antitype) of Christ whose existence serves to undermine the prevailing notion of male domination in the representation of embodied humanity.

I will accomplish my thesis by first offering a change in lenses from an emphasis on both historical reconstruction and patriarchy as the frame for understanding Eve’s place in salvation, to the utilization of varied gendered language in the Pauline text to exemplify embodied faith, and how this undermines various gender hierarchies that may be perceived. This thesis will also involve considering the “correspondence” language of the Genesis, and how early Christian writers used gender language to describe the struggle of faith, embodied existence, and future hope.

This will provide a plausibility lens from which to be able to conceive of an Eve Christology and open the doors to re-imagine the place of Eve in our theological world. Next, I will work out a uniquely Eve Christology arguing for her presence as a type of Christ in Timothy 2:13–3:1a.

Lastly, I will wrestle with whether Christ ‘as male’ reinforces gendered power structures or serves to diffuse them. Does the idea that a woman is merely a deformed man who must “become male” to enter into salvation best capture the figures of Adam and Christ presented by these Pauline writings? Or, does the presence of Eve steer us in an entirely different direction, perhaps even away from various forms of gender essentialism?

Nicholas Quient Fuller Theological Seminary

Learning in the Pastoral Epistles: Verbs, Wives, and a Solution to a Pauline Prohibition

In the evangelical world, no debate has raged longer than the conflict over the ordination of women to positions of leadership. Denominations have split over this issue, and many scholars and pastors on both sides have lost jobs over any sort of change in heart.

The present article is a study of the verb μανθάνω (“to learn”) in Paul’s writings, in coordination with the LXX and the broader New Testament writings. Given the varied and diverse uses of language within the broader world of the New Testament, the conclusion drawn from the evidence best supports an egalitarian reading of 1 Tim 2:8–15, specifically in reference to v.11. Specifically, the use of the verb “to learn” in 2:11 is a solution to the particular problem of the deception of wives in Ephesus. Thus, a reading of the Pastoral Epistles that emphasizes vv.11–12 as a present ad hoc prohibition fits the literary context much more than an eternal appeal to creation, which would be a gross misreading of Genesis 1– 3.

Thus, 1 Tim 2:12 is not restricting the learning of 2:11, but is instead restricted by 2:11. This conclusion undermines a patriarchal reading of the broader text of 1 Tim. 2:9–15 and the article concludes that women ought to learn so that they may teach, in coordination with what we find of “learners” in the LXX and particularly in the whole of New Testament theology.

Anjeanette (AJ) Roberts Reasons to Believe, Covina, CA

Rescuing Methodological Naturalism: An Evangelical Scientist’s Defense

Among many evangelicals, methodological naturalism (MN) is maligned as an undue commitment to naturalism and as a tack taken only to exclude intelligent design or creation arguments from scientific discourse. Many antagonists of MN argue that it supports materialistic, atheistic approaches to science and is good neither for open scientific inquiry nor for society as a whole. Many articulate that a soft form of MN should be employed in scientific research, but that strict MN as the only valid methodology for conducting research should be abandoned. As an evangelical Christian and a research scientist in molecular and cellular biology, I will argue that this criticism is misguided and counterproductive to science and to the science-faith discourse.

I believe the harsh position against MN results from a series of misunderstandings: 1) misunderstanding the difference between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism; 2) misunderstanding the proper demarcation of science and scientific pursuits; 3) misunderstanding a robust Christian theology that necessitates methodological naturalism as the proper methodology for scientific research and demarcation of scientific pursuits; and 4) equivocating science with human reasoning and human rationality.

I will argue that these misunderstandings are leading some to an unnecessary call to redefine science and contribute to an anemic view of Christian theology. We come to the knowledge of God primarily through revelation. Thankfully we have been given revelation in creation, in Scripture, and in the incarnation. Properly understanding and demarcating science within its “sphere sovereignty” and its constraints of methodological naturalism is the appropriate way to access God’s revelation in creation.

Lane Scruggs Wycliffe College, University of Toronto

The Church as Necessary and Necessarily Derivative: Toward an Evangelical Ecclesiology

In recent years the increase among evangelical who are interested in ecclesiology is noteworthy. At the same time a move among many of these born and bred evangelicals from entirely “extrinsicist” to more “intrincisist” ecclesiological options is also clearly evident.

The paper will address the proper understanding of the church in relation to the gospel and how evangelicals have failed to reconcile these fundamental ingredients within the economy of salvation. It will do so in two moves, the first is an historical look at two prototypical theologians of the 19th century: Charles Hodge and John Williamson Nevin. By examining their understandings of the gospel and its impingement upon their ecclesiology, it will be shown that each begins with proper theological assumptions, but these initial presuppositions are not properly held in tension. The second move will be to recognize this same polarization in much contemporary evangelical ecclesiology.

