Browsing by Author "Hauerwas, Stanley M"

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 question of violence. This dissertation demonstrates that the standard contrast between the theopolitical visions of Yoder and Augustine is mistaken. An introduction portrays the cumulative work of the chapters as the unfolding of a question about the contemporary reception of Augustine and Yoder: Might John Howard Yoder's "pacifism of the messianic community" be received as a radical form of Augustinianism? The dissertation consists of four chapters, each dealing with some aspect of Yoder's or Augustine's thought which, under closer examination, reveals an interesting line of convergence with the thought of the other. The politics of historical interpretation, the challenge of interiority, the aims of historicism, and the nature of "the political" are taken up in succession. An affirmative answer to the overarching question is suggested, but the more important task is to render the question salient for contemporary theologians and ethicists.

This thesis project explores Thomas Aquinas’ writings about eudaimonia (human flourishing, happiness) and its compatibility with Christian discipleship. Eudaimonia and Christian discipleship are not mutually exclusive ideas but can be synthesized in a meaningful manner. Moreover, I explore rational and theological ideas that challenge Thomistic understandings of bodily perfection in the attainment of happiness in this mortal life. In the second part of his imminent work The Summa Theologica, Aquinas seeks to integrate Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. The cornerstone of his theoretical system is eudaimonia, human flourishing, well-being, or happiness. Aquinas ultimately concludes that perfect happiness (beatitude) cannot be achieved in this life. However, imperfect happiness is possible. Interestingly, this situates Aquinas between Aristotle, who believed in the attainability of eudaimonia in this life, and Augustine who taught that happiness was unattainable in this life. Rather, Augustine’s hope for happiness stemmed from his eschatological vision of the afterlife. The first part of my dissertation is exploratory by design, carefully examining Aquinas’ views on the essence and requirements for happiness, the dynamics of the will, the nature of intelligent substances, and the cultivation of the virtues. Through examining part II of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and Book 3 of his Summa Contra for the Gentiles, I critically explore the unity and sometimes disunity of Aristotle's ethical paradigm with Christian discipleship. The second part of my research project consists of a four-week Bible study entitled The Quest for Happiness: A Four-Week Journey With Thomas Aquinas. In addition to teaching the bible study, I will provide reflections on my experience with the class for my growth and development as a leader. Aquinas provides his readers with a unique ontological lens for discerning the dynamics of human behavior. His perspectives are neither antithetical or hostile toward Christian discipleship but provide unique perspectives on the will, human proclivities, and morality. Aquinas’ Aristotelian analysis of the will provides hope that in achieving a deeper understanding of moral behavior, we can better achieve our ultimate telos, eudaimonia, in this life and the life beyond.

Are civic democracy and Catholic authority at odds? Do the aspirations of modern democratic politics imply theological claims that are in essential conflict with Catholic claims about civic authority? Does democratic tradition cultivate a self-reliant, skeptical stance toward authority that is incompatible with a cultivation of deference to authority in orthodox Christian tradition? Are we confronted with two traditions in conflict, such that the Catholic tradition must be rendered more democratic if it is to provide support for modern democratic politics? Is an approach to theological ethics that emphasizes the church, with its authoritative teachings and offices, and its claim to be a unique means of grace as a form of Christ’s body, necessarily at odds with an approach that emphasizes the civic nation and lends support to struggles for democratic progress?

These questions are prompted by Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition, as well as D. Stephen Long’s Augustinian and Ecclesial Ethics in his characterization of the debate between two schools of theological ethics, largely Niebuhrian and civic liberal or Yoderian and ecclesial in orientation, which he labels “Augustinian” and “ecclesial.” This dissertation will present Yves Simon’s political philosophy as providing significant elements of a way forward for this discussion. Following Alasdair MacIntyre, I present Simon as an adherent of both the Catholic and the modern democratic traditions, who as a Thomist is able to provide an account of civic politics wherein liberty and authority, authority and autonomy, and Catholicism and democracy are friends instead of enemies. Simon as a Thomist is able to do this, as I present him, while rival restorationist Augustinian and Enlightenment liberal accounts tended to see such pairs as antinomic.

In chapters one and two, I begin to assess Simon’s contribution, following MacIntyre by seeking to understand him within the “complex political and moral history” out of which he emerged. In chapter one, I give an account of the tradition of Catholic social teaching Simon inherited, characterizing it as taken up by two approaches, Augustinian and Thomist, to confronting the challenge of practical atheism raised by Enlightenment liberalism. Simon took up the mantle of Leonine Thomism, in its deep criticism of liberalism’s social contract, its rejection of restorationist Augustinian views of authority, and its articulation of civic authority as a created natural good with a divine origin, a positive aspect of our social nature in service of the common good.

