This thesis examines how, in late-medieval England, uses of Scripture and associated written discourses expanded to encompass the sacramental functions hitherto privileged to the bread and wine of the Mass. This process, reflecting the longstanding if implicit importance of scriptural symbolism to the medieval Eucharist, also bears witness to a major cultural shift in this period: the assignment to words of the same powers that had underpinned the function of visual, non-verbal symbols in medieval religion and society. As Chapter Two demonstrates, this process was starkly exposed in John Wyclif’s vision of an English religion centred upon the sacrament of the preached word of Scripture, rather than on the Mass. As Chapter Three shows, this was the vision that Wyclif’s followers sought to realize, even if they may have achieved their aims only within a limited band of followers. However, Wyclif’s vision was powerful precisely because its relevance was not confined to Wycliffites. Chapter Four charts how the same substitution was taking place through the dissemination in English of ‘Scripture’, which, in its broadest sense, encompassed meditations upon depictions of Christ crucified as well as preaching. The greatest danger of Wycliffite thought to the late-medieval Church rested in its potential to increase lay awareness of this process. This threat was reflected in the restrictions placed by the English Church upon lay use of religious writings in the early fifteenth century. Nonetheless, as Chapter Five shows through a reading of one of Wyclif’s sternest critics, Thomas Netter, the eucharistic function of ‘Scripture’ had not disappeared but had to be occluded. This occlusion represents the most significant shift in the eucharistic function of ‘Scripture’ in the fifteenth century, allowing its use to develop further without threatening the Mass. This thesis concludes that the unacknowledged yet increasingly central role of ‘Scripture’ helps to explain why, at the Reformation, a scripturally-based religion seemed so quickly to supplant one to which images had been fundamental.

Horrendous evils pose distinctive challenges for belief in an ethically perfect God. To home in on these challenges, I construct an ethical framework for theodicy by sketching four cases of human action where horrors are either caused, permitted, or risked, either for pure benefit (i.e., a benefit that does not avert a still greater harm) or for harm avoidance. I then bring the framework and the moral valuations confirmed by this casuistry to bear on the project of theodicy. I construct four analogous structures – one for each case – and identify examples of each structure in theodicies in contemporary philosophy of religion. I summarize each theodicy and evaluate whether it is structurally promising with respect to horrendous evils. That is, if the proposed interconnected set of facts and reasons were true, would God be ethically in the clear? My initial conclusions impugn the dominant structural approach of depicting God as causing or permitting horrors in individual lives for the sake of some merely pure benefit. This approach is insensitive to relevant asymmetries in the justificatory demands made by horrendous and non-horrendous evil and in the justificatory work done by averting harm and bestowing pure benefit. I next argue that the structurally promising theodicies I have identified are implausible due to their overestimation of the extent to which finite human agents can bear primary responsibility for horrendous evils and their underestimation of the importance for theodicy of being consonant with a broadly Darwinian approach to evolutionary theory. The project of theodicy is in trouble. The second half of my thesis develops an approach to theodicy that falls outside my proffered taxonomy. Following a suggestion of Leibniz, Robert Adams has argued that theodicy can be aided by the insight that almost all of the evil of the actual world is metaphysically necessary for the community of actual world inhabitants to be comprised of the specific individuals who comprise it. Beginning with this insight, I develop (what I term) Non-Identity Theodicy. It suggests that God allows the evil he does in order to create and love the specific individuals comprising the community of inhabitants of the actual world. This approach to theodicy is unique because the justifying good recommended is neither harm-aversion nor pure benefit. It is not a good that betters the lives of individual human persons (for they wouldn’t exist otherwise), but it is the individual human persons themselves. In order to aim successfully at the creation of particular individuals, however, God would need a control of history so complete that it might be argued to be inconsistent with beliefs about human free will that are important to some theologies. I construct a second version of Non-Identity Theodicy designed to avoid this problem by considering whether God’s justifying motivation for allowing the evil of this world could be his aiming for beings of our type, even if it could not be his aiming for particular individuals. I suggest that God would be interested in loving those he creates under various descriptions (e.g., biological, psychological, and narrative descriptions), and argue that a horror-prone environment is necessary for us to be the type of being we are under each of the descriptions. I assess the structural promise and plausibility of Non-Identity Theodicy. In order to do so, I engage with Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem and with some influential assumptions in the ethics of procreation literature. I end by recapping what I take to be the key areas of overemphasis and under-emphasis in contemporary theodicy.

