Thesis advisor: Frederick Lawrence / This dissertation aims at understanding Bernard Lonergan’s understanding of how the passion of Jesus Christ is salvific. Because salvation is of human persons in a community, a history, and a cosmos, the first part of the dissertation examines Lonergan’s cosmology with an emphasis on his anthropology. For Lonergan the cosmos is a dynamic, interrelated hierarchy governed by the processes of what he calls “emergent probability.” Within the universe of emergent probability, humanity is given the ability to direct world processes with critical intelligence, freedom, love, and cooperation with each other and with the larger world order. This ability is not totally undirected. Rather, it has a natural orientation, a desire or eros for ultimate goodness, truth, beauty, and love, i.e. for God. When made effective through an authentic, recurrent cycle of experience, questioning, understanding, judgment, decision, action, and cooperation, this human desire for God results in progress. However, when this cycle is damaged by bias, sin and its evil consequences distort the order of creation, both in human persons and in the larger environment. Over time, the effects of sin and bias produce cumulative, self-feeding patterns of destruction, or decline. In answer to this distortion, God gives humanity the gift of grace. Grace heals and elevates human persons. Through the self-gift of divine, unrestricted Love and the Incarnate Word, God works with human sensitivity, imagination, intelligence, affect, freedom, and community to produce religious, moral, and intellectual conversion, and to form the renewed, renewing community Lonergan calls “cosmopolis” and the body of Christ. Building on this cosmology and anthropology, the second part of the dissertation turns to the culmination of God’s solution to the problem of sin and evil in the suffering and death of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, on the cross at Calvary. The cross does not redeem creation by destroying its order, nor does it redeem humanity by revoking its freedom. Rather, the cross redeems the world by working with the order and freedom of creation and humanity to fulfill their natural processes and purposes. Just as from all possible world orders, God chose the order of emergent probability and human freedom, from all possible ways of redeeming that order, God chose the way of the cross. How does the cross redeem a free humanity in a world of emergent probability? For Lonergan, the best way to understand the cross is through the analogy of communication. This communication is in two parts. First, the cross is a communication, primarily, of humanity to God. Lonergan calls this part “vicarious satisfaction.” He takes the general analogy from Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo?. But rather than understanding satisfaction primarily in an economic context of debt (as Anselm does), Lonergan situates it in the higher context of interpersonal psychology: Sin creates a rupture in the relationships between human persons and God, among human persons, and among all parts of creation. Christ’s vicarious satisfaction flows from a non-ruptured relationship. It expresses a perfect concord of the human and the divine, through its threefold communication of (1) a perfect knowledge and love of God and humanity, (2) a perfect knowledge and sorrow for the offense that sin is, (3) and a perfect knowledge and detestation of the evil sin causes. Conceived as a communication in the context of ruptured interpersonal relationships, Lonergan’s analogical understanding of the cross as vicarious satisfaction avoids Anselm’s understanding’s tendency to be misinterpreted as “satispassion” or “substitutionary penal atonement.” The other major part to Lonergan’s analogy of the cross as communication is called the “Law of the Cross.” While vicarious satisfaction is mainly Christ’s achievement prescinding from the cooperation of human freedom in a world of emergent probability, the Law of the Cross proposes that Christ’s crucifixion is an example and an exhortation to human persons. On the cross, Jesus wisely and lovingly transforms the evil consequences of sin into a twofold communication to humanity of a perfect human and divine (1) knowledge and love for humanity and (2) knowledge and condemnation of sin and evil. This twofold communication invites a twofold human response: the repentance of sin and a love for God and all things. This love and repentance form a reconciled relationship of God and humanity. Furthermore, when reconciled with God, a human person will tend to be moved to participate in Christ’s work by willingly taking on satisfaction for one’s own sin as well as the vicarious satisfaction for others’ sins. Such participatory vicarious activity invites still other human persons to repent and reconcile with God and other persons, and furthermore to engage in their own participatory acts of satisfaction and communication. Thus, Christ’s own work and human participation in his work are objective achievements as well as moving or inspiring examples. However, while Christ’s work and our participation are moving, their movements do not operate by necessity. Nor are the appropriate human responses of repentance, love, personal satisfaction, and vicarious satisfaction in any way forced upon human persons. Consequently, the cross as communication operates in harmony with a world of emergent probability and in cooperation with human freedom. With the cross as communication, redemption is reconciliation, a reconciliation that spreads historically and communally by human participation in the divine initiative. This is God’s solution to the problem of evil, according to Lonergan. Because God wills ultimately for human persons to be united to God and to all things by love, God wills freedom, and God allows the possibility of sin and evil. But sin and evil do not please God. Out of infinite wisdom, God did not do away with evil through power, but converted evil into a communication that preserves, works with, and fulfills the order of creation and the freedom of humanity. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Hinton's theology of pain posits that an individual's suffering contributes to God's redemptive work in the world. This dissertation explores Hinton's theological appropriation of pain in four ways. First, we examine Hinton's life and writings to establish his personal interest about pain. Factors that contribute to Hinton's theological interest were the death of his brother, his sojourn in Whitechapel, his mental health, and his practice and skepticism of medicine. Second, we examine Hinton's redemptive nexus of suffering, beneficence, and deification in light of the Jewish and Christian traditions. While our exploration shows that the biblical tradition interweaves suffering, beneficence and deification, we also see that the biblical tradition adds elements that Hinton's treatment misses. The tradition shows that society also has an obligation to those who suffer. Suffering and wellbeing are ultimately social issues that require social, not simply personal, solutions. The serendipitous nature of suffering in the Hebrew bible fleshes out what in Hinton is simply an argument. In light of the serendipitous suffering in the Hebrew tradition, we examined participants in medical trials and the advancement of medicine as possible instances to bolster Hinton's theological nexus. The New Testament suggests that Hinton is too unidirectional in his understanding of the nexus of suffering, beneficence and deification. The New Testament places identification with Christ preeminently ahead of the suffering of the individual. Third, we explore the relevance of Hinton's thinking about pain in his contemporary setting in light of the philosophical, theological, and scientific developments in the nineteenth century. Hinton's metaphysical speculations bridge theology to Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwin was unable to connect Christianity to his thinking about natural selection because of his acceptance of ideas within natural theology. Hinton's metaphysical conceptualization allows him to reject natural theology while embracing the Darwinian revolution from a Christian perspective. Finally, we explore modern pain theories and the literature on the role of religious coping on pain and illness to see if Hinton's theology of pain remains intelligible. The modern medical and social science literature sustains Hinton's basic premise that theological outlook can influence one's tolerance of pain. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts / Theology / PhD / Dissertation

