During the 5th-6th century multiple clashes of theological debate engulfed the Roman empire after the heated council controversies of Ephesus and Chalcedon. The aftermath sparked factions and formulated alliances dependent on their hermeneutical and dogmatic positions. This study inquires Narsai of Nisbis and Jacob of Serugh who are characterized by the late-antique’s drama and compares their hermeneutical backgrounds in relation to their beliefs.

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The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) – considered by many to be one of the foremost poets of the English language alongside Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton – is an important name in the history of modern poetry. Together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and Robert Southey (1774-1843) he was known during his lifetime as one of the ‘Lake Poets’, who chose to live and work not in the bustling city of London but in the ‘sublime’ countryside of the Lake District in England’s north western corner. Their poetry – and especially that of Wordsworth – sought to capture the ‘Splendour and Beauty’ (Ode.—1820) of nature and to give it fresh, luminous expression. They sought to recover ‘The vision and the faculty divine’, as Wordsworth called it (The Excursion, I. 79), which is the natural way of perceiving the world for the child but – in Milton’s elegiac words – a ‘Paradise lost’ for man. This study has had two main objectives: (I) to analyse Wordsworth’s poems My Heart Leaps Up and Ode: Intimations from a Christian theological perspective, and (II) to discuss the implications of this analysis on the understanding of the metaphor of the child in the New Testament. The theoretical starting point for the investigation has been that poetry has ‘a special ability to expose different (also contradictory) perspectives and meanings since it is (often) characterised by puzzling paradoxes, suggestive symbols, provocative voids and other stylistic figures’ (Maria Essunger) and that Wordsworth is a ‘Philosophical Poet’ – a thesis well established in the literature. The results of the study show that the metaphor of the child is theologically rich in meaning – it can be understood from an ontological, a Christological, a Trinitarian and a soteriological perspective – and philosophically complex in nature, and that it therefore requires careful consideration in order not to be deprived of its spiritual, metaphorical significance. ‘For the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life’ (2 Cor. 3.6).

Pentecostalism, which developed its essential character during the classical period of 1901-1916, has many significant contributions to make to modern theology. Often viewed as a type of fundamentalism, it is actually a theological tradition in its own right that deserves consideration along with the other two major streams of protestantism, conservative evangelicalism and more liberal ecumenical-mainline thought. Although it emphasizes the experience of the Holy Spirit, pentecostalism is highly Christocentric as is evidenced by its foundational symbol of faith, the fourfold gospel of Jesus as savior, healer, baptizer, and coming king. This work examines how the pentecostal fourfold gospel, as a functional, from below Spirit Christology, anticipates and intersects with trends in twentieth century ecumenical theological thought. The result of the study is the articulation of a fuller, more holistic understanding of the work of Christ in salvation in the world today. / Systematic Theology & Theological Ethics / M. Th. (Systematic Theology)

Pentecostalism, which developed its essential character during the classical period of 1901-1916, has many significant contributions to make to modern theology. Often viewed as a type of fundamentalism, it is actually a theological tradition in its own right that deserves consideration along with the other two major streams of protestantism, conservative evangelicalism and more liberal ecumenical-mainline thought. Although it emphasizes the experience of the Holy Spirit, pentecostalism is highly Christocentric as is evidenced by its foundational symbol of faith, the fourfold gospel of Jesus as savior, healer, baptizer, and coming king. This work examines how the pentecostal fourfold gospel, as a functional, from below Spirit Christology, anticipates and intersects with trends in twentieth century ecumenical theological thought. The result of the study is the articulation of a fuller, more holistic understanding of the work of Christ in salvation in the world today. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / M. Th. (Systematic Theology)

Intertextuality as a method of biblical interpretations is well known and often misused in theological circles. This thesis critically describes how intertextuality is used and what are the main issues with this term and method. The main conclusion is that intertextuality as the modern method is for no much use in biblical hermeneutics though it can be used as an old and well know method of source theory. Intertextuality in the modern view appears to be as a confusing and an unstable term. Philosophical presuppositions of a modern hermeneutics might lead to self-contradictory conclusions. It is not that the attempt to come to original meaning is fulfilled through new interpretational methods, but anyone can introduce any new meaning to old texts. This work shows that the reasons to believe in the death of the original meaning is based on shaky and uncertain grounds. The main concern of this work is introductory citation of the Gospel of Mark. It shows that Mark bases his high Christological understanding on the prophecy of Isaiah and Malachi. Though Mark's Gospel is often considered as the earliest manuscript containing non-high Christological notion, this work shows that Mark from the very beginning introduced us to Jesus who possesses the same qualities as the Yahweh in the books of Isaiah and...