L'influence de l'Église catholique sur la vie des Québécois, autrefois dominante, s'est beaucoup amenuisée au cours des dernières décennies. Si tel est le cas, les signes, les motifs, les images et les mots de la religion n’ont pas, quant à eux, déserté l’espace symbolique. Ils sont les traces d’un héritage et squattent l'imaginaire social (Pierre Popovic) du Québec contemporain. À ce titre, ils peuvent être mobilisés, maniés, détournés, resémantisés par la littérature. Ce mémoire a pour but d’étudier ces reliques imaginaires de la religion chrétienne, laquelle est considérée en tant qu'Église et en tant que mythologie, dans deux romans québécois publiés en 2011 : L'âge de Pierre de Pierre Gariépy et Maleficium de Martine Desjardins. Dans une perspective sociocritique, il analyse les rapports à l'autorité, à l'érotisme, à la morale, aux étrangers et à l'écriture tels qu'ils sont travaillés par les « mises en texte » (Claude Duchet) dans ces œuvres. L’étude démontre que les deux romans thématisent la religion et la tiennent pour un matériau familier et malléable à merci, non pour entretenir un patrimoine ni par nostalgie, mais afin de porter un regard critique sur la société québécoise contemporaine. D’une certaine manière, ils disent que celle-ci est toujours pieuse, mais que les croyances qui la traversent sont à chercher désormais du côté de la politique, des médias et du commerce. / The influence of the Catholic Church on the lives of Quebecers, once dominant, has greatly diminished in the last decades. If that is the case, the signs, patterns, images and words of religion, for their part, have not deserted the symbolic space. They are traces of a heritage and they squat the “imaginaire social” (Pierre Popovic) of contemporary Quebec. As such, they can be mobilized, handled, twisted and transformed by literature. This thesis aims to study these imaginary relics of the Christian religion, which is regarded as a Church and as a mythology, in two Quebec novels published in 2011: L’âge de Pierre by Pierre Gariépy and Maleficium by Martine Desjardins. In a perspective of sociocriticism, it analyzes the relations to authority, eroticism, ethics, foreigners and writing as they are processed by the “mises en texte” (Claude Duchet) in these works. The study shows that both novels thematize religion and use it as a familiar and readily malleable material, not to maintain a legacy nor out of nostalgia, but to take a critical look at contemporary Quebec society. In a way, they say that it is still pious, however the beliefs that run through it are now found on the side of politics, media and business.

This thesis is an historical analysis of nineteenth century Protestant Christian mission in New Zealand, with a particular focus on religion and theology, and their role in shaping the perceptions of Church Missionary Society missionaries as they observed and related to Maori people and their culture between 1830 and 1860. It showcases theology as the primary paradigm in which missionaries understood and commented upon Maori, as opposed to other culturally received frameworks. It argues that historians have given too little attention to this theological paradigm and have therefore failed to grasp its significance for accurately portraying the missionary perspective on Maori culture. The significance of religious worldview is highlighted by an examination of the meaning and role of the Christianity-Civilization nexus in missionary thinking. The following pages explore the relationship between the two terms: why and how they were linked, both in general, and in a New Zealand-specific context. The arguments of this thesis are put forward through a close examination of CMS missionary documents, particularly letters and journals, as well as published source materials. This study highlights the moral and religious basis of CMS missionary notions of civilization, and emphasises their theological outlook as the most powerful factor that impacted on missionary ‘civilizing’ activities in New Zealand. It underscores the reality that missionaries were religious people and often viewed the world around them in a religious way. The implications of this fact mean that historians must give significant attention to the missionaries’ religious worldview in order to portray missionary perceptions of Christian mission, Maori people, culture and civilization in an accurate light. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1375331 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 2009

