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This thesis investigates the connection between community trauma and reconciliation. Based on a case study about how Guatemalans dealt with traumatic events, the thesis focuses in particular on the role of the churches in Guatemala. One of the main challenges that traumatised communities face is dealing with the sufferings of the past. Notably the churches will need to think about their understanding of forgiveness and reconciliation within a traumatised community. All too often forgiveness is either denied because of the magnitude of the crimes committed or forgiveness is granted without asking for repentance and restoration. Consequently, communities tend to either disapprove of reconciliation or support a hasty peace process without sufficiently dealing with the victims’ needs. The investigation was based on literature review and on qualitative expert interviews conducted in Guatemala. The interviewees were partly from organisations with a church background and partly from a non-church background. The results suggest that within the Guatemalan context more emphasis should be given to an approach that tries to actively involve the perpetrators when dealing with the past. In addition, bystanders should be encouraged to acknowledge their role within the conflict. Also, the churches should be prepared to help overcome communal trauma by encouraging ecumenical relationships and by actively supporting their members’ spiritual growth in order to assist in the process of reconciliation. External intervention is important after traumatic events, yet it needs to take into account the spiritual landscape. And finally, love has to be considered as a core factor in trauma recovery. The results of this thesis make clear that reconciliation depends on the way former enemies shape their relationships. It is important that the parties within a conflict act with humility and with a preparedness to change, basing their behaviour and decision-making on their spiritual beliefs about love, non-violence, and peace.

This dissertation is an attempt to revisit Jonathan Edwards’ theory of spiritual perception from the perspective of Robert Roberts’ work in the philosophy of emotions and other related philosophical sub-disciplines with the purpose of providing a contemporary account of spiritual perception and, by extension, a theological psychology of transforming grace. The contemporisation effort focuses on three main aspects of Edwards’ theory: the infusion of grace, the content of Scripture and spiritual delight. The weaknesses and limitations of Edwards’ original account in these three aspects were examined and a proposal to revise, update and deepen his theory in five major ways was provided in light of the issues raised. The contemporised account of spiritual perception constitutes an overall advancement over Edwards’ original theory in two ways. First, it avoids a number of the difficulties that the original faces. Second, it further refines some aspects of Edwards’ account that were underdeveloped and brings many of Edwards’ insights into conversation with various spheres of contemporary discussion. Moreover, the contemporised account also examines the psychological basis of spiritual perception in a way that Edwards never did. In particular, it argues that the capacity for spiritual perception of the supreme good is grounded in a wisdom-like seminal virtue centered upon the incarnate Christ (i.e., Christocentric wisdom). Such wisdom, on the contemporised account, is considered the psychological core of transforming grace and the foundational basis upon which all other Christian virtues are formed.

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This thesis critically engages with the Torrances' claim that all of humanity is in Christ. It explores how God has claimed humanity in salvation and the claim that He has placed upon humanity in sanctification. It argues that this claim upon humanity is not a cumbersome one, for God's radically objective act of salvation is the basis for the subjective outworking of the Christian life. As we freely participate by the Spirit in the incarnate Son's filial relationship with the Father, we grow into the ontological reality of who we are in Christ. Part One critically examines how the salvation wrought for us by the triune God of grace is filial, ontological and objective. It challenges soteriologies that have an overarching federal or external framework which lead to people being thrown back upon their own subjective endeavours to gain salvation. Part Two extends the implications of the Torrances'soteriology to the outworking of our sanctification. It roots sanctification objectively with justification in Christ, challenging the belief that, having been justified by God, it is now our part to work out our own sanctification; Affirming humanity's new eschatological orientation in the risen humanity of Christ, it argues for confidence in the nature of our humanity and in the outworking of sanctification. Thus it challenges external paradigms that can only offer a poor perspective on humanity and demand our own ineffectual efforts. It presents the outworking of sanctification in dynamic, relational terms, rather than static, moralistic terms, as the free gift of participating by the Spirit in the Son's intimate communion with the Father.

This thesis considers the relationship between soteriology, missiology and pedagogy in fresh expressions of church. Having identified the key theological and pedagogical challenges for the fresh expressions of church movement, three heuristic models of the dominant contemporary approaches to Christian education are identified, positing a direct relationship between soteriological and missiological beliefs and the consequential pedagogical praxis of Christian communities. The methodology of the qualitative research is shown to be grounded within the field of practical theology and utilizes a critical realist framework for the ethnographic approach undertaken in the participant observation of three fresh expressions of church. The pedagogical praxis, soteriological and missiological beliefs of the three communities are thus outlined and analysed, allowing the ethnographic data to critique, and be critiqued by, the heuristic models put forward. The three models are shown to be in part upheld by the praxis of the three communities whilst the data analysis challenges the integrity of the theological diversity of the fresh expressions of church movement and calls for further research to be undertaken on identifying the nature and purpose of Christian education with, and for, the unchurched.

My thesis offers an account of salvation theology in Augustine and Dante under three main aspects: prelapsarianism, the fall, and the redemptive work of God in Christ. Resting on an analysis of the precise doctrinal position in these authors, the thesis is historical in conception, but is arranged in such a way as to allow the patterns of thought advanced by Augustine and Dante to enter into a dialogue one with the other, its overall purpose, therefore, being a species of conversation transcending the historical pure and simple. In keeping with this, the thesis is in three chapters, the first chapter exploring the notion of man’s original righteousness in Augustine and Dante, the second their respective senses of the fall in its essential substance and meaning, and the third their understanding of the redemptive work of the Christ. More precisely, the first chapter compares and contrasts Augustine’s sense of how it is that man stands in need of grace for the purposes of good works even prior to the fall with Dante’s sense of his direct creation in the image of God and of the implications of this for his persisting in good works without God’s further assistance. The second chapter addresses the origins of sin, and, more particularly, compares Augustine’s sense of evil as a matter of privation with Dante’s account of it in terms of dysfunctionality on the plane of properly human loving. In Chapter Three I take up the question of the relationship between nature and grace, and, in consequence of the fall, the indispensability of the latter as that whereby man is brought home once again to God. But where in Augustine (and especially in the later Augustine) it is always a question of nature as moved by grace to its proper good, I argue that for Dante grace enters into nature for the purposes of empowering it from within itself to its proper righteousness and likeness to God. Basing my argument on a strict reading of the text, and taking care in the introduction to identify the main historical and contemporary approaches to the question of Dante and Augustine (and thus to preserve at every stage a properly scholarly perspective), I nonetheless aim in my thesis to recreate in a manner over and beyond the purely historical something of the dialogue which is taking place here, a dialogue at every point informed, for all its distribution and re-distribution of emphases, by a common existential intensity, a shared preoccupation with what it might mean for man to be both for self and for God.