In chapter two, I draw out the rootedness of Simon’s political thought in the crises of the early twentieth century, showing how his critique of liberalism went along with firm support for democratic liberation, and how his developing theory of authority went hand in hand with opposition to authoritarian regimes. Here, I examine Simon’s early political essays, books, and letters to his mentor Jacques Maritain. Simon emerges as a committed Leonine neo-Thomist who placed the Thomist tradition in conversation with the democratic tradition stemming from the French and American revolutions. Simon found resources in the Thomist and democratic traditions to support a politics in which authority and liberty were not opposites, but in service of common goods in which the liberty, equality, and fraternity of persons-in-community were secured.

In chapter three, I present Simon’s mature political philosophy as a project that indicates how the Thomist preconciliar tradition of Catholic social thought can contribute to contemporary theological ethics. Simon’s ontologically realist conception of the common good helps us understand that authority is a correlative concept, that which enables a community to enjoy goods in common. Starting here, Simon is able to show that democratic aspirations for freedom and equality are better served within an authoritative community that pursues goods in common than by an Enlightenment liberal polity that does not. Moreover, it is better able to form people in the civic virtues needed for such a polity to flourish, and is capable of openness to God’s grace.

In my conclusion, I place Simon’s work into conversation with contemporary theological ethics. Simon’s Thomist acceptance of the acquired or civic virtues, his Thomist account of authority in service of the common good (rather than an Augustinian account for which authority serves as a check against sin), his vigorous defense of democratic freedom and equality joined to his defense of civic authority, and his openness to the further ends of the theological virtues, all provide helpful tools for contemporary discussion. Today’s conversation, largely Augustinian in character, can be moved forward by Thomist insights drawn from the preconciliar tradition of Catholic social teaching. Democratic freedom and equality need not be in conflict with Catholic authority. With Simon’s Thomist account of civic authority and the common good, we are enabled to pursue both the civic national and the ecclesial projects at the same time.

Did the early Pentecostals regard themselves as servants to the wider church, bearers of the gifts of the Spirit, sent to bring a renewed focus on love, unity, holiness, and justice to all parts of the church? Or did they see themselves as the only true believers in the midst of apostates, heretics, and reprobates? What can be found among the early Pentecostals, as a people whose primary self-identity was as a people of the Spirit, that carried the Spirit's mission forward in unique or significant ways? Can the loss of such practices help explain the decline of the Pentecostal movement? Narrating the Pentecostal movement through the lens of the Spirit's mission to the world is an attempt to give a normative account of Pentecostal liminality, to describe certain communitas commitments as ones that gave rise to the movement and propelled it forward. This study describes in detail how this understanding itself came to be something else, something quite damaging. Still, the general principle was that the Holy Spirit comes in power and blesses work that aligns with the Spirit's own mission. That is the primary presupposition at work here as well, that through understanding the mission of the Holy Spirit, we may find ways to align ourselves with that mission, to co-labor with the Spirit by privileging the liminal moment. Implicit in this claim is the denial that such alignment is automatic, guaranteed, or even self-sustaining. The argument here is that the incompatibility of the Pentecostal ethos represented by these communal commitments with the uncritical acceptance of evangelical-fundamentalist theological accounts on the part of the second and third generation Pentecostals resulted in a loss of what constituted the Pentecostal movement as such. This dissertation begins with an exegesis of John 16.8-11 in an effort to articulate Pentecostal ethics in terms of participation in the Spirit's mission of convincing the world with regard to sin, righteousness, and power. The conclusions of this exegesis are that the entire world is in view throughout this passage; that the Spirit convicts all with regard to sin, defined as not believing in Jesus, righteousness, defined as following Jesus' example in a life of holiness, and power, defined as the Spirit's judgment on all forms of power that are self-aggrandizing as opposed to the cruciform mode of authority that must characterize the Christian life; and that the Spirit accomplishes this convincing work primarily through the life of the communitas the Spirit forms, embodies, and empowers. These results are then carried to the Pentecostal movement in its earliest instantiation and as it exists as a Christian subculture today, asking what Pentecostal liminality might look like, if the rubric of the Spirit's mission to the world is applied as a moment we are to participate in enduringly.

