The Theological Research Seminar (TRS) meets every other Tuesday from 12:30pm - 1:20pm  throughout the regular academic terms (Fall and Winter), providing a venue for presenting research and engaging in dialogue with the presenter.  Professors, students and visiting scholars are invited to read or summarize papers followed by questions and discussion. These seminars are open to participation and attendance by anyone interested in the research topic being explored. These topics include all areas of theology, including Old and New Testament studies, Greek and Hebrew language and linguistics, Systematic Theology, Church History, Ethics, Practical Theology and related disciplines

The format of each session begins with presentation of a paper, or a synopsis of a paper distributed earlier, followed by a generous amount of time for exploring issues raised by means of question and answer and discussion.

The seminar takes place in Hurlburt Hall (previously known as the Rec. Room) at McMaster Divinity College. For paper proposals, please contact Dr. Paul Evans, Dr. Wendy Porter or Dr. Steve Studebaker.

Schedule for the 2009-2010 Academic Year:

Winter 2010 Sessions (additional sessions are posted regularly):

• Tuesday, March 23, Justin Comber, "Eyes (and ears) on the Prize: Judging the Jesus-Experience of Marks's Charcters." The Gospel of Mark is short, sweet, and confusing. Characters of all sorts appear and disappear in Mark’s story with little introduction, and almost no development. They are healed, they are confused, or they are angry and they disappear from the story and are not heard from again. However, Mark uses these Jesus/Character interactions as the basis for his plot and thematic structure. In attempting to influence his readers to faith in Christ, Mark builds character groups that react uniformly to what they see and hear from Jesus. The crowd, Mark’s great character bank, moves with Jesus, seeing everything that he says and does. Word travels, as members come and go, taking the story with them. And three distinct responses to this shared experience emerge. The disciples see and hear the good things that Jesus does and says  and doubt, those associated with the Jerusalem religious authority see, hear and accuse, and a certain few exemplary characters see, hear, and are moved to align themselves with Jesus in faith. Click here to review the paper.

• Tuesday, March 9, Dr. Wendy Porter, "From Jubal to John, from Johann to Hillsong: Contemporary Worship Song and the Worshiping Church."Although Church leaders throughout the centuries have seemed to argue against the notion of contemporary worship music, the Old Testament, the New Testament and the entire spectrum of Church history all show us that the contemporary worship song is now--and has always been--essential in the life of the worshiping Church. This paper brings together some of the evidence for this, and reminds us that we are called to "sing a new song" to the Lord.
  
  

• Tuesday, February 23, Chris Land, “Moltmann and the Old Testament.” Jürgen Moltmann is acknowledged as one of the most influential voices in contemporary theology by both supporters and critics alike. In this essay, I bring Moltmann’s theological writings into conversation with the Old Testament. My focus is the enduring reality of sin and the nature of God’s response to it. My method is to observe how Moltmann speaks to his modern context about this crucial biblical theme, and then to compare and contrast his approach with that of the Old Testament. In simple terms, this essay intersects biblical and dogmatic theology, the unifying factor being the theme of human sin and its divine remedy. Click here to review the paper.
  
  
  
• Tuesday, January 26, Adam Brown, “Discovering David In Light Of 1 Samuel 25: A Narrative Critical Reading Of 1 Samuel 24-26.” The objective of this paper will be to demonstrate that 1 Sam 25 is an integral component of 1 Sam 24-26 and that it is an essential chapter in order to fully understand the narrator’s characterization of David. This paper will be structured around three main sections. The first will establish the literary coherence of 1 Sam 24-26. The second will identify and assess David’s men (in 1 Sam 24/26) and Abigail (in 1 Sam 25) as David’s rhetorical alter-egos. The third will draw conclusions about David’s character from these observations. The thesis to be defended is that in 1 Sam 24-26 David acts with both restraint and unrestraint and that these seemingly opposite manifestations of character both stem from David’s political brilliance and moral deficiency. Click here to review the paper.
  
  
  
• Tuesday, January 12, James Robertson, “University on its knees: the spectacular demise of Des Moines University.” In the 1920s the battle for the soul of America was being fought in the classroom. Anti-biblical “modernism” threatened to unravel the fabric of belief and destroy the faith handed down by the saints. “Apostate” schools were everywhere and self-proclaimed Fundamentalists had nowhere to send their young without exposing them to heretical teaching. T.T. Shields heard the cry of those forlorn parents and threw his hat into that ring. However, the fate of the fundamentalist university he started would become a thing of legend…
  
  
  
• Tuesday, November 24, Patrick Franklin, "Missionaries in Our Own Back Yard: Lesslie Newbigin’s Concept of the Missionary Congregation as a Precursor to the Missional Church." This paper examines the roots of the missional church concept in the writings of Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998). Particularly relevant are Newbigin’s insights regarding Western culture, his understanding of mission, and his vision for a missionary encounter between the gospel and Western culture. I will argue that while the concept of the missional church continues to develop (in the writings of the Gospel and Our Culture Network and other authors), Newbigin remains a rich resource and an important dialogue partner in this ongoing discussion. Moreover, I will argue that a fresh interaction with Newbigin’s writings can help us recover some important themes and emphases about the nature and mission of the church that are under-developed (or even ignored) in much of the present missional church literature. Newbigin can therefore offer a corrective to the movement he inspired. Click here to review the paper.
  
