Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

ABSTRACT This essay summarizes teaching goals when the content is theories of biblical composition and the context is a liberal/progressive classroom of first‐year seminary students. For teaching to be relevant to this group and responsible in the world, the professor explains four main strategies or learning goals that guide the class away from memorization of complex models and toward considerations that will most likely be useful for students' vocational contexts. These four foci are (1) developing greater comfort with historical criticism; (2) emphasizing the evidence that scholars engage with more than the overarching theories; (3) making space for classroom reflection on the implications of potentially challenging insights; and (4) filtering the entire learning experience through learning about hermeneutics.

This compare/contrast case study explored the role of religiosity on completion of advance directives in preoperative open-heart surgery patients. Eight preoperative aortic valve replacement cardiac surgery patients were interviewed at Cleveland Clinic, five of whom had completed an advance directive and three of whom had not. In vivo, descriptive, affective, and axial coding was used to analyze results. "Caring for family" emerged as the primary reason for completing, or planning to complete, an advance directive. The values underlying spiritual and religious beliefs appeared to be more important than the beliefs themselves in completing advance directives.

Book review

Abstract The charge of schism has been one in the history of Western Christianity that carries with it deep emotive tones of horror. Through the examination of a tract making this charge about eighteenth-century English Dissent by the evangelical Anglican clergyman Thomas Robinson and of its rebuttal by the Particular Baptist theologian Andrew Fuller, this essay explores such perennial questions as: what is the nature of a true church and what is its relationship to the state? There is a poignancy to this particular debate between Robinson and Fuller as both men were evangelicals and each had a profound respect for the other.

“Wilt thou be made whole?” This is a question posed by Jesus in the Gospels. Wholeness for Jesus means being in right relationship with God and in right relationship with other human beings. Wholeness can also be defined as completeness or well-being. This essay argues that preaching ministries committed to addressing the total well-being of all of God’s people must include sermons about mental health. As evidence of the need, the author cites statistics from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that at least one in four people in the United States is affected by mental illness directly or indirectly during their lifetime. Then, to equip preachers to address mental health concerns, the author: addresses the causes of mental health stigma both in and beyond the pulpit; shares theological and hermeneutical approaches and concerns of disability proposed by the theologians Nancy Eiesland and John Swinton and homiletician Kathy Black; and provides resources for preachers to use in their preaching.

Many works have enriched the historical body of Christ by advancing the need for Christians to become better theologians so that they may, in turn, disciple others unto maturity. While Bible studies are crucial for Christian growth, Christians must employ systematic doctrines of the Scripture to learn to think theologically. This article introduces the Theological Concept Formation model, which can help mature Christians better understand how to connect different concepts in the Scriptures to disciple others and educate them toward maturity in Christ. The proposed model is based on the Vygotskian concept formation model, which provides a suitable framework for Christian scholars and educators to teach theological cognition using theological concepts. Firstly, this article proposes that Scripture is the purposive language of the imago Dei. Secondly, Scripture purports an analogous association with human development and Christian maturity.

Augustus Hopkins Strong and the struggle to reconcile Christian theology with modern thought. By John Aloisi. (Sustainable History Monograph Pilot.) Pp. x + 170. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2021. £25 (paper). 978 1 64825 022 4 - Volume 74 Issue 1

Abstract During the first few decades of the long eighteenth century, the English Particular Baptist community found itself in the grip of a seemingly inexorable decline, the reasons for which included doctrinal, social, and cultural issues. While there were significant sectors of spiritual vitality, especially in the West Country as a result of the impact of Bristol Baptist Academy, widespread revival did not come until the final three decades of the century. Links with the earlier Evangelical Revival that had been largely concentrated within Anglicanism, a movement of prayer for spiritual awakening that began in 1784, the influence of the writings of the American divine Jonathan Edwards, and the theology of Andrew Fuller led to significant renewal that gave birth to the modern missionary movement.

Abstract In Gregory of Nazianzus’s Oration 30, seven of his ten points against Eunomian misreadings of Scripture about the Son deal directly with quotations of Jesus from the Gospels. This study shines new light on Gregory’s exegetical method, arguing that in Oration 30, grammatical, contextual, and partitive exegesis marks Gregory’s interpretation of the Gospels, which serve as foundational texts for understanding the Son’s relationship to the Father. First, I briefly provide support for the Gospels as foundational texts for understanding the Son’s relationship to the Father. Second, I summarize Gregory’s exegesis of each of these seven texts in detail. Third, I analyze Gregory’s exegetical method based on his grammatical, contextual, and partitive exegesis. Perhaps most importantly for Gregory, one must always have before him both the divinity and humanity of the Son. Anything less than this exegetical method leads to misreading the Gospels and misunderstanding the Son himself.

In this essay, I consider how the racial politics of Ridley Scott’s whitewashing of ancient Egypt in Exodus: Gods and Kings intersects with the Hamitic Hypothesis, a racial theory that asserts Black people’s inherent inferiority to other races and that civilization is the unique possession of the White race. First, I outline the historical development of the Hamitic Hypothesis. Then, I highlight instances in which some of the most respected White intellectuals from the late-seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century deploy the hypothesis in assertions that the ancient Egyptians were a race of dark-skinned Caucasians. By focusing on this detail, I demonstrate that prominent White scholars’ arguments in favor of their racial kinship with ancient Egyptians were frequently burdened with the insecure admission that these ancient Egyptian Caucasians sometimes resembled Negroes in certain respects—most frequently noted being skin color. In the concluding section of this essay, I use Scott’s film to point out that the success of the Hamitic Hypothesis in its racial discourse has transformed a racial perception of the ancient Egyptian from a dark-skinned Caucasian into a White person with appearance akin to Northern European White people.