One of the focuses of John Howard Yoder's theology is Christian nonviolence. From the teaching and example of Jesus, who dealt with the evil in the world and defeated it through obedience to the will of God to the point of dying on the cross, Yoder derives the normative Christian stance of nonviolence. It is expressed in the life of the disciples in their suffering with Christ the hostility of the world as bearers of the kingdom cause and in their living out the suffering servanthood in place of dominion. For Yoder, subordination is how Christ's model of servanthood is carried out into the concreteness of family life, and it is most extensively explored in his essay, "Revolutionary Subordination," in The Politics of Jesus.

This dissertation is an attempt to read household codes in the New Testament, especially Col. 3:18-4:1, together with Yoder, with a special emphasis on the husband/wife relation. Due to an exceptionally controversial character of Yoder's essay, it seeks to understand his main points, while identifying the elements that have caused strong opposition. The fact that these Haustafel texts have been historically abused to legitimate oppression and exploitation of persons poses a warning in one's endeavor to interpret them. Particularly telling is Americans' experience around slavery during and after the Civil War. The conflicting interpretations of the Bible between the proslavery camp and the abolitionists leave us in a hard place in addressing the issue of women's status in the household and in society.

Through examining key debates on the Haustafeln in the biblical scholarship focused on James Crouch and David Balch; two alternative views on the subject in theological ethics - Yoder and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza - and further discussions of their views aided by theologians such as Gordon Kaufman, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Jeffrey Stout, this study addresses issues found in Yoder and Schüssler Fiorenza. It concludes that Yoder's undue reliance on David Schroeder and his refutation of Martin Dibelius have led him to overlook the preexisting schema that was adopted and Christianized by the early church, and that he fails to name patriarchy a sin. Schüssler Fiorenza's problems are found in the areas of the biblical canon, tradition and democracy. The relevance of the slavery debates to this study is revisited through discussions of Mark Knoll and Dale Martin, and Yoder's nonviolent kingdom ethic is compared to Paul Ramsey's just war theory and backed up by Rowan Williams, Bernd Wannenwetsch, and Sarah Coakley.

Respect for autonomy is the foundation of modern bioethics, even (or especially) where bioethics is attentive to the problem of suffering caused by the practice of medicine itself. It provides guidance in the midst of therapeutic and moral uncertainty, justification for morally problematic enterprises, and the promise of protection against self-serving or predatory medical personnel. Yet bioethical arguments that appeal to the injustice or the horror of suffering depend on an instinctual and uncomplicated association of suffering, especially imposed suffering, with evil. This uncomplicated association, this flattening of the complexities of the moral landscape, must lead to a diminished capacity to navigate the very difficulties that define the field of bioethics. This dissertation explores the relationship, particularly, of autonomy, suffering, and happiness in modern bioethics, as represented by three key theorists (James Childress, Tom Beauchamp, and H. Tristram Engelhardt). It then contrasts these findings with resources from the Christian tradition: Luke-Acts, the letters of Paul, and the theologians Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Genoa, and Margaret Ebner. Their accounts of the meaning and experience of suffering within well-lived lives makes for a more robust account of the moral life, one in which suffering plays a formative part.

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 Theology: Race, Discipleship, and Interracial Existence theologically interprets mulatto lives making visible and interrogating the wider reality of racialized lives in modernity. The mulatto's body is significant in that it discloses what is masked in modern (and particularly white) identities.

Culture, identities (individual and communal) are not only interconnected, but they are mixtures where peoples become presenced in the lives and practices of other "alien" peoples. This mixture requires reflection upon the formation of all identities, and the ways these identities become visible within the world. Given this arc of identity any reflection upon Christian identity must articulate itself within the tensions of these identities and the practices that mark such identities within the world.

In examining the formation and performance of mulatto bodies this dissertation suggests these bodies are theologically important for modern Christians and theological reflection in particular. Namely, the mulatto's body becomes the site for re-imagining Christian life as a life lived "in-between." The primary locus of this re-imagination is the body of Christ.

A re-examination of theological reflection and Scripture regarding his person and work display his character as mulatto, or the God-man. But not only is his identity mulatto, but his person also describes the nature of his work, his re-creation of humanity. So

understood Christian bodies can be construed as "interracial" bodies -- bodies of flesh and Spirit that disrupt modern formations of race. The Christian body points to a communal reality where hybridity is no longer tragic, but rather constitutive of Christian discipleship. This new, hybrid and "impure" way of existing witnesses to God's redemptive work in the world.

