Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / M. Th. (Christian Spirituality)

D.Litt. et Phil. / In the words of du Rand (1997:1), ' ... theology is the primary unifying thread in the narrative of the Apocalypse'. The reason for this is the God who occupies centre-stage in the book. God hold the entire book in His hand. Everything is linked to Him. The next step is to appreciate how God gives both a particular perspective and then a resultant thrust to the book. This perspective on life, history and salvation is called the world-view (Weltanschauung) in this thesis. It's the view from the position of transcendence. Yet unlike deists or the pagan helpless gods, the God of the Bible (which is also the God of the Apocalypse) is directly involved in the affairs of this world. This is true from creation in the past, the sustaining process, the saving reality and ultimately the terminating of history. It's at this point that this thesis chose the word 'influence' to be part of its title. It is God who initiates, sustains and terminates matters in the theological thrust. The theological thrust is not a mere evolutionary development or a dialectical process. God in His transcendence enters the process and thus becomes 'immanent'! 'The reader gets the impression that the whole drama originates with God on his throne, coming to earth through the Lamb, as God's agent, and concludes with God on his throne'. (Du Rand, 1997:4). Crucial to God's influence is the agency of the 'Lamb'. 'Christ's sacrificial death belongs to the way God rules on earth. What has been accomplished in heaven, namely God's reign, is visibly manifested on earth through the slaughtering of the Lamb' (Du Rand, 1997:11). The method is that of triumph through suffering, first - with apparent defeat. Then comes resurrection at the hands of God - an intervention of God as He accomplishes His purposes. This mode was demonstrated in the death and resurrection of Jesus. In turn - this becomes the model to the Church as it triumphs through suffering (See Rev.11:1-11).

D.Litt.et Phil. (Biblical Studies) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

[pt] As transformações pelas quais o mundo tem passado nas mais diversas esferas, exigem da Igreja Católica, neste início de milênio, um renovado ardor pastoral desde as suas estruturas. A renovação eclesial proporcionada pelo último concílio ecumênico ainda está por começar. As últimas décadas tem se tornado bastante desafiadoras quanto à busca de valores sólidos, seguros e cheios de vitalidade, mesmo quando se vê por toda a parte o efêmero, o transitório e o espetáculo que garantem público e alguns selfies para alimentar as redes sociais, que hoje se tornaram parte do dia-a-dia das pessoas. A ação evangelizadora da Igreja no Brasil bebe da fonte latino-americana, e é aqui que se pretende recuperar um itinerário pastoral que forme discípulos e alcance a tantos batizados afastados da praxis cristã, através de um processo de iniciação à vida cristã kerigmático e mistagógico. Em meio a uma atmosfera social que beira o neopaganismo, a Igreja retoma o catecumenato não como adjetivo da catequese tradicional, mas sujeito que inspira e transforma a comunidade como um todo. Toma-se, como ponto de partida, o primeiro anúncio da fé, que vem acompanhado de outros sinais que demarcam a função profética que todo cristão batizado assume: o testemunho que move, o anúncio de Jesus Cristo que aquece o coração, a instrução que garante a profissão de fé e a maturidade cristã, quando procura dar razões de sua própria fé. / [en] The transformations that the world has been going through in the most diverse spheres, demand from the Catholic Church, at the beginning of this millennium, a renewed pastoral ardor from its structures. The ecclesial renewal brought about by the last ecumenical council has yet to begin. The last decades have become quite challenging in terms of the search for solid, secure and vital values, even when the ephemeral, the transitory and the spectacle that guarantee public and some selfies to feed social networks are everywhere, which today they have become part of people s daily lives. The evangelizing action of the Church in Brazil draws from the Latin American source, and it is here that we intend to recover a pastoral itinerary that forms disciples and reaches so many baptized people who are far from Christian praxis, through a process of initiation into the kerygmatic and mystagogical Christian life. In the midst of a social atmosphere that borders on neopaganism, the Church takes up the catechumenate not as an adjective of traditional catechesis, but as a subject that inspires and transforms the community as a whole. The starting point is the first proclamation of the faith, which is accompanied by other signs that outline the prophetic role that every baptized Christian assumes: the witness that moves, the proclamation of Jesus Christ that warms the heart, the instruction that guarantees the profession of faith and Christian maturity, when he tries to give reasons for his own faith.