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2009. / Thesis directed by Stephen D. Dumont and Joseph P. Wawrykow for the Medieval Institute. "December 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 177-183).

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Many historians have failed to consider seriously the role of the Brooks-Baxter War of 1874 in ending Reconstruction in Arkansas. Of those who have, they have not examined participants in the conflict nor attempted a robust study to determine who fought in the conflict. This thesis examines the soldiers and officers of the rival armies of Joseph Brooks and Elisha Baxter. It surveys the participants' class, race, professions, places of birth, and especially places of residence at the time of the conflict. This analysis of the Brooks-Baxter War reaffirms other historians' work on the fall of Reconstruction, while finding unique characteristics to Arkansas's redemption, like substantial support from white Arkansans for upholding Reconstruction and instances of black Arkansans supporting the redeemer army of Elisha Baxter. It concludes that Arkansas redemption was typical of other redemptions in the South in the mid-1870s, insofar as the powerful role that the state Democratic Party and Democratic elites played in ending Reconstruction in the state. The Brooks-Baxter War shows, however, that redemption in Arkansas had a more moderate face in that explicit, naked white supremacist rhetoric was not as apparent in the overthrow of Reconstruction there as in some other Deep Southern states.

Some Calvin commentators assert that Calvin argues for the sole view that, in the Father's eternal plan of election, the nature and scope of saving union with Christ is limited to a particular number of the elect. The nature of saving union with Christ is actualized for the believer, by the gift of faith, through a sovereign operation of the Spirit. Prior to this gift of faith, men and women are deemed sinners and excluded from God's salvific work in Christ. Other Calvin commentators assert that Calvin argues that in the Incarnation, God established a saving union between Christ and all humanity. Prior to the illuminating work of the Spirit, in the work of salvation, men and women were embraced by the Father, once and for all, in the person of Christ in virtue of the Incarnation. This thesis argues that, in unfolding the nature of our redemption, Calvin presents both views of our saving union with Christ inconsistently. In his Christological themes, he argues that men and women were savingly united, once and for all, with Christ. This is argued in his presentation of our union with Christ's Incarnate Priesthood, with the Irenaean notion of recapitulation and in his understanding of faith as an acknowledgement of the objective reality of the Father's benevolence toward us in Christ. However in looking at the divine initiative as he presents it from the human response, with his pneumatological insights, Calvin argues that the union which God established is solely between Christ and believers. This is actualized through the gift of faith which is selectively granted to a particular number of the elect. Calvin presents us with an ambiguity as the nature of how we have been savingly united with the person of Christ. In the light of this inconsistency, we go further and work out a resolution beyond Calvin's conception by looking at the theological methods of Karl Barth and Thomas F. Torrance. These two theologians provide a much more consistent approach in unfolding the nature of our redemption in the light of the Incarnation which Calvin grasped but failed to develop.

Thesis (S.T.M.)--Yale Divinity School, Yale University, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 118).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1974. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.