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This thesis examines three prevalent models of community engagement in the black churches in the United States of America since the year 2000. It will contribute to existing scholarship by identifying theological motivations for community engagement by the black churches, and assessing the extent to which the black churches address and fulfill criteria for advancing liberation delineated from three generations of scholarship in Black Theology. This shall provide theological insight into the continued social relevance of the black churches. Existing scholarship has shown that the black churches historically have engaged the oppressed communities they have served by addressing their secular and social needs in addition to their spiritual ones, with a sense of mission to affirm human dignity and advance social justice. This praxis of liberation through community engagement was necessitated by the oppressive contexts in which the black churches were founded, and has continued in varied ways in tandem with shifts in social location of black people in America. Black church community initiatives have also been marked among three generations of scholars in Black Theology, who have delineated imperatives for which the black churches might engage their communities to fully continue the praxis of liberation in the present. The interrelated aims of this thesis are to discover the theological motivations of black church community engagement agents, and, to consider the extent to which the community engagement initiatives of the black churches of the twenty-first century address critical theological criteria from Black Theology for advancing liberation; each of which will help to illuminate theological implications for the continued social relevance of the black churches. This project requires an examination of contemporary models of black church community engagement in their own social reality. The models of community engagement that are researched are grass-roots movements where black churchpersons use non-violent direct action to advance particular social justice causes, community development corporations where churches filter grant money from the government to create economic opportunities for their local communities, and megachurch initiatives where congregations use the revenue of their large memberships to effect positive change in their communities. Local examples of each model are examined from a grounded theory approach through interviews with clergy and community workers, observations of worship and program activities, and textual analysis of bulletins, websites, and brochures.

Albert Bandura’s construct of moral disengagement has been recognized as theoretically useful for the study of self-destructive behaviors and moral disengagement, and to provide a unique criterion for empirical investigation of United States combat veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The purpose of this project is to better understand predictors related to the disengagement of moral self-sanctions in order that self-destructive behaviors related to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, such as drug and alcohol abuse, and the ultimate self-destructive behavior of suicide, might be mitigated. Charles Snyder’s hope construct, Harold Koenig and Arndt Büssing’s concept of intrinsic religiosity and Corey Keyes’ notion of psychological flourishing are chosen as viable predictor variables. Hope and intrinsic religiosity are found to be significant and to be correlated with moral disengagement. Inferences regarding the results are postulated and suggestions are made for research regarding other possible predictors of moral disengagement. Agentive moral reinforcement is discussed and proposals offered related to increasing psychological resilience and decreasing the agent’s risk associated with moral disengagement.

This thesis addresses the conflict traditionally found within moral philosophy between deontological and utilitarian schools of thought. Using the example of the serious moral ambivalence experienced by individuals who are deciding whether to end or continue a difficult pregnancy, it is argued that this ambivalence is the result of both absolute principles (such as the intrinsic value of human life) and outcome based considerations (such as the desire to avoid causing pain and suffering) appearing to be morally reasonable, while also being fundamentally opposed: Each course of action is at once morally defensible on the basis of its own reasonableness, and, conversely, reprehensible due to the reasonableness of the other. This lived experience of moral ambivalence is directly reflected by the tension between deontology and utilitarianism as it occurs at the moral philosophic level, where the deontological emphasis on the unconditional rightness of certain principles is seen to be at irreconcilable odds with the utilitarian emphasis on the attainment of certain ends. The thesis’ central claim is that such ambivalence strongly indicates that human morality is neither exclusively one type or the other, and that both types of moral property are in fact reasonable, and thus have moral value. It is theorised that accounting for this dual reasonableness would lead to the most accurate and helpful representation of the human moral experience – but that the philosophic ‘divide’ between the two types of principle has led to an either/or situation, which has largely prevented this sort of understanding from being developed. The thesis argues that Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick developed a view in which neither deontological nor utilitarian principles can be fully realised without reference to the other, precisely on the basis that both can be found to be ultimately rational. This thesis aims to revitalise that theory – represented by the term ‘Rational Benevolence’ - to show that Sidgwick reconciled the divide between absolute and end based principles in such a way that the relationship between them becomes a ‘synthesis’. In this synthesis, deontological and utilitarian concepts are both seen as essential components of morality, that combine to form a dynamic whole in which the value of each principle is both indicated and naturally limited by the value of the other, on account of their respective rationalities. It is argued that this provides a more comprehensive understanding of the reality of the human moral experience, and better moral justification for either course of action in situations of complex and sensitive ethical decision making.