The paper will close with a preliminary proposal for truly evangelical ecclesiology that assumes the church is necessary, though always necessarily derivative.

SuJung Shin New Brunswick Theological Seminary, New Brunswick, NJ

The “Authority” of the Bible from the Perspective of an “Internally Persuasive” Word

This paper deals with the long-standing questions related to the “authority” of the Bible from the perspective of “evangelical” in the 21st century. This paper examines how the authority of the Bible can be accepted, challenged, reclaimed or reinterpreted when one reads biblical literature not as a closed or fixed literature or historiography but as a text continuously open to the audience in the context of multicultural and multi-communicational world.

Focusing specifically on the prose of Samuel in the Old Testament, this paper’s approach to the topic of the authority of the Bible invites a rereading from the perspective of an “internally persuasive” word, and thus provides a dialogic way of understanding the interrelations of character, speaker, and audience.

In so doing, I attempt to make the stylistic (and ideological) distinction between “authoritative word” and “internally dialogized word” from the Bakhtinian perspective of dialogue: In the authoritative word, one would encounter a single and unitary language containing a monologic ideological thought. In internally persuasive discourse, on the other hand, one discovers various available ideological points of view and values that are contestable in each of the new contexts that dialogize the discourse.

Influenced by a new perspective in literary studies, this paper challenges certain traditional values and presuppositions in regard to the text, such as the univocality of meaning, the privileging of the author’s intention, and the objective reality of history. This paper eventually aims to provide an opportunity for recognizing a dialogic, rather than monologic, understanding of the biblical text in a context of the 21st century, where hierarchical dominance and the authority of the logocentrism have been continuously questioned by and in dialogue with ordinary readers.

Michael Spalione University of Aberdeen

Evangelical Sacramentalism: The Opportunity of Evangelical Theology for the Ecumenical Movement

Evangelical theology is not known for its sacramentality or its concern for the ecumenical movement. However, there is a largely unrealized correlation of the Evangelical movement’s passion for the gospel with the ecumenical movement’s pursuit of visible unity. These two passions converge in the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist.

The sacraments are simultaneously visible signs of union with Christ (prized by Evangelicals) and of the unity of Christ’s body (valued by the ecumenical movement). Baptism is a sign of our union with Christ (Rom 6:4) and of the washing away of our sins (Acts 22:16). It is also a sign of the unity of the body of Christ: “For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free” (1 Cor 12:13). Similarly, the Eucharist is the sign of the new covenant in Christ’s blood (Luke. 22:20) and of the forgiveness of sins (Matt 26:28). At the same time, it is a sign of Christian unity: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:17).

This suggests that the pursuit of visible unity among the Christian traditions that all confess “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph 4:5) is, indeed, a gospel concern. Therefore, an Evangelical theology that sets all doctrines in orbit of the euangelion possesses a unique and largely unrealized opportunity for the ecumenical movement—namely, an emphasis on the gospel meaning of the sacraments as simultaneously signs of union with Christ and as signs of the unity of Christ’s body.

Evangelicals can foster ecumenical unity at the denominational, pastoral, and layperson levels. At the denominational level, there must be corporate and public repentance before there can be corporate and visible unity. The violence of historical religious wars and present denominational slander and indifference divides Christ (1 Cor 1:13) and grieves the Holy Spirit (Eph 4:29–31). Just as the body of Christ is corporately justified in the one gospel, so also the body of Christ must pursue corporate sanctification through the gospel.

Second, evangelical pastors can form collegial unity with local pastors inside and outside of their own tradition, whereby they can foster mutual care and collaborating with one another to discover the unity of their common gospel confession in the plurality of their church traditions.

Lastly, laypersons can foster unity by worshipping alongside believers outside of their own tradition. All Christians can lament and pray for gospel unity in the churches that are out of sacramental union with one another. There are reasons why the various churches do not recognize the validity of each other’s sacraments, important reasons. But those reasons, no matter how important, cannot be the grounds of sacramental division between the churches that all confess the one gospel together. The church must share in one baptism and one bread because we are the one body of Christ.

Kyle Sullivan Roberts Wesleyan College

The Millennial Dilemma

In the North American Church today, 80% of young adults between the age of 18 and 30 will leave the institutional church and most will never return. The mass exodus of young people from the church is essential evidence in discovering how the church has failed to perpetuate a narrative that allows people to make sense of the world around them. An entire generation of young Christians across denominations believe the church they were once engaged with is no longer hospitable to their shifting perspectives and unwelcoming of their expressed doubts. They believe that the church is fundamentally disconnected from the reality of the world in which it was meant to embody a narrative of hope and peace.