This dissertation studies how Catholic schools in a post-feminist world approach the topic of educating women both with a professional mindset but also with a Catholic understanding of the importance of motherhood. The theoretical framework of the dissertation draws on second-wave feminism as well as Catholic scholars on feminism, with a special focus on scholars using Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. The study aims to reveal specifically how four faithfully Catholic high schools in geographically different areas of the United States are united in a mission to educate students to live an integrated life, through a personal faith based on reason, virtue ethics, vocation, and exemplars. Through interviews with alumnae, teachers, and administrators, the study concludes that the schools’ vision of a fully integrated virtuous life is a prerequisite for the girls to peacefully make vocational decisions about balancing professional life and motherhood. The alumnae and the school administrators show that while the mission is clear, the execution of the mission in all four schools is fraught with tensions because of the conflicts between the integrated life view and mainstream cultural views regarding happiness and fulfillment.

Text in German / No abstract / Practical Theology / M. Th. (Practical Theology)

This study presents an insider’s view concerning the significant influence of American fundamentalism at Prairie Bible Institute (Three Hills, Alberta, Canada) during the tenure of the school’s co-founder and primary leader, Leslie Earl Maxwell. During much of the period covering 1922-1980, PBI rivaled well-known American schools such as Moody Bible Institute, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) and Columbia Bible College in Columbia, South Carolina, in size. These schools were also highly efficient in producing hundreds of missionaries and Christian workers to serve the fundamentalist cause in North America and around the world. As a belated response to Dr. John Stackhouse, Jr.’s portrayal of PBI in his 1993 book, Canadian Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction to Its Character, this thesis offers clarification and modification to Stackhouse’s work regarding how PBI during the Maxwell era should be viewed by students of church history. It is argued here that the ubiquitous influence of the United States of America on Canadian life is clearly visible in the nature of the Christian fundamentalism that prevailed at PBI under Maxwell’s leadership. The work thereby lends a certain amount of credibility to the suggestions made by some scholars that PBI during Maxwell’s career might legitimately be considered an outpost of American fundamentalism. Employing primarily a quantitative assessment of the evidence in combination with personal anecdotes and a few basic statistics, the thesis reveals that Maxwell’s personality and rhetoric were consistently more militant than Stackhouse allows. PBI’s affinity for many of the distinctives of American fundamentalist theology and culture are also documented. Such an approach serves the additional purpose of enabling the writer to call into question the utility of considering militancy the defining characteristic of twentieth-century evangelicalism when considered from a post-9/11 perspective. It also enables a challenge of Stackhouse’s assumption that what he identifies as “sectish” Canadian evangelicalism is ultimately as substantially different from American fundamentalism as the Canadian scholar infers. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / D.Th. (Church History)

This thesis is an attempt to relate the Scriptural revelation of God's nature to the normal Christian life. It analyses the experiential factors that originally gave rise to a triune awareness of God, arguing that a contemporary recovery of those seminal events is requisite for an integration of the trinity into the Christian life. After a theological summation of the biblical revelation, the thesis then explores the nature of the orientation of the trinity within the Christian life. This orientation is brought about by observing the harmonious arrangement of the different Persons within the Godhead. Once this is done we can then ensure that this arrangement finds an echo and corresponding imprint within the Christian life. As the Christian consistently integrates that tripartite relationship into the Christian life, the doctrine of the trinity will be a continual source of sustenance and direction for life and godliness. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / Th. M. (Systematic Theology)