This thesis is an historical analysis of nineteenth century Protestant Christian mission in New Zealand, with a particular focus on religion and theology, and their role in shaping the perceptions of Church Missionary Society missionaries as they observed and related to Maori people and their culture between 1830 and 1860. It showcases theology as the primary paradigm in which missionaries understood and commented upon Maori, as opposed to other culturally received frameworks. It argues that historians have given too little attention to this theological paradigm and have therefore failed to grasp its significance for accurately portraying the missionary perspective on Maori culture. The significance of religious worldview is highlighted by an examination of the meaning and role of the Christianity-Civilization nexus in missionary thinking. The following pages explore the relationship between the two terms: why and how they were linked, both in general, and in a New Zealand-specific context. The arguments of this thesis are put forward through a close examination of CMS missionary documents, particularly letters and journals, as well as published source materials. This study highlights the moral and religious basis of CMS missionary notions of civilization, and emphasises their theological outlook as the most powerful factor that impacted on missionary ‘civilizing’ activities in New Zealand. It underscores the reality that missionaries were religious people and often viewed the world around them in a religious way. The implications of this fact mean that historians must give significant attention to the missionaries’ religious worldview in order to portray missionary perceptions of Christian mission, Maori people, culture and civilization in an accurate light. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1375331 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 2009

This doctoral thesis explores the entanglement of religion and identity politics in the Indo-Burma borderlands and the indigenisation of Christianity there through grassroots processes of cultural revivalism. The ethnographic focus is on the Sumi Naga from the state of Nagaland in Northeast India. While the Sumi started converting to Baptist Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth century, conversion rates accelerated especially in the 1950s and again in the 1970s when two evangelical revivals swept across the lands of the Sumi and resulted in their conversion en masse. Significantly, these Great Revivals coincided in time with the most turbulent political history of this borderland region, as the Sumi, alongside all other Naga, were waging an armed struggle against the Indian nation-state for their right to self-determination and independence. While this struggle is now largely being fought with political rather than military means, it remains ideologically motivated by Naga perceptions of their distinct ethnic identity, history and culture compared to the rest of India. Baptist Christianity has played a central role in shaping and sustaining these perceptions. Over the past several decades following the Second Great Revival in the 1970s there has been a movement from within Sumi society to reconstruct and redefine their identity by drawing heavily on both their contemporary religion (Baptist Christianity) and their 'good' pre-Christian culture, which had been demonised and rejected in the course of earlier conversions. Discourses have been circulating in public space on the urgent need to reconceptualise collective Sumi identity by reviving, or preserving, those aspects of pre-Christian Sumi culture that are perceived as 'good' and constitutive of Sumi-ness but are currently 'under threat' of being gradually lost to modernity and foreign influences. These discourses are directly linked to processes of cultural revivalism across Nagaland, which have been motivated by a sense of the perceived loss of 'good' cultural heritage and cultural roots. This thesis is an ethnographic study of these processes of identity (re)construction within a Sumi Naga community. It sets out to examine the ways in which Baptist Christianity is central to everyday life in a Sumi village and how it plays an important role in forging group cohesion and solidarity through ritual practice and various forms of fellowship. The thesis then proceeds to study the phenomenon of cultural revivalism in both its discursive and practical manifestations. The thesis argues that the cultural revival has not reduced the centrality of Baptist Christianity to Sumi self-ascriptions and perceptions of identity, but is rather thought to have enriched it and given it a stronger cultural foundation. Hence, a Sumi Naga Christianity is being created which is perceived as unique, indigenous and distinct in its own right. The thesis attempts to explore the essence of this vernacular Christianity against the backdrop of its specific historical, economic, political and spiritual context and the all-encompassing Naga struggle against the Indian nation-state. In pursuing these issues, the thesis locates itself within debates on the intersection between religion and identity politics, which prevail in many contemporary contributions to the anthropology of Christianity.

Francis Schaeffer presented a Christian world and life-view encompassing the totality of reality as an alternative to a fragmented view of reality. Refinements of dualism are examined from within a theological context giving substance to his understanding of modern world and life-view trends. Dualisms may be traced from the dawn of history of religion. It was Thomas Aquinas who profoundly influenced Western thought into a secular compartment through a synthesis of Christian dogma with Aristotelian presuppositions. The reign of the sacred diminished and a predominantly secular pathway may be traced through disciplines such as philosophy, arts, science and theology. This dissertation suggests that a dualistic analysis of reality is limited in its application. A model is suggested which traces all of reality to its ultimate source, God. The Fall brought about a dialectic which is found within the totality of a Christian world and life-view. / Philosophy, Practical & Sytematic Theology / M. Th. (Systematic Theology.

