Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union, 1981. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-90).

The observation is made that the spiritual well being of the church youth - i.e., the covenantal youth -is not healthy. The aim of this thesis is to study this observation. It seems that when children come to the point that they confess their faith they do not grasp the full implications of this undertaking as they do not bear the fruits of faith in their daily lives. There exists empiric evidence that the church youth are well equipped in the knowledge of faith, but when it comes to subjective acts of faith, there is a great lack. The assumption is made that the catechist is not always sufficiently equipped to apply the balance between knowledge of faith and subjective acts of faith in catechises. The focus point of the study is: Catechises as a means through which salvation is secured and appropriated within the context of the covenant and the Kingdom of God. The fundamental question at stake is: How does the believer share in the salvation that Christ has earned on the cross, and in which way can the catechises serves as a vehicle to achieve this goal. Essentially catechises is the official service of the church through which children of the covenant are assured of their salvation. They must also come to the point where they claim this redemption. The church obtains this objective by proclaiming the truths and instructing the doctrines of the Word of God to these children in such a way that each individual should come to confess his/her faith publicly and personally. Catechists must shepherd and guide these children not only to obtain certainty of faith (certitudo fidei) and to be obedient as believers, but also to be convinced of their salvation (certitudo salutis) and to make this redemption their own. The unity between God and man is not a polar one, but an apolar covenantal relation. Within this polar relation the covenant is like a solid foundation in which this oneness is rooted. The monopleuric (one-sided, unilateral) and dipleuric (two-sided, bilateral) character of the covenant proves that God treats man as a responsible associate in this treaty. God's sovereignty or objective salvation, on the one hand, and human responsibility or subjective faith, on the other hand, coexists without any strain or uneasiness whatsoever within this apolar covenantal connection between God and man. There is no contradiction between God's redemptive word and man's responsibility. It is therefore compulsory for man to believe; that man has faith is not something that rakes place without his decision. However, it is through the power of the gospel that faith is created in man - the gospel that Christ was crucified. The grace of God does not cause the believer to be a passive being; it has the effect that he is in active service of the Lord. The requirement to believe and to repent is not set aside; in fact, it remains a condition of the covenant. This means that, in the relation between God and His people, the promises and the demands of the covenant must be operative and active in the personal lives of the people of the covenant. The purpose of this exercise is that the believers will be able to experience the grace of the promises of the covenant as a reality. There is also a call at the address of these people to appropriate the salvation promised in the covenant. The children of the covenant must share in the promises of the pact on a personal basis. The reality of these promises, as well as the urgency of the demands - according to the gospel of God - must be proclaimed to the catechumens. There is a close relationship between certainty of faith and the objective truths of religion. This certainty is built on the truths that form the content of the Word of God. Certainty of salvation links up with the subjective acts of faith. A believer takes part on a personal level in the redemptive work of Christ. The fact that he is saved, through this redemption, forms the foundation of the Christian's life. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Catechetics))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005.