This thesis provides a critical application of Robert P. George’s views to English equality law. The research question is what George, with his view of religion as a basic human good, might think about the religious liberty cases taken under the provisions of the Equality Act 2010. In addressing this question, it will be necessary to look at those - to some eyes - irreconcilable tensions which have emerged between laws protecting religious freedom. A number of legal claims have been brought by employees who have been instructed to carry out new legal obligations which they have been unwilling to perform. Questions have arisen regarding the current state of reasonable accommodation and proportionality analysis within indirect discrimination law. To examine these questions, this thesis will be in two parts: first, it will consider Robert George’s distinctive contribution to new natural law theory (NNL) and critically analyse George’s NNL approach that arises from this. To do so the key themes: a) practical reason and b) natural rights, will be considered in George’s work. Second, by reading George’s views on practical reason in line with his approach to natural rights, from this position this thesis will give an applied example of NNL, displaying George’s critique of the relevant equality law and arguing for an innovative understanding and approach to religious equality law. This is in an effort to find whether George’s theory is useful in exploring English religious equality law. By doing so this will reconstruct George’s NNL approach through using religious equality law as an applied example. This thesis argues that at a time when religious liberty often loses out in a balancing of rights, legitimate interests and protected characteristics, a superior way to approach equality law in this area may be through an application of a modified version of George’s NNL thought presenting religion as a public good. This will emphasise the priority of the good in religious conscience over legal rights within law viewed by George as a public morality. Viewing religion not only as a basic human good but also as a public good could provide the basis for future accommodation towards freedom of religious conscience and solve the tensions regarding the protection of religion or belief at work. Religion and religious freedom will be shown to be a form of flourishing within an understanding of the public good.

This thesis has two overarching aims. The first aim is to understand the origins and development of temperance and abstinence in British Methodism, particularly through the theology that informed what may broadly be called the Methodist teetotal movement in its period of greatest popularity from 1830 until 1919. The second is to consider the downfall of this movement in the period from 1945 until 1974, when the Methodist Connexion adopted the view that each Methodist “must consider his personal attitude to all drugs in relation to his Christian vocation”. The need for the study arises from the relative dearth of historical investigation regarding Methodism and abstinence. Representations of Methodism and abstinence tend either to be partisan or to lack wider understanding of the abstinence movement, or the theology of Methodism. Methodologically, this thesis attempts to hold together historical and theological considerations; it is important to consider both the socio-economic contexts in which diverse abstinence and teetotal movements arose and the theological motivations that drove British Methodist belief and practice. Regarding the origins and development of temperance and abstinence in British Methodism, it is proposed in this thesis that the Bible Christians were the first organised Methodist abstainers, and that their practice was likely to have been influenced by John Wesley's theologies of sanctification, holiness and Christian perfection. The thesis is an attempt to counter the Bible Christian’s diminished historical significance, as well as to investigate the likely impact of the theological underpinnings for their abstinence. Regarding the downfall of temperance and abstinence in British Methodism in the period from 1945 until 1974, this thesis will propose that a loss of focus upon holiness as a catalyst for abstinence was detrimental to the growth and continuation of the teetotal movement throughout Methodism after World War Two. It will highlight the general rejection of this focus on encouraged abstinence in the second half of the twentieth century, acknowledging the changes and disagreement within British Methodism to which this dismissal led. Concluding comments allude to the need for a renewed witness within British Methodism to societal and theological imperatives for both temperance and abstinence.