However reluctant he may be about providing details, Karl Barth dares to affirm the coming resurrection, even in the strong corporeal sense of the Apostles Creed, “I believe in . . . the resurrection of the flesh.” At the heart of Barth’s creative approach is an equation between revelation and resurrection. Indeed, everything said about the human addressed now in revelation is to be said about the human at the coming resurrection, including the remarkable fact that resurrection raises the “flesh” (inasmuch as God has revealed Himself to those “in the flesh”). Barth’s early training inculcated in him dialectical themes that would emerge throughout his career. His early work is dominated by a sense of encounter with the present but transcendent God, an encounter described in terms of the raising of the dead. Human existence is sublated – “dissolved and established” – unto a higher order in God. Yet even after Barth abandons the resurrection of the dead as his preferred theological axiom, he portrays eschatology proper in terms of the human sublated in the divine presence. Therefore, in Church Dogmatics he expresses the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh in three primary ways: eternalization, manifestation and incorporation. The human, delimited as he or she is by death, is made durable in God, obtaining the gift of eternalization. The human, ambiguous in the creaturely mode of earthly life, has one’s true identity revealed with Christ at His return, and obtains the gift of manifestation with the divine. The human, isolated as he or she is in one’s autonomy, is incorporated into the body of Christ by His Spirit, obtaining the gift of communion. In each of these expressions of resurrection Barth desires to preserve fleshliness. His account, however, entails a certain loss of temporality, creatureliness and particularity of the human when it comes to the final state. Instead of being resurrected from the dead in the strong corporeal sense, human bodies appear to be memorialized, deified, recapitulated. Though written with the language of the Antiochene and Reformed schools, Barth’s position enjoys the same strengths and suffers the same weaknesses of a more Alexandrian or Lutheran theological trajectory. Like each of the traditional lines of Christian thought about the resurrection of the flesh, Barth gravitates toward an eschatology centered around the human’s vision of God in the heavenly life. To this extent Barth’s creative treatment of the resurrection of the dead can be understood as broadly Christian, even if he risks undermining the very flesh he hopes to save.

At the incarnation, Jesus Christ assumed the fallen human nature that He found. Having lived a life of perfect obedience in the fallen human flesh that He assumed, He voluntarily and willingly bore the sins of the entire human race and died the second death for, and in our place; thereby paying the penalty for sin. Jesus Christ bore our sins (acts or behaviours) vicariously, while sin as nature or a law residing in the fallen human flesh that He assumed was condemned in that flesh and received eternal destruction on the cross. Thus, on the cross, in Christ, God saved the entire humanity. On the cross, the condemnation that the entire humanity had received by being genetically linked to Adam was reversed in Christ. Thus, the entire human race stands legally justified. But this is a gift, which can either be received or rejected. Therefore, salvation is not automatic. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / M. Th.(Systematic Theology)

[pt] Palavra de Deus e Ação Profética são termos recorrentes na teologia de Karl Barth. A teologia como função da Igreja, confessa à Deus pelo fato de falar de Deus a partir dele mesmo. Ela assim o faz na ação de cada cristão individualmente. Este conceito de teologia apresenta a forma pela qual Karl Barth compreende a vivência cristã por meio da relação prática/teoria/prática. O objetivo deste trabalho é percorrer os caminhos que Barth trilhou desde seu pastorado na Suíça, seu aprofundamento teológico após a Primeira Guerra Mundial e o abandono do seu projeto de sistematização da teologia. Sua obra é inacabada, como inacabada é a teologia produzida pela Igreja. A partir desta reorientação, colocou a teologia a serviço da Igreja. Afirma que é a Igreja que ensina o teólogo e não o contrário. Ele se nutre dela para conduzi-la diante das circunstâncias mais adversas. A teologia deve servir para a edificação da Igreja mas, também deve conduzi-la a exercer plenamente, como comunidade dinâmica, suas potencialidades de serviço por meio da ação profética que anima o amargurado e denuncia o pecado e a injustiça. / [en] God´s Word and prophetic action are appellants terms in Karl Barth Theology. The Theology as Church´s function, confess to God for the fact of speeking about God from himself. It thus makes it in the action of each christian individualy. This concept of theology presents the form through what Karl Barth comprehends the chrystian experience by means of the relation practice/theory/practice. This paper´s purpose is to cover the ways that Barth trod since his priesthood in Switzerland, his theological deepening after the First World War and the abendonment of his project of theology systematization. His work is unfinished, as unfinished is the theology produced by the Church. From this reorientation, He put the theology in the service of the Church. Affirms that it is the Church that teachs the theologian not the opposite. He nourishes himself of the church in order to conduct it against the most adverse circumstances. The theology must serve as edification to the Church, but it has also to conduct the Church to fully exert, as a dinamic community, its potentialities of service through the prophetic action that livens up the afflict and denounces the sin and the injustice.