The observation is made that the spiritual well being of the church youth - i.e., the covenantal youth -is not healthy. The aim of this thesis is to study this observation. It seems that when children come to the point that they confess their faith they do not grasp the full implications of this undertaking as they do not bear the fruits of faith in their daily lives. There exists empiric evidence that the church youth are well equipped in the knowledge of faith, but when it comes to subjective acts of faith, there is a great lack. The assumption is made that the catechist is not always sufficiently equipped to apply the balance between knowledge of faith and subjective acts of faith in catechises. The focus point of the study is: Catechises as a means through which salvation is secured and appropriated within the context of the covenant and the Kingdom of God. The fundamental question at stake is: How does the believer share in the salvation that Christ has earned on the cross, and in which way can the catechises serves as a vehicle to achieve this goal. Essentially catechises is the official service of the church through which children of the covenant are assured of their salvation. They must also come to the point where they claim this redemption. The church obtains this objective by proclaiming the truths and instructing the doctrines of the Word of God to these children in such a way that each individual should come to confess his/her faith publicly and personally. Catechists must shepherd and guide these children not only to obtain certainty of faith (certitudo fidei) and to be obedient as believers, but also to be convinced of their salvation (certitudo salutis) and to make this redemption their own. The unity between God and man is not a polar one, but an apolar covenantal relation. Within this polar relation the covenant is like a solid foundation in which this oneness is rooted. The monopleuric (one-sided, unilateral) and dipleuric (two-sided, bilateral) character of the covenant proves that God treats man as a responsible associate in this treaty. God's sovereignty or objective salvation, on the one hand, and human responsibility or subjective faith, on the other hand, coexists without any strain or uneasiness whatsoever within this apolar covenantal connection between God and man. There is no contradiction between God's redemptive word and man's responsibility. It is therefore compulsory for man to believe; that man has faith is not something that rakes place without his decision. However, it is through the power of the gospel that faith is created in man - the gospel that Christ was crucified. The grace of God does not cause the believer to be a passive being; it has the effect that he is in active service of the Lord. The requirement to believe and to repent is not set aside; in fact, it remains a condition of the covenant. This means that, in the relation between God and His people, the promises and the demands of the covenant must be operative and active in the personal lives of the people of the covenant. The purpose of this exercise is that the believers will be able to experience the grace of the promises of the covenant as a reality. There is also a call at the address of these people to appropriate the salvation promised in the covenant. The children of the covenant must share in the promises of the pact on a personal basis. The reality of these promises, as well as the urgency of the demands - according to the gospel of God - must be proclaimed to the catechumens. There is a close relationship between certainty of faith and the objective truths of religion. This certainty is built on the truths that form the content of the Word of God. Certainty of salvation links up with the subjective acts of faith. A believer takes part on a personal level in the redemptive work of Christ. The fact that he is saved, through this redemption, forms the foundation of the Christian's life. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Catechetics))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005.

The purpose of this research project is to address the question, “What does it mean to be saved for people with severe intellectual disabilities (SID)?” The question is derived from concrete situations that are embedded in their cultural and social contexts. The issue that this project addressed is the marginalization of people with SID in Hong Kong, in the contemporary evangelization movement for people with disabilities. Certain formulations of evangelicalism have made it appear difficult if not impossible for people with such disabilities to appropriate the faith that is necessary for salvation. The practical theological cycle, a method comprising four steps, is used in this study to organize the enquiry. Findings of the action research, which was undertaken in a Hong Kong evangelical church, show how two forces (Christian egalitarianism and Evangelical spirituality with Christian education) have contributed to the formation of a religious prejudice against people with SID. It is suggested that having a theologically adequate notion of faith that is truly inclusive is vital for the removal of such religious prejudice. By making reference to Karl Barth's understanding of faith, I look to show that faith is neither a datum nor a phenomenon. Faith is not a formal condition for human acquisition of revelation and saving grace. Christ, being the object of faith, is both the ontological and epistemological ground of faith. Faith is faith is completely a divine gift from God, making us participants in the reality of Christ. I argue that having SID would not make a person incapable of knowing and believing God. Also, suffering from severe cognitive impairment would not make the faith act of a person less authentic than that of the one without such disability. Finally, a new practice of faith education that corresponds to the inclusive notion of faith is recommended.

This thesis investigates the theology of the leading Southern Baptist theologian of the mid-nineteenth century, James P. Boyce. Chapter 1 examines the history of Reformed soteriology among Baptists to the time of Boyce. He is introduced with a biographical sketch, highlighting some of his theological influences. Chapter 2 is an analysis of Boyce's soteriology, primarily his views concerning total inability, unconditional election, and effectual calling. Chapter 3 examines in detail those influences that shaped Boyce's soteriology. Attention is given both to his contemporaries as well as his theological ancestors. Chapter 4 offers thoughts on what happened to Boyce's soteriology in Baptist life in the years that followed. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the contemporary value of his theology. / This item is only available to students and faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. If you are not associated with SBTS, this dissertation may be purchased from <a href="http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb">http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb</a> or downloaded through ProQuest's Dissertation and Theses database if your institution subscribes to that service.