The aim of this dissertation is to propose an eco-feminist model of the Divine for the contemporary Korean Protestant Church, where sexism and eco-antipathy are problematic. For this purpose, the dissertation explores native Korean spiritual traditions with respect to their inherent eco-feminist sensitivity, with a view to making points of contact with traditional Christian conceptions of the Trinity. The dissertation proposes a model called ‘God of Land’ that brings eco-feminist Christian theology together with Feng Shui perspectives on finding an alternative divine model in a Korean context. The model is grounded deeply in both Christian confession of the Trinity and East Asian IChing cosmology. More specifically, the ‘God of Land’ model reinterprets Christian theological language of the Divine using non-Trinitarian symbols derived from Feng Shui in Asian cosmology, which is a symbolic thinking process fundamental to Koreans. This reinterpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity in an Asian context represents a new hermeneutical approach to Christian theology that calls for a contextualizing method of reflection, praxis, and cultural mediation. From an eco-feministic standpoint, the proposed ‘God of Land’ model identifies women and nature as victims of a male-centered mindset that is well blended with native traditional patriarchy. The realities of women’s multi-layered oppressions that are rampant in the contemporary Korean Protestant Church follow from this patriarchy. This dissertation criticizes how the Korean Protestant Church has for many years institutionalized the patriarchy that has led to the current ecological crisis, and women’s oppression. Mindful of this patriarchy, this dissertation offers a new model of the Divine, presented as ‘God of Land’, that combines an eco-feminist theological perspective and an Asian perspective in the hope that this way of thinking with Christian tradition and native Korean spirituality can be healing and restorative to both women and nature in Korea. Furthermore, the proposed model attempts to reveal rich images of a Triune God, which have been veiled behind institutionalized Christianity but that can be rekindled in dialogue with yin and yang symbolic thinking taken from Feng Shui cosmology. The claim is that the proposed interaction between Christian theology and Feng Shui cosmology, inspired by yin and yang, Chi, and the ChunJiIn idea in Asian cosmology, will contribute to a more explicitly cosmological understanding of the Trinity, as informed by the traditional doctrine of perichoresis. Christian Trinitarian thinking about perichoresis will be brought into dialogue with Feng Shui cosmology around the concepts of balance and equilibrium — again with a view towards restoring the current reality of subjugated positions of women and nature in the contemporary Korean Protestant Church. In this way, the ‘God of Land’ model - informed by Christian Trinitarian theology and reinterpreted from an Asian perspective - is emancipatory, eco-feminist sensitive, and perichoretic; this bespeaks equal, respectful, and nurturing relationship among the persons of the Trinity, which is rich and embracive.

This thesis seeks to develop an enlarged understanding of justice which reduces future conflict rather than feeding it and which seeks to ground human practices and notions of justice more firmly in divine justice. At the heart of this project is Miroslav Volf’s theology of embrace. The thesis attempts to question what this theology offers to the present day context of Croatia and Bosnia from which it emerged in the 1990s. Firstly, I draw on field work and NGO work to suggest that justice is a pressing issue in post-conflict Bosnia and Croatia, and that current approaches to justice are problematic. I draw on Volf’s work to assess the key problems and suggest that turning to his eschatological vision of justice may provide fruitful answers as to how justice should be pursued for the future. Secondly, I suggest that identity needs to be reconfigured in order that justice might be pursued. I suggest that this should occur along the lines of Volf’s understanding of identity as embrace. Identities can be reconfigured through enlarged thinking. Seeking to shape the other and for the other to shape the self is key to pursuing justice collaboratively. Thirdly, I address the theological roots of Volf’s work in examining the Trinity. I suggest that Volf’s work can offer an understanding of the Trinity which has significant implications for the pursuit of justice. I read Volf’s work as allowing for a sense of justice residing within the Trinity. I seek to draw out the ways in which human life can image the triune life of justice and the parameters of this mirroring. Finally, I propose that the type of justice I have suggested, in collaboration with Volf, means that the pursuit of justice should be centred on restoring right relationships, going beyond what is due and is a continuous process rather than discrete actions.

This thesis describes the theology and praxis of philosopher/theologian Dr. Dallas Willard and its effect on contemporary forms of evangelicalism in America. Willard’s works have become increasingly attractive to emerging generations of Christians protesting the perceived excesses and hegemony of mainstream evangelical culture. Willard presents a positive alternative to contemporary versions of evangelicalism seen by many as increasingly devoted to soteriological escapism, modern consumerism, individualism and sectarianism. Alternatively, Willard proposes a return to the original (proto) message of good news (evangel) articulated by Jesus in the New Testament. For increasing numbers of disaffected evangelicals with postmodern sensibilities, this protoevangelical vision offers a more robust doctrine of God, a return to the primacy of discipleship to Christ, and the experience of a holistic and integrated life in the Kingdom of God. Ethnographies of four evangelical organizations applying Willardian theology provide insight into the current evolution within American evangelical theology and praxis.

This study is an exercise in understanding both doctrinally and pastorally the nature of knowledge of God for persons with intellectual disabilities. Its central question is: “How might one know the Word of God without words?” At present, no extended theological systematical consideration has taken place of this question, and confusion arguably exists in the church and wider disability circles as to if/how persons with high support needs, such as intellectual disability, should be afforded pastoral care. This study addresses this need in dialogue with Karl Barth’s theological insights, and by developing an account of knowledge of God for persons with intellectual disabilities that is at once theologically informed and pastorally effective. In the last thirty years theological reflection considered in light of the situation of disability has seen tremendous growth and change, as the discipline has budded and blossomed. In particular, theologians of disability have reflected on the significance of disability in relation to the Christian doctrines of creation, anthropology, Christology, the imago Dei, ecclesiology and eschatology, amongst others, with rich and varied results. Similarly, this project suggests that consideration of the doctrine of revelation and the discipline of pastoral care in light of the situation of intellectual disability will yield unique and valuable outcomes for the disability community, but also for the wider church. Karl Barth will be the primary dialogue partner in these preparatory, theological stages. His thought regarding the incarnation of the Word in various forms, perhaps surprisingly, opens new avenues for our reflection. By engaging Barth’s theological anthropology as well as his theology of co-humanity of being with others in encounter, this project aims to demonstrate that knowledge of God is possible for all persons of all abilities.