This thesis introduces a new interpretation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity from a missiological perspective. It will argue that religionless Christianity reflects Bonhoeffer’s theology of mission for the modernized and globalized world. Bonhoeffer observed the world becoming nonreligious in all aspects of life and challenged the church to prepare for a generation of people without religious a priori knowledge, whose language would be vastly different from the language of the church. Advances in science and technology have precipitated modernization and globalization, which result in a movement toward human autonomy. The authority of God in the public sphere has lost its significance and influence, and Christianity is considered an individual preference in the private sphere. The world appears to operate just fine even if God does not exist.

The conventional method of mission focuses on communicating the Gospel to individuals residing in a secular environment. This is achieved by adapting the core tenets of Christianity into a vernacular that resonates with them, with the ultimate aim of converting the nonreligious world into a Christian one. In other words, the objective of the mission is to transform the context (secular world) by contextualizing the content (Christianity). Bonhoeffer’s approach is unique in that he attempted to transform Christianity to make it meaningful and relevant for nonreligious people. Bonhoeffer’s theology of mission challenges the church to embrace religionless Christianity as a new form of Christianity for a nonreligious world. Instead of requiring nonreligious people to accept religious doctrines and traditions to become Christians, religionless Christianity offers them to remain in a nonreligious world by becoming religionless Christians.

The term “religionless Christianity” is difficult to reconcile when “Christianity” is already understood as a religion and if Bonhoeffer’s concept of a “completely religionless age” is interpreted as a world without religion. Efforts have been made to resolve this logical fallacy by (1) removing religious aspects in Christianity to make it secular and calling it “secular Christianity,” (2) claiming that Bonhoeffer’s prediction of the religionless age has been proven wrong by presenting the statistical evidence of religious revivalism, (3) suggesting religionless Christianity as Bonhoeffer’s apologetics to explain and defend the core beliefs of Christianity to nonreligious people, and (4) interpreting “religionless” to mean “without legalistic religious traditions of the church” and suggesting that religionless Christianity is Bonhoeffer’s version of a “seeker-sensitive” church.

In this thesis, I will argue that Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity is vastly misinterpreted because anthropological, sociological, and theological approaches to Bonhoeffer’s concepts of “religion,” “religionlessness,” and “Christianity” are not adequate to explain Bonhoeffer’s motivation in exploring the necessity of religionless Christianity. I will present Bonhoeffer as a missionary who stood between two worlds—the world of the religious and the nonreligious—struggling to transform Christianity for the religious and the nonreligious by restoring the centrality of Jesus Christ as the Lord of the world. By analyzing key aspects of religionless Christianity from a missiological perspective, I will establish religionless Christianity as Bonhoeffer’s proposal of a new form of Christianity for today’s church.

Sacrifice often connotes death or some form of lack within popular discourse. The association of sacrifice with death is assumed in some strains of the Christian tradition that employ sacrifice within a penal substitutionary account of the atonement. In this framework, sacrifice is understood as death for the purposes of punishment. This dissertation challenges the identification of sacrifice with death. It presents a reinterpretation of sacrifice through a canonical and literary reading of Old and New Testament texts. Sacrificial practice displayed in Leviticus and Hebrews suggests that sacrifice is oriented at life rather than at death. Specifically, sacrifice in Leviticus aims toward a reinstatement of the good order of creation displayed in Genesis 1. The telos of the Levitical cult is humanity’s redemption and creation’s restoration. Both are achieved on the Day of Atonement described in Leviticus 16 as a Sabbath. Hebrews expands upon the sacrificial logic of Leviticus in presenting Christ’s resurrection as the perfection of the cult. Christ’s sacrifice is his resurrected body, not his death. Christians are called to participate in Christ’s sacrifice, and discipleship assumes a form that challenges society’s deathly sacrifices.

Against the dominant contemporary options of usefulness and disinterestedness, this dissertation attempts to display that beauty is better--more fully, richly, generatively--described with the categories of fittingness and gratuity. By working through texts by Gregory of Nyssa, this dissertation fills out what fittingness and gratuity entail--what, that is, they do for beauty-seekers and beauty-talkers. After the historical set-up of the first chapter, chapter 2 considers fittingness and gratuity through Gregory's doctrine of God because Beauty, for Gregory, is a name for God. That God is radically transcendent transforms (radicalizes) fittingness and gratuity away from a strictly Platonic vision of how they might function. Chapter 3 extends such radicalization by considering beauty in light of Christology and particularly in light of the Christological claims to invisibility, poverty, and suffering. In a time when beauty is wending its way back from an academic exile enforced by its associations with the `bourgeois,' such considerations re-present beauty as deeply intertwined with ugliness and horror. Chapter 4 asks how it is a person might perceive such beauty, which calls for pneumatological and anthropological reflections on Gregory's doctrine of the spiritual senses. The person who sees beauty rightly, for Gregory, is the person who is wounded by love.