Thesis advisor: Frederick G. Lawrence / This study investigates Aquinas' understanding of Christ's role in sanctification. In discussing the soteriological effect of Christ's passion, Aquinas makes a distinction between the manner in which the soteriological effect is brought about (modo efficiendi), the effect in itself, and the way the effect is obtained. The dissertation explores Aquinas' understanding of the third element - the securing of the effect of Christ's passion - and the relation of this third element to the first two. Sanctifying grace is given as a result of Christ's saving acts, is infused by an act of the Holy Spirit, and conforms its recipients to the Holy Spirit. But Christ's role in sanctification does not cease once the Holy Spirit is given. In Aquinas' judgment, Christ continues to be present in the giving of the gift, a giving that is also consequent upon a being conformed to Christ. The dissertation builds toward an examination of how Aquinas understands this being conformed to Christ, especially in light of Aquinas' conception of faith as a knowledge of God, of Christ as the source and object of faith's knowledge, and of charity's relation to this knowledge, all of which are analyzed against Aquinas' strict adherence to the principle that humans cannot know God in his essence so long as they remain in time / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: M. Shawn Copeland / This dissertation investigates God’s salvific response to contemporary experiences of depression. The inquiry affords both constructive and critical insights for Christian theologies of suffering and salvation. Constructively, it offers a theological interpretation of depression and an account of salvation in relation to it. I argue that depression is an instantiation of bodily difference with unique difficulties and limitations to which God responds with the life-giving possibilities of survival and situational flourishing. These possibilities are a heuristic for an eschatological vision of salvation. The glorified body is characterized by an expansion of possibilities amid the persistence of some creaturely limitations, including many that constitute depression. Critically, my proposal about depression and salvation challenges the prevailing treatment of suffering and soteriology in political and liberation theologies. I argue that an “infralapsarian logic” shapes the predominant vision of salvation in these movements. I adopt the framework of infralapsarian logic from Edwin Chr. van Driel, who uses it to denote theologies that are primarily governed by the principle of sin. This is largely because negative suffering—that is, suffering that results from sin and evil—has been the primary object of concern in recent theologies. My argument about salvation in the context of depression illuminates the anthropological and theo-logical shortcomings of infralapsarian logic, and it reveals the need for alternative accounts of God’s salvific response to suffering. To this end, I advocate for the retrieval and development of soteriologies shaped by “supralapsarian logic,” and I point to my constructive account of depression and salvation as one example of this way of thinking about salvation. Chapter 1 introduces readers to Christian soteriology, my methodology, and a project overview. Chapter 2 examines suffering and salvation in the early work of Johann Baptist Metz, Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Cone, and Rosemary Radford Ruether. This analysis illuminates the infralapsarian logic shaping their influential liberation soteriologies. Chapter 3 explores critiques of liberation soteriology that have arisen from within political and liberation theologies in recent decades—namely, from feminist theology, theologies of disability, black and womanist theologies, theologies of trauma, Latin American feminist theology, and theologies engaged with postmodern conceptions of power. Together, chapters 2 and 3 present the recent landscape of theological discourse on suffering and salvation. Chapter 4 is a cross-disciplinary survey of depression that presents the affordances of narrative and phenomenological accounts of this condition. Based on these accounts of depression, chapter 5 develops a theological interpretation of depression as a particular instantiation of bodily difference—not a form of suffering that results from sin or evil. Chapter 6 offers an account of God’s saving work in relation to depression. I argue that salvation in this context is not primarily liberation from suffering but rather survival and an expansion of possibility that enables an improved quality of life amid depression. Together, chapters 5 and 6 illuminate the inadequacy of infralapsarian logic for envisioning salvation in relation to depression. I conclude the dissertation with chapter 7, where I argue for the development of soteriologies that reflect a supralapsarian logic. I close the project by naming the implications of this argument for further theological reflection on depression, in particular, and suffering and salvation, more broadly.

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.

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Thesis (MA(Practical Theology)--University of Pretoria, 2006? / Includes bibliographical references (p. 92-94)