This thesis offers an analysis of George Eliot's aesthetics and ethics from the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and theology. I examine the role that religious motifs play in Eliot's "ethics of art," and argue that the motifs of incarnation, revelation, and transcendence are central to Eliot's aesthetic aim of extending her reader's sympathies. Eliot's ethics of art is designed to help her reader transcend his or her inherent egoism, and to improve the way her reader understands his or her own self in relation to the world and to others. An exploration of the religious motifs of incarnation, revelation, and transcendence explains how Eliot achieved this aim without resorting to didacticism or preaching. In order to demonstrate this, the thesis offers a reading of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda in which I employ three concepts that are present in the early philosophical writings of Mikhail Bakhtin; non-alibi in being, excess of seeing, and self/other relations. The motif of incarnation is central to each of these concepts and forms a bridge between Bakhtin's aesthetics and ethics. In applying these concepts to a reading of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, I demonstrate the way in which Eliot's "ethics of art" relies on theological motifs.

The theological writings of James E. Loder, Jr. (1931-2001) require a wider audience. For more than forty years he developed and exercised an interdisciplinary methodology that identified patterns of correlation in the fields of fields of psychology, educational theory, phenomenology, epistemology, and physics producing a powerful theological vision that centers around the person and work of the Holy Spirit engaging and transforming human life. At his untimely death in November, 2001, Loder was the Mary D. Synnott Professor of the Philosophy of Christian Education at the Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey (U. S. A.), where he lectured primarily in the areas of human development and the philosophy of education. If Loder is known at all, he is recognized for his work in the area of practical theology, especially among church educators. Even in the discipline of practical theology his work is largely unknown and has yet to receive the recognition it deserves from systematic theologians, biblical scholars, as well as clergy and laity. It is my hope to help change this. The purpose of this thesis is to introduce and examine, explore and decipher the complexity of Loder's thought in order to make it more accessible to a wider public. This important task is done in service to the broader goal of demonstrating that Loder's work, particularly his pneumatology, is of inestimable value to the discipline of theology and theology's service to the work of the church. At the core of Loder's work is an epistemological, psycho-spiritual framework that I characterize as a relational phenomenological pneumatology. The Christian life is preeminently relational, distinguished by a relationship with God constituted by Jesus Christ, and sustained by the Holy Spirit. The relation, Loder claims, takes place in and through the life of the Holy Spirit who operates within a complementary relationship with the human spirit, in what he describes as the analogia spiritus: an intimate, transformational interrelation of the Holy Spirit and the human spirit. The Holy Spirit, intimately connected to the person and work of Christ, takes up and extends the work begun in the incarnation by enfleshing the presence of Christ in the life of an individual in ways that are transformationally Christomorphic. What makes Loder's work unique is the way he articulates a theology of the Holy Spirit that incorporates a firm grasp of the way the self participates in and comes to have a knowledge of itself, the world, and God. It is precisely the logic of this dynamic, I would argue, that has extraordinary implications for the way we articulate the Christian experience. My thesis, therefore, is that Loder's relational phenomenological pneumatology contains rich and principally unrecognized resources for providing new frameworks for the Christian life.

This thesis offers a theological analysis of Korean fundamentalism. Chapter One uses various historical sources to trace how Korean society encountered Christianity (particularly fundamentalism) through foreign missionaries in the period 1884-1945 and what features of Korean culture and religions have significant bearing on the development of Korean fundamentalism. It discusses how the Korean church developed during the Japanese colonial period (1905-1945), and why it split between fundamentalism and liberalism after the outbreak of the Second World War. Chapter Two discusses the life and work of Hyung-ryong Park, the most influential fundamentalist theologian in Korea between 1930-1970. It examines a number of primary texts in order to analyse the influence on his work of important Old Princeton theologians (Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, Benjamin Warfield and Gresham Machen), and also examines how his major writings develop the doctrines described in the formative text The Fundamentals: A Testimony to Truth. Chapter Three considers the legacy of Park's fundamentalism to the Korean church today and identifies some of the theological weaknesses of present-day fundamentalism. It makes some positive suggestions regarding theological tasks facing the Korean church today.