Browsing Divinity School by Duke Department "Religion"

Now showing items 1-20 of 27

Belonging in Genesis: Biblical Israel and the Construction of Communal Identity

Mbuvi, Amanda (2008-06-25)

Genesis is central to both hegemonic and counterhegemonic conceptions of communal identity. Read one way, the book undergirds contemporary assumptions about the nature of communality and the categories through which it ...
Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel

Bowler, Catherine Christiane (2010)

This dissertation introduces readers to the major figures and features of the twentieth-century American prosperity gospel. It argues that these diverse expressions of Christian faith-fuelled abundance can be understood ...
"Choosing the Jesus Way:" the Assemblies of God's Home Missions to American Indians and the Development of an Indian Pentecostal Identity

Tarango, Angela (2009)

This dissertation explores the history of the Assemblies of God's Home Missions to American Indians, the development of an American Indian leadership in the denomination and the development of a Pentecostal Indian ...
Constituting the Protestant Mainline: the Christian Century, 1908-1947

Coffman, Elesha J (2008-11-19)

Scholars, journalists, and religious leaders in the twentieth century widely hailed The Christian Century as the most influential Protestant magazine in America. This dissertation investigates the meaning of such praise. ...
Continuity and Discontinuity: the Temple and Early Christian Identity

Wardle, Timothy Scott (2008-12-10)

In Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, he asks the readers this question: "Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you?" (1 Cor 3:16). Although Paul is the earliest Christian writer ...
The Contradictions of Genre in the Nehemiah Memorial

Burt, Sean (2009)

The first-person Hebrew narrative of the Persian courtier sent to be governor of Judah, the "Nehemiah Memorial" (or NM: Neh 1-2:20; 3:33-7:3; 13:4-31), is a crucial text for understanding how elements within ancient ...
Dispensational Modernism

Pietsch, Brendan (2011)

This dissertation begins with questions about the epistemic methods that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American Protestants used to create confidence in new religious ideas, and particularly the role of ...
Divided by Faith: The Protestant Doctrine of Justification and the Confessionalization of Biblical Exegesis

Fink, David C. (2010)

This dissertation lays the groundwork for a reevaluation of early Protestant understandings of salvation in the sixteenth century by tracing the emergence of the confessional formulation of the doctrine of justification ...
Eucharist and Anthropology: Seeking Convergence on Eucharistic Sacrifice Between Catholics and Methodists

Sours, Stephen (2011)

Eucharistic sacrifice is both a doctrine of the church and a sacramental practice. Doctrinally, it explains in what manner the sacrament is a sacrifice, or at least its sacrificial dimension; liturgically, it refers ...
Figural Reading in the Epistle to the Hebrews: A Dialogue with Augustine and Calvin

Lee, Gregory Woodae (2010)

This exercise in constructive Christian theology presents the relation between the testaments as a critical problematic for the figural reading of the Old Testament. The project consists of two parts, the first focusing ...
From Fratricide to Forgiveness: the Ethics of Anger in Genesis

Schlimm, Matthew Richard (2008-12-05)

In the first book of the Bible, every patriarch and many of the matriarchs have significant encounters with anger. However, scholarship has largely ignored how Genesis treats this emotion, particularly how Genesis ...
Genealogy, Circumcision, and Conversion in Early Judaism and Christianity

Thiessen, Matthew (2010)

In his important work, The Beginnings of Jewishness, Shaye J. D. Cohen has argued that what it meant to be a Jew underwent considerable revision during the second century B.C.E. While previously a Jew was defined in ...
The Limits of Wisdom and the Dialectic of Desire

Knauert, David Cromwell (2009)

It is fair to identify the motive of this dissertation with the paradoxical formulation of Gerhard von Rad, to the effect that the essence of biblical Wisdom is disclosed where the sages articulate this wisdom as ...
Mulatto Theology: Race, Discipleship and Interracial Existence

Bantum, Brian Keith (2009)

To exist racially "in-between," has been characterized as a tragic existence in the modern world. The loneliness and isolation of these lives have given rise to the term the "tragic mulatto." The dissertation Mulatto ...
A New and Living Way: Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews

Moffitt, David McCheyne (2010)

The New Testament book known as the epistle to the Hebrews contains little obvious reference to Jesus' resurrection. Modern interpreters generally account for this relative silence by noting that the author's soteriological ...
A Nonviolent Augustinianism?: History and Politics in the Theologies of St. Augustine and John Howard Yoder

Collier, Charles Mayo (2008-12-10)

The theologies of St. Augustine and John Howard Yoder are, if at all treated together, typically contrasted. This negative juxtaposition is in so small part due to the very different reputations of each theologian on ...
The Perfect Hope: More Than We Can Ask or Imagine

Adam, Margaret Bamforth (2011)

As Christians in the United States struggle to sustain hope in the face of global economic, environmental, military, and poverty crises, the most popular source of theological hope for preachers and congregations is ...
The Practice of the Body of Christ: Human Agency in Pauline Theology After MacIntyre

Miller, Colin Douglas (2010)

This dissertation begins a conversation between "apocalyptic" interpretations of the Apostle Paul and the contemporary revival in "virtue ethics." It argues that the human actor's place in Pauline theology has long been ...
Reading Galatians As Rhetorical Parody: Paul's Reinterpretation of Scriptural Demands for Obedience to the Law and the Implications for Understanding Faithfulness and Apostasy

Dawson, Kathy Barrett (2012)

Vastly different opinions exist within New Testament scholarship regarding the relationship between Paul's ethical exhortations in Gal 5-6 and the theological portions of the letter. In an attempt to argue for the ...
"See and Read All These Words": the Concept of the Written in the Book of Jeremiah

Eggleston, Chadwick Lee (2009)

Unusually for the Hebrew Bible, the book of Jeremiah contains a high number of references to writers, writing, and the written word. Written during the exilic period, the book demonstrates a key moment in the ongoing ...