While this topic is centered around the anxiety of a fleeing generation, I will argue that this is a predominantly white exodus that has not transcended into multicultural representations of the church experience. At the same time, I will examine the reasoning for the white millennial exodus from the church and highlight actions that can be taken to address it. It is necessary that the church begins to examine their practices and engage the concerns of the millennial generation, as the continuation of the church for future generations demands it.

Ambrose Thomson McMaster Divinity College

Righteousness, Repentance, and the Recovery of Divine Wealth: Luke 15:11–32 In Its Literary Discourse Setting Thomson

Treatments of the Lost Son parable frequently focus on the parable in isolation from its literary context and interpret it as essentially an exposition of sola gratia soteriology and even a template of the divinely ordained process of repentance and forgiveness/salvation. This paper will proceed from the premise that the parable is best understood, not as an independent story-lesson, but as integrally related to the preceding Cotext in the narrative discourse of Luke’s Gospel from which it derives its primary meaning and significance. Specifically, the meaning of the parable and the way that it functions in Jesus’s discussion with the scribes and Pharisees is directly connected to the associations with material family wealth that are first activated for the listener by the illustrations of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin.

The paper will show that in the Parable of the Lost Son Jesus juxtaposes the returned son with unreturned family wealth in order to expose the precise nature of the conflict between the value system of the scribes and Pharisees and his own. What he shows is that his listeners have incorrectly identified righteousness as the asset that the divine estate is missing and needs to recover. Far from being an instruction manual or even an exhortation on turning to God and receiving free, unmerited forgiveness, this parable represents a key moment in a debate between Jesus and the religious experts about the status of the divine promises to Israel and expectations about how and when they will finally be fulfilled.

Michael Walters Northeastern Seminary

Too Wounded to Heal: The Church’s Uncomfortable Challenge to Wholeness

The image “wounded healer” (from Henri Nouwen) has been a helpful and instructive metaphor as the church endeavors to carry out its mission in the world. The church is not, and cannot pretend to be, perfectly whole as long as it is filled with broken human beings who are in various stages of being made new. But is it possible for the church to be too wounded? Is it possible that the church is so broken in particular ways that its effectiveness is severely impacted and limited?

Listening to voices in today’s culture indicates that the answer would seem to be “yes.” Notably, and alarmingly, among the younger generation the institutional church has been found wanting, even though largely left untried. This manner of response by those on the outside reveals the suspicion and cynicism of the cultural street that all-too-often views the church as unable to deliver on its most basic promise—to be a healing community in our midst. It also underscores the precariousness of the church’s visible presence in today’s world. Churches seeking a hearing from the culture are increasingly dismissed as ineffective and “too wounded” to be taken seriously. From much of the culture, the collective retort to the church seems to be “physician, heal yourself!”

The current cultural challenges for a church aspiring to actually embody its vocation are legion, but nowhere is the challenge more evident than in what have been called the “three great wounds of the church.” The issues of gender, race, and class confront today’s faith communities with a complicated and uncomfortable gauntlet that is being run in full-view through the public square.

This paper examines why these specific issues have become so decisive towards the church’s effectiveness in the world, and how finding the courage and will to deal with these particular “wounds” may well signal the church’s missional viability within the culture in the near future.

Thomas Worth Community Covenant Church, Manlius, NY

Mining for a Heart of Gold

How do we measure outcomes in our pastoral work in our Evangelical churches? How do we know that what we teach and preach is germinating in fertile soil? After thirty-plus years of pastoral work in mostly small congregations, I have found an answer in the glimpses I catch into souls who are aiming to love God and love people. It’s not the only answer and some would complain that it is merely anecdotal. I would counter that the Gospels are collections of anecdotes—anecdotes of people encountering the Eternal in our Lord Jesus.

Robert Coles has edited a collection of anecdotes by William Carlos Williams called The Doctor Stories, where Williams tells anecdotes of his encounters with various kinds of people in his medical practice. His vivid and betimes raw descriptions bring one into contact with the human dimension of the practice of medicine.

I propose to do something similar by relating vignettes from my pastoral practice which give us a window into the human dimension of how our theology forms us, how the Good News, the Evangel helps us to live. My paper would be primarily in the narrative mode. But like the Gospels, there would be interaction between narrative and exposition, though I would refrain from overwhelming the narrative with commentary or interpretation.