Against dominant interpretations of Thomas Hobbes that ignore or downplay the place of theology in his work, this essay aims to show the centrality of theology to the account of politics Hobbes offers in Leviathan. By attending closely to the case Hobbes makes to his Christian readers to see the world and its history as he narrates it—a case that entails several modes of suasion: scientific demonstration, appeals to intuition, theological and scriptural argumentation, all of them seasoned with Hobbes’s distinctive rhetorical flourish—this essay displays the subtle way that he incorporates the nascent modern nation-state into a Christian account of salvation history, thus urging his readers to accept its total claim on their lives.

St. Thomas Aquinas on Disability & Profound Cognitive Impairment

Abstract

This dissertation raises a question regarding the relationship between the condition of the body, moral virtue, and human flourishing. Our main objective is to reconstruct Aquinas's theological understanding of corporeal infirmity in order to depict, in broad outline, a Thomistic theology of disability and cognitive impairment. A prominent concern in this investigation is to understand, according to Aquinas, the significance of the body in the perfection of human activity towards the realization of our natural and supernatural end, as well as the implications of Aquinas's view with respect to persons who have a profound and utterly debilitating cognitive impairment.

Remarks on disability and impairment are found throughout Aquinas's Summa Theologica and his treatise De Malo. Although Aquinas did not compose an ex professo theological tract on `disability,' the integral and systematic character of what he says about these matters implicates the whole of his thought and, in particular, his moral theology. In his Summa, Aquinas brings together careful scriptural exegesis, patristic and medieval sources, as well as the best philosophy of his day. The result, with respect to our theological understanding of corporeal infirmity, is an innovative and far-reaching depiction of a properly Christian understanding of these matters.

In the experience of corporeal infirmity, we are confronted with a question that pertains directly to the proper object of moral theology. [1] Regrettably, there remains a notable lacuna in contemporary Aquinas studies and Thomistic moral theology on the topics of disability and cognitive impairment. In particular, the vulnerability of human beings to the evil (malum poenae) of corporeal infirmity and the moral significance of profound affliction has received very little attention. We intend that the interpretive work of this investigation in the theology and philosophy of Aquinas will help address that lacuna.

We can describe the relevance of this project to the work of Thomistic moral theology in stronger terms. Aristotle's great insight was to understand that any description of the good life and the happy life of the human being cannot be separated from an account of how that life is possible for the kind of beings that we are, i.e., the biological constitution of the rational animal. Aquinas appropriated that Aristotelian thesis and revised it in the light of the Christian doctrine of creation. So conceived, integral to moral reasoning in the Thomistic theological tradition is the ability to account for how faithful discipleship, Christoformic virtue, and cruciform love are possible for the kind of beings that we are, i.e., our creaturely constitution: mortal rational animals made in the image of God.

Moreover--and here are the stronger terms mentioned above--no moral theology can pretend to any measure of seriousness if it does not account for how discipleship, Christoformic virtue, and cruciform love is possible for the created rational animal while contingently and unequally bearing the corporeal wounds of original sin. Specifically, grace restores and heals what was lost at the fall (original justice), but baptism does not immediately heal the wounds of original sin in our bodies (our trust in Christ entails the hope of bodily resurrection). Yet, Christ calls us to discipleship, virtue, and love as we await the restoration and healing of our wounded bodies in the consummation of glory. On this understanding of the human predicament, our present concern is to provide a theological account of what it means for the created rational animal to flourish with respect to its natural and supernatural ends, even as it continues to bear the corporeal wounds of original sin.

The four chapters of this dissertation are divided into two parts. Part 1 (chapters 2 and 3) is concerned with Aquinas's understanding of the first perfection or creaturely integrity of the human being. The objective is to depict Aquinas's account of the human being by showing how he made use of Aristotle and Augustine. Towards that end, chapter 2 focuses on Aristotle's metaphysical biology and his account of human defect; Aquinas's Augustinian doctrine of creation; and Aquinas's appropriation and subversion of Aristotle's account of `defective human beings.' Of particular importance in chapter 2 is Aquinas's engagement with the forms of irrational human behavior described in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle's theory of natural slavery outlined in Book 1 of the Politics (i.e., despotic rule over an essentially defective human being who is incapable of discursive reasoning).

