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Curriculum design and implementation can be a daunting process. Questions quickly arise, such as who is qualified to design the curriculum and how do these people begin the design process. According to Graves (2008), in many contexts the design of the curriculum and the implementation of the curricular product are considered to be two mutually exclusive processes, where a long chain of specialists including policy makers, methodologists, and publishers produce the curriculum in a hierarchical process, at the end of which lies the teacher. There has been a movement in recent years by teacher-practitioners to exert greater agency over curriculum analysis and design (El-Okda 2005; Jennings and Doyle 1996). From September 2011 to the present, a group of teachers at the language center of a national university in Seoul have embraced their role as curriculum developers and collaborated on the creation, implementation, and ongoing development of a wholly teacher-generated backward-designed curriculum that targets their students' collective needs. The curriculum is teacher-generated in that they have created all their teaching materials without the use of traditional coursebooks, and it is backward-designed in that they began by identifying needs and learning outcomes before making all other curricular decisions. In the process of implementing and continuing this project, they have devised a ten-step development process (Butler, Heslup, and Kurth 2014), based on a backward-design approach to curriculum design, to facilitate the creation and revision of five-week teaching units for their practical English conversation courses.

Luther and other Reformers, especially Zwingli, had passionate disagreements over the theology of the Lord's Supper. Surprisingly, Luther seemed to have more in common on this topic with an Ethiopian Christian who visited him in 1534. This article places that interaction in its historical context, suggesting that Ethiopian Christianity in that time period had significant theological similarities with and may even have influenced the European Reformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last several decades, Pentecostal hermeneutics have undergone an identity crisis of sorts. Recognizing that their movement's core commitments are incompatible with the approach to Scripture it has often borrowed from fundamentalism, Pentecostals have proposed engaging postmodern hermeneutics, historical critical methods, and other interpretive approaches in the development of a distinctly Pentecostal hermeneutic. The interpretive strategies of the Church Fathers, however, have yet to receive much explicit attention from Pentecostals. This is unfortunate since the commitments of patristic exegetes have much in common with the core tenets of Pentecostal spirituality. This paper therefore suggests that if Pentecostals are to move beyond the fundamentalist assumptions that have often exerted too much influence over their hermeneutics, the Fathers could serve as prime dialogue partners, avoiding certain pitfalls of postmodern and historical-critical readings of Scripture while providing Pentecostal interpretation with a link to the Great Tradition of Christian exegesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Martin Luther believed that through Adam's fall, humanity lost the image of God, which is restored only through justification by faith. That doctrine would imply that non-Christians do not have the image of God in them. This paper analyses Luther's argument and proposes a mediating position: all humans retain the divine image, but only justification can restore the divine likeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plagues and pandemics are nothing new for the Christian church. Throughout its history, believers have been forced to grapple with outbreaks, the latest being the COVID-19 crisis of 2020. As a relatively young branch of the Christian faith, Pentecostalism itself does not have a great deal of experience with this subject compared to many older traditions. In addition, with its emphasis on divine healing, a triumphalist attitude has unfortunately hindered some segments of the movement from developing a robust response to sickness and suffering at all. Martin Luther's sixteenth-century response to the Black Death outbreak in Germany, however, might offer a prime example for contemporary Pentecostals to emulate. His pastoral wisdom, approach to suffering, and distinctive theology of the cross together compose a prudent yet ultimately optimistic take on how Christians should behave in such instances, making his voice an invaluable one for the contemporary church to learn from. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long regarded as a spiritual grandfather of sorts for the Pentecostal movement, John Wesley has been credited by some as paving the way for their doctrinal distinctive of Spirit baptism through his teaching on entire sanctification. Yet, Wesley's language surrounding Spirit baptism and the meaning of Pentecost differs significantly from that of classical Pentecostalism, calling into question whether a direct line can be drawn from Wesley himself to this Pentecostal distinctive. This article makes the case that their doctrine of Spirit baptism owes much more to the theology of Wesley's intended successor John Fletcher and the Holiness movement that followed than Wesley's doctrine of entire sanctification, and that one may find in Fletcher's theology the seeds that would culminate in this Pentecostal doctrine easier than one could in Wesley's theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]