  
  
• Tuesday, November 10, Beth Stovell, "God As Shepherd-King And The Restoration Of Justice: Metaphors Of Shepherding And The Constellation Of Kingship." God as shepherd-king is a central metaphor in Ezekiel 34, but little work has been done in developing a linguistic and literary analysis of the interweaving of metaphors surrounding God as shepherd-king in this passage and the implications of this interweaving for our understanding of the purpose of this passage. This paper will trace the repeated interweaving of these metaphors in Ezekiel 34 by applying a literary-linguistic approach to metaphor that incorporates elements of the Conceptual Metaphor theory of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner with elements of the systemic functional linguistics of M. A. K. Halliday. This approach allows for the analysis of the metaphors in Ezekiel 34 both at the conceptual level and the pragmatic level within the larger discourse. This approach then uses the analysis from these linguistic approaches to evaluate the literary and theological implications of these metaphors and their interrelationship. Based on these findings, this paper will assert that the metaphor of “God as shepherd-king” must be understood in light of the failing shepherds. Thus the metaphor of“God as shepherd” is part of our understanding of the metaphor of “God as king” and of“shepherd as king” in the Hebrew Bible and can equally only fully be understood by developing an understanding of the metaphor of “the people of Israel as sheep”. Click here to review the paper.
  
  
  
• Tuesday, October 27, Ralph Korner, "The Gospel of John’s Jesus: the Way into a Place, into a People, or into a Person?" James H. Charlesworth is not alone in his sentiments that John 14:6 is “an exceptional embarrassment to Christians who are seeking a fruitful dialogue with persons of other religions, especially Jews.” No doubt Charlesworth would also want to apply this assessment towards early Jewish Christ-followers who continued to meet within/among synagogues. It probably would have been more accurate, however, for Charlesworth to say that it is a theological presupposition, and the not the verse itself, that give rises to the discomfort that he, and others, feel. His presupposition appears to be that John 14:6 teaches an exclusivist soteriology in which Jesus claims to be the only way through which humanity can gain access to heaven. Click here to review the paper.
  
  

• Tuesday, October 13, Colin Toffelmire, "Historiography and Religious Identity in the Animal Apocalypse." The Animal Apocalypse of 1 Enoch 85-90 offers a unique example of ancient historiography in the guise of a prophetic vision of the history of the people of Israel in which the players are represented by animals. The structure of the allegory is controlled by the primary image of clean v. unclean. All of the animals representing the people of God are clean animals, and all of the animals representing the surrounding nations are unclean animals. Also of vital importance for the rhetoric of the Animal Apocalypse are the roles of the primeval patriarch Enoch. By assuming the mantle of Enoch the pseudonymous author is able to offer his comments regarding Israelite history and identity both as an authoritative prophet living in the ancient past and also as a perfect priest able to enter the heavenly Temple (cf. 1 En 14-15). I argue that this controlling metaphor of clean v. unclean is used by the author of the Animal Apocalypse, in concert with the dual prophetic/priestly role of Enoch, to retell Israelite history, thereby establishing both a religious history and a religious identity for Jews living in Seleucid era Yehud. History thus becomes a frame in which the author sets his message of religious and militant resistance. Click here to review the paper.
  

• Tuesday, Sept. 27, Andrew Pitts, "The Spirit in the Second Temple Jewish Monotheism and the Origins of Early Christology." We will be looking at the role of the Spirit & Divine Intermediaries in ancient and second temple Jewish Onothesism. If you are New Testament person you will be interested in the discussion of Christian origins, primitive Christology and the exegesis of key Pauline passages. This paper has vast implications for understanding the development of the doctrine of the Trinity.
  
  

• Tuesday, Sept. 15, Louise Adnams, "Pilgrimage: A Paradigm for Spiritual Formation." Most Christian leaders would agree that spiritual formation is an important component of the individual and corporate Christian life. However, the means and success of reaching maturity in Christ is open for debate. Although Christians may be participating in various programs and spiritual disciplines, how is Christian maturity measured? Are those disciplines bringing about changed character? Despite adopting many models and employing novel strategies, Canadian church attendance is dropping, and at times, the character and moral fibre of those within the church is indistinguishable from the surrounding culture. This paper takes up the challenge to think differently about spiritual formation for the ethos and mission of the twenty-first century church in Canada by exploring the concept of pilgrimage as a paradigm for spiritual formation.