Special attention is given to the precise metaphysical defect of the `slave by nature,' as distinct from other forms of human defect on Aristotle's terms. We show how Aquinas subverts Aristotle's notion of natural slavery (by rejecting the possibility of essential defect), while revising Aristotle's phenomenological description of the natural slave's dispositional dependency under the moral logic of merciful care for vulnerable and dependent persons. Specifically, Aquinas stipulates the moral imperative to counsel and protect human beings who variously and unequally `lack the use of reason' due to an extraordinary injury of the cognitive faculties.

In chapter 3 we focus on Augustine's account of the image of God and the mind (mens); Aquinas's appropriation and development of Augustine on the activity of the imago trinitatis; Aquinas's understanding of the rational soul as the substantial form of the body; and the incorruptible aptitude of the rational soul to image God by knowledge and by love.

Part 2 (chapters 4 and 5) treats Aquinas's understanding of the second perfection or orderly operation of the human being, and the effects of original sin upon that activity. The objective is to depict Aquinas's account of the purpose and perfection of the human being and to do so by showing how he went beyond Aristotle and Augustine. Chapter 4 describes Aquinas's understanding of the operational limitations unequally experienced by particular human beings as a consequence of original sin. We address, according to Aquinas, how the second perfection of the human being in operation came to be wounded, and we formulate a metaphysical account of evil suffered (or affliction). From that basis, a typological sketch of corporeal infirmity and cognitive impairment on Aquinas's terms is provided. The purpose of this systematic overview is to reconstruct Aquinas's theology of disability and cognitive impairment, to show its internal coherence, and to indicate points of significance from the aspect of our creaturely dignity and creaturely destiny.

Chapter 5 describes how those who `lack the use of reason' participate in the sacramental life of the Church (principally through Baptism and Eucharist). In particular, we treat Aquinas's understanding of the condition amentia (`mindlessness'), where a person `lacks the use of reason' due to a profound and utterly debilitating impairment of particular corporeal and cognitive faculties. We provide an account, on Aquinas's terms, of the moral implications of a profound cognitive impairment on the order of amentia. Our interest is the way Christians afflicted with amentia can, on Aquinas's view, participate in the life of the Church and live the virtues.

Specifically, just as the acquired virtues dispose and enable a person to act in accordance with the light of natural reason, which is proportionate to human nature; in the light of grace and consequent of baptism, the infused virtues dispose and enable a person to act in a `higher manner' and toward `higher ends,' in relation to a `higher nature'--which is our progress toward the perfect participation of the blessed in the divine nature. On Aquinas's terms, the consummation of grace and infusion of supernatural virtue at baptism can be understood to capacitate someone who completely `lacks the use of reason' with supernatural knowledge and a supernatural principle of self-movement. So capacitated, there is no reason to deny that a person afflicted with an amentia-like condition could be graced to realize a meritorious magnanimity in knowledge and love of God.

Likewise, on Aquinas's terms, there is good reason to believe that in baptism persons with profound and utterly debilitating cognitive impairments are capacitated for Christian friendship--even as they remain incapable of performing the acts ordinarily associated with Christian friendship. That is to say, although profoundly impaired, through baptism a person with an amentia-like condition is capable of the kind of friendship that is only possible for creatures endowed with an immortal and incorruptible rational soul. It is a friendship based on the fellowship of our deepest happiness, which is the consummation of grace; where our creaturely likeness to God according to image (by knowledge and by love) precedes and causes a supernatural likeness that we share as members of the Body of Christ.

Beginning with a thorough description of the human being and corporeal infirmity, on Aquinas's terms, and in light of his main influences, it is possible to reconstruct his account of cognitive impairment as such, its moral implications, and the moral significance of profound bodily affliction in the Christian understanding of the good life. The goal is to bring to light the doctrinal and moral integrity of what Aquinas says about physical disability and cognitive impairment--he says quite a lot--and, subsequently, to make reasonable inferences on those matters where he is silent.

Fate is not destiny. Saint Thomas Aquinas helps us recognize our fate--we who are or who will soon become weak, disabled, and cognitively impaired--in the light and the hope of the Divine consummation of nature, grace, and glory. He helps us not only to see but also to recognize that the existence of the mortal rational animal, the image of God, is beautiful. It is the beauty that belongs to the One called Beautiful, the exemplar after whom our likeness is for now but an imperfect shadow. Our infirmities, the evil we suffer, and the afflictions of our mortal wretchedness is our fate; but our fate will be redeemed and made perfect in the light of His glory, through the Beauty of the Cross.