While the study of Charles Dickens’s religion has produced various results, few would contest that Dickens’s religious views are shaped by his peculiar emphasis on Jesus and the Gospels. As to the precise nature of his views and the degree to which his commitment to the Christian faith extends, however, a much lesser degree of consensus has been established. I attempt to demonstrate here that at the heart of his work is a conspicuous Christian worldview, which is grounded squarely in the imitation of Jesus and which pervades his life and his work in the most profound yet unobtrusive ways. I argue, then, that Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord is a definitive source in the Dickens corpus for our understanding of his Christian thought and worldview. Moreover, as a serious expression of Dickens’s understanding of Christianity, The Life of Our Lord also functions as an index to his Christian thought in the larger Dickens corpus. Of first importance then, I attempt to establish the authority of The Life of Our Lord as a composition that will bear the full weight of such assertions. Then, I analyze its content as to its implicit theology in order to establish not only its thoroughgoing Christian character but also to demonstrate that it reveals Dickens’s own genuine Christian conviction manifested in all his work. Drawing the work to a close, I attempt to demonstrate how The Life of Our Lord helps us to understand Dickens’s churchmanship and his relationship to the church. In the end, I comment on its intended purpose as moral instruction for his children exemplifying his understanding of Christianity. The study demonstrates throughout how the Christianity embodied and articulated in The Life of Our Lord is consistently and naturally reflected in all of Dickens’s work, whether fiction, journalism or correspondence.

This thesis examines the relationship between professional practice and professional training of Christian ministers in post-Communist Central Asia. It responds to the call for study of the phenomenon of Protestant theological education in the post-Soviet bloc. Theological education in Central Asia has been developed without any research-led evaluation and is often found unsatisfactory by the emerging church, which calls for a more relevant, field-driven and contextualised training of its leaders. This study also responds to the gap in the literature on attitude development of ministerial students. This is a qualitative inquiry. Its primary emphasis is on in-depth semi-structured interviews of forty graduates of four major theological colleges in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, who had spent several years in pastoral ministry after graduation. This research seeks to identify the most common problems they face in professional practice; to identify the attitudes and capabilities underlying their problem-solving processes; and to analyse how their training enabled or failed to enable them to develop those qualities. This thesis argues that theological education can be viewed as a special case of professional training, with a unique cluster of spiritual qualities that are of paramount importance for the success of ministers. It also argues that, despite the graduates’ generally positive appraisal of their training, there was little connection between the training and the capabilities that the graduates needed to succeed in their current practice. It therefore argues that the institutions in Central Asia have inherited the flaws of the "schooling" paradigm of theological education. A more integrated, context-specific and missional model is needed. By developing a model for investigating the practical knowledge of ministers, this study attempts to provide the training institutions in question with a framework of capabilities and attitudes. This will allow those institutions to have a useful starting point in the reformulation of their curricula.

This thesis examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination in Britain from the years 1790 to 1850. Historically, distinctions between understandings of pilgrimage as motif, metaphor, artistic process, and actual journey have been blurred to varying degrees, resulting in the creation of images that were at once narratives, memorials, and stimuli for contemplative journeys from pictorial space to imagination. In the first half of the nineteenth century, religious architecture, sacred landscapes, and the emblematic figure of the pilgrim with coat, hat, and scrip functioned as temporal reminders of a promised land to come, as mediated through artistic practice. Through a close analysis of a range of interrelated visual sources, I contend that pilgrimage, both in practice and as a form of mental contemplation, helped to shape the religious, literary, and artistic imagination of the period and beyond. This study draws out the various levels at which pilgrimage engaged the visual imagination. In doing so it offers a detailed perspective on the conjunction of content, form, meaning, and process for artists and theorists, as notions of the transfer of ‘spirit’ from sacred space to represented space re-emerged as a key aspect of the theological and artistic discourse of the period. Chapter 1 outlines the antiquarian dissemination of medieval pilgrimage texts and images. I suggest that an awareness of pilgrimage as embodying the real and imagined emerged with the recovery of allegorical texts, histories of actual pilgrimages, and an interest in pilgrimage souvenirs. The discussion moves on to intersections between pilgrimage and religious art in Chapters 2 - 4, including the idea of painting as pilgrimage, as demonstrated through specific case studies, and the refashioning of relics and religious ruins as contemporary sites of pilgrimage (Chapter 5).