“How does one develop an appropriate urban Christian Spirituality?” is the question this study asks. First, I develop a rigorous, yet open, theoretical framework with which to describe Christian Spirituality’s complexity: a description focused primarily on constraining the markers of Biblical Spirituality and City Spirituality. Within the limits placed on the complex system of Christian Spirituality, I begin exploring various, mostly minor, tropes of urban biblical spiritualities in the “Old” and “New” Testament. From these analyses, I evince the implications of these biblical spirituality tropes for the current city theater, and also construe a set of questions evaluating the appropriateness of mitigating urban communities. The study culminates in an imagined ideal mitigating urban community named an ekklesiastes: a wisdom teaching technology of urban meaning, complexity, and resistance. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / M. Th. (Christian Spirituality)

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-08-29T11:32:51Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Marcos Vieira das Neves.pdf: 990356 bytes, checksum: b2f6086dd687bfb1011fb770d4553663 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-29T11:32:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marcos Vieira das Neves.pdf: 990356 bytes, checksum: b2f6086dd687bfb1011fb770d4553663 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-08-10 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / All current life is an encounter and it happens between two parts, ‘I’ and ‘another’, being this another ‘You’ or one ‘That’. The meeting takes place in a context, that today is the liquid modernity, that radically changed the way to relate. In this sense the encounter with Christ in the liturgical actions transforms the human being and take the have a new life in Him, which, therefore, it also transforms the world. In this sense, the aim of this paper is to lecture on the concepts to the meeting, net modernity and its challenges for the meeting, presence and encounter with Christ in the liturgy and culture of the meeting as a way of overcoming the current world. For it was made a bibliographical research in the works of authors with, Buber, Bauman, Giraudo, Rahner, as well as in magisterium and commentators alike. As a result, has drawn up a vision on the concept of a philosophical and theological point of view, as well as an approach of aspects of liquid modernity and its challenges, in addition to an investigation of the meeting and presence of Christ in its five forms in the liturgy, as exposed by the Sacrosanctum Concilium. It also reached that the meetings in the liturgical actions provoke the 'meeting culture' that overcomes the challenges of the modern liquid world. Thus it is concluded that the change of individual mentality, which is necessarily added with that of other human beings, It is essential to the culture of the meeting and that some steps can be fleshed out to that, such as issue of laypeople christians, the inculturation and young people / Toda vida atual é encontro e ele se dá entre duas partes, o ‘Eu’ e o ‘outro’, sendo este outro um ‘Tu’ ou um ‘Isso’. O encontro acontece em um contexto, que na atualidade é a modernidade líquida, que mudou radicalmente a forma de se relacionar. Neste sentido o encontro com Cristo nas ações litúrgicas transforma o ser humano e o leva a ter uma vida nova Nele, que, por conseguinte, também transforma o próprio mundo. Neste sentido, o objetivo deste trabalho é dissertar sobre os conceitos de encontro, modernidade líquida e seus desafios para o encontro, presença e encontro com Cristo na liturgia e cultura do encontro como caminho de superação para o mundo atual. Para isso foi feita uma investigação bibliográfica nas obras de autores com Buber, Bauman, Giraudo, Rahner, assim como em documentos do magistério e comentadores afins. Como resultado, elaborou-se uma visão sobre o conceito de encontro de um ponto de vista filosófico e teológico, assim como uma abordagem de aspectos da modernidade líquida e seus desafios, além de uma investigação do encontro e presença de Cristo nas suas cinco formas na liturgia, como exposto pela Sacrosanctum Concilium. Também se alcançou a visão de que os encontros nas ações litúrgicas provocam a ‘cultura do encontro’ que supera os desafios do mundo líquido moderno. Conclui-se que a mudança de mentalidade individual, que é necessariamente somada a dos outros seres humanos, é essencial para que a cultura do encontro aconteça e que alguns passos podem ser aprofundados para isso, como a questão dos cristãos leigos e leigas, a inculturação e os jovens