[1] For Aquinas, the question of happiness is the principle concern of all morality. To be happy is to live a good life, which is the life of moral virtue. Affirming that basic judgment, Servais Pinckaers, O.P., remarks that "if the idea of happiness is the initial consideration in moral theology, the place of suffering will be obvious, for it is precisely the reverse of happiness. Suffering will then be an element of moral theology from the very start...[the] banishment of the consideration of suffering from ethics is an outgrowth of a rationalistic conception of the human person." Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 25.

This dissertation investigates the interpretation of Karl Barth’s ecclesiology from 1927 through 2015. The history of interpretation of Karl Barth’s ecclesiology has never been attempted in such a comprehensive way as what is attempted in this dissertation. That is its basic contribution.

The primary argument of the dissertation is that Barth’s ecclesiology has been mischaracterized in five different ways. The investigation reveals that Karl Barth’s ecclesiology has thrilled and puzzled interpreters. They end up characterizing Barth in a largely appreciative way or dismissive way but in whatever way, it is reductive. When all the secondary literature is investigated it is revealed that Sacramental interpreters applaud the fierceness with which he defends the importance of the church in the midst of a confused world but are disturbed by what they perceive to be his lack of attention to the institutional church. Free Church interpreters gloat in his denunciation of infant baptism and his preference for congregational polity but wonder why he is not even more firmly congregationalist. Architectonic interpreters bask in the genius of his Trinitarian and Christological descriptions of the church but then criticize him when he does not hew to their elegant explanations. Actualistic interpreters, disenchanted with the institutional church, relish his attacks on religion in his early commentaries on Romans but ignore that he calls his magnum opus, the Church Dogmatics. Missionary interpreters trumpet his emphasis on witness but play down his obsessive denunciation of syncretism. When all of this is seen, it becomes clear that Barth’s ecclesiology defies easy characterization. The specific evidence for different characterizations are identified and analyzed in light of what Barth really said. Sometimes the characterizations are due to a misreading of what Barth was saying. Other times Barth’s interpreters have identified an isolated statement that Barth developed elsewhere more adequately. The great advantage of this close analysis is to convey the complexity and nuance of ecclesiology. Someone who generally shares Barth’s approach to ecclesiology may learn what objections may be posed by other church traditions. For people critical of Barth’s ecclesiology, they can more adequately weigh whether indeed their critiques are well-founded.

The secondary argument of the dissertation, impossible to prove, is that Karl Barth’s ecclesiology is reasonably solid ecclesiology. The dissertation seeks to take seriously the major accusations hurled at his ecclesiology and they are found wanting. The dissertation concludes with what Barth wanted the church to be—over against the five schools of interpretation—practicing, local, catholic, confessing, and witnessing.

This dissertation attempts to do two things. First, I provide a theological interpretation of congregation-based community organizing by connecting this activity to the politics of the church. The link between the two, I argue, is the rule of Christ, a non-hierarchical process of political judgment that operates in a mode of receptive generosity and vulnerability as well as accountability to deliberate and discern how best to resolve conflicts. Situating this activity within an apocalyptic orientation determined by lordship of Jesus Christ, I suggest that this process, when accompanied by the other structuring practices of the church, allows the social, historical community to embody the new age of God's reign. Congregation-based community organizing, I conclude, is the extension and extrapolation of this constitutive process, and therefore, can be understood as an act of mission in witness and service to the world. In addition, this missionary activity can also help to retool the church in the practice of binding and loosing, which has fallen into desuetude. Second, I describe how this missionary activity functions both faithfully and effectively to challenge and counteract the forces of late, global capital. By challenging the configuration and experience of time under capital, the work of organizing can serve to recover political judgment from a regnant market ideology so as to reconstitute the way decisions are made and conflicts resolved by opening them to a process more lilted to the justice of God's reign. Moreover, in doing so, the political work of organizing can serve to offer a new future through forgiveness and reconciliation to individuals and a society trapped within a capitalist history whose end is immanently experienced in the destructive pursuit of unlimited growth and expansion.

This study approaches Óscar Romero by attending to his intimate involvement in and concern for the problematic surrounding the reform of Salvadoran agriculture and the conflict over property and possession underlying it. In this study, I situate Romero in relation to the concentration of landholding and the production of landlessness in El Salvador over the course of the twentieth century, and I examine his participation in the longstanding societal and ecclesial debate about agrarian reform provoked by these realities. I try to show how close attention to agrarian reform and what was at stake in it can illumine not only the conflict that occasioned Romero’s martyrdom but the meaning of the martyrdom itself.

Understanding Romero’s involvement in the debate about agrarian reform requires sustained attention to how it takes its bearings from the line of thinking about property and possession for which Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum stands as a new beginning. The enclyclical tradition developing out of Leo’s pontificate is commonly referred to as Catholic social doctrine or Catholic social teaching. Romero’s and the Church’s participation in the debate about agrarian reform in El Salvador is unintelligible apart from it.

What Romero and the encyclical tradition share, I argue, is an understanding of creation as a common gift, from which follows a distinctive construal of property and the demands of justice with respect to possessing it. On this view, property does not name, as it is often taken to mean, the enclosure of what is common for the exclusive use of its possessors—something to be held by them over and against others. Rather, property and everything related to its holding derive from the claim that creation is a gift given to human creatures in common. The acknowledgement of creation as a common gift gives rise to what I describe in this study as a politics of common use, of which agrarian reform is one expression.

In Romero’s El Salvador, those who took the truth of creation as common gift seriously—those who spoke out against or opposed the ubiquity of the concentration of land and who clamored for agrarian reform so that the landless and land-poor could have access to land to cultivate for subsistence—suffered greatly as a consequence. I argue that, among other things, their suffering shows how, under the conditions of sin and violence, those who work to ensure that others have access to what is theirs in justice often risk laying down their lives in charity. In other words, they witness to the way that God’s work to restore creation has a cruciform shape. Therefore, while the advocacy for agrarian reform begins with the understanding of creation as common gift, the testimony to this truth in word and in deed points to the telos of the gift and the common life in the crucified and risen Lord in which it participates

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 captive to theological concerns foreign to Paul and that we can discern in Paul a classical account of human action that Alasdair MacIntyre's work helps to recover. Such an account of agency helps ground an apocalyptic reading of Paul by recovering the centrality of the church and its day-to-day Christic practices, specifically, but not exclusively, the Eucharist. To demonstrate this we first offer a critique of some contemporary accounts of agency in Paul in light of MacIntyre's work. Three exegetical chapters then establish a "MacIntyrian" re-reading of central parts of the letter to the Romans. A concluding chapter offers theological syntheses and prospects for future research.

This thesis presents the ecclesiology of Resident Aliens as an alternative to overcome the crisis of the Korean church and focuses on the ways to establish a Christian community through “virtuous leadership”. This thesis points out the crisis situations facing Korean churches in the 21st century as a culture of quantitative growthism, secularization, an increase in “dones (Ga-na-an saints or group)”, “nones”, and a fall in credibility. This thesis compares and analyzes solutions to those crises and various ecclesiology proposed during the last 20th century and demonstrates why the community-centered and countercultural church model shown in Resident Aliens is still how biblically viable, relevant, and balanced it is. Furthermore, this thesis recognizes that the essence of the crisis of the church is not the lack of out-reach to the world, but of Christians who are not sufficiently equipped with virtues. Therefore, this thesis suggests ways to shape God's faithful people through the virtuous leadership.

This thesis presents the ecclesiology of Resident Aliens as an alternative to overcome the crisis of the Korean church and focuses on the ways to establish a Christian community through “virtuous leadership”. This thesis points out the crisis situations facing Korean churches in the 21st century as a culture of quantitative growthism, secularization, an increase in “dones (Ga-na-an saints or group)”, “nones”, and a fall in credibility. This thesis compares and analyzes solutions to those crises and various ecclesiology proposed during the last 20th century and demonstrates why the community-centered and countercultural church model shown in Resident Aliens is still how biblically viable, relevant, and balanced it is. Furthermore, this thesis recognizes that the essence of the crisis of the church is not the lack of out-reach to the world, but of Christians who are not sufficiently equipped with virtues. Therefore, this thesis suggests ways to shape God's faithful people through the virtuous leadership.

This dissertation draws on the virtue ethics tradition in moral theology and moral philosophy for inquiries regarding the acquired and infused virtues, virtue's increase and remission, and virtue's relation to sacramental practice. I rely on two medieval texts to ask and answer these questions: the Summa Theologiae by Thomas Aquinas and Piers Plowman by William Langland. My arguments are primarily inter- and intra-textual with some attention to the texts' history of interpretation and the socio-historical Catholic culture in which they were written. I conclude that the texts share pedagogical features that teach their readers in what the perfection of virtue consists and show readers how to increase in that perfection.

This thesis follows from the work of David Aers, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Josef Pieper, and Eberhard Schockenhoff.