DukeSpace

Purpose

Methods and materials

Results

Conclusions

This thesis explores the ideas, challenges, and hesitations that may arise when women engage in prophetic proclamation from the pulpit. Many women feel called by God to deliver a word of prophecy to their communities, yet they often encounter barriers to being heard and accepted as prophetic voices. Throughout both biblical and modern history, individuals have embodied prophetic actions, and this work affirms that prophecy continues to be an essential means through which God communicates with humanity. If humanity is part of God's creation, then anyone, regardless of gender, can serve as a conduit for God's word.Women have always held equal value before God, yet they have historically been viewed as lesser within society and religious communities. In both the Old and New Testaments, female prophets are present but often underrepresented. While most prophets named in Scripture are men, women also stand in the pulpit alongside their male counterparts, proclaiming messages from God. This thesis argues that women have always played a vital role in the prophetic tradition, even if their contributions have not always been acknowledged. Chapter One introduces the concept of what it means to speak prophetically. Chapter Two examines how theologians have understood the role of the prophet and how this understanding has evolved over time. Chapter Three presents biblical examples of prophetic women in both the Old and New Testaments, supported by insights from biblical commentaries. In Chapter Four, the discussion turns to contemporary implications for those who feel called to prophetic ministry—especially women who have had negative experiences when attempting to speak prophetically. This chapter offers encouragement for women to live into their calling with boldness and faith. Chapter Five concludes with reflections on what it means for women to embody a prophetic vocation today. An appendix includes a guide designed for use in small groups or workshops to help women understand, embrace, and feel empowered in their call to ministry and preaching. Readers are invited to approach this work with an open mind and heart, recognizing that God can and does call anyone to proclaim God's will for creation.

This dissertation delineates an African Pentecostal political theology of money within the context of Ghana’s public and private debt, which originates in the disparities created by the enchanted Black Atlantic currency exchange system. Exploring the Ghanaian Pentecostal/Charismatic economy of tithes and seed offerings, it delves into the soteriological and political utility of money as a mediation object that generates the spiritual and material condition for humans to enter a credit–debt relationship with God. The Pentecostal use of money as a mediation object spawns fundamental soteriological questions, such as whether divine gifts to humans are unconditional or products of exchange. From a political and economic theology perspective, it begs the question of the extent to which human exchange economies are similar or dissimilar to the divine economy of unconditional giving. Addressing these questions, the study offers a constructive theological framework that gestures toward a more faithful and just way of organizing credit–debt relationships that resists the manufactured conditions of debt and austerity under neoliberal capitalism.Drawing on the sermons and writings of eminent Ghanaian Pentecostal/Charismatic preachers in dialogue with cultural anthropological theories of gift, debt, and money, the dissertation argues that all political economic discourse is imbricated with salvation discourse. In developing this argument, the dissertation offers a theological and anthropological account of the exchange logic in the Pentecostal economy of tithes and seed offerings. Furthermore, from a historical perspective, it examines the mutually constitutive relationship between the history of Ghana’s currencies, political economic history, and the economy of salvation, as manifested in Ghana’s history from the precolonial era to the present day. Given the absence of money, debt, and the Pentecostal exchange economy in African political theologies and global Pentecostal studies, the constructive and theological vision offered contributes to African Christian theology, world Christianity, and political theology.

While the New Testament contains a relative paucity of references to age and aging, Luke’s Gospel and Acts stand out as a striking exception. Luke’s infancy narrative includes young characters (John, Jesus, and likely Mary) alongside older characters (Zechariah, Elizabeth, Anna, and by implication, Simeon). The juxtaposition of young and old appears again at Pentecost, where Peter, quoting Joel, declares, “Your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams” (Acts 2:17). While the focus on young and old is rather concentrated in these opening chapters of Luke and Acts, Luke’s narrative includes characters of various ages throughout. Still, scholarship has given little focus to the broader narrative implications of Luke’s depiction of age broadly conceived.

This dissertation offers a historically situated, literary examination of Luke’s narratives to analyze Luke’s depiction of age. By incorporating literary, material, and demographic evidence, both Greco-Roman and Jewish, this dissertation situates Luke’s narratives within their broader cultural milieu. This dissertation argues that Luke’s account of age furthers a particular theme in Luke’s narratives: that of God’s inclusive—and specifically, intergenerational—kingdom. As scholars often discuss, the vision of the kingdom of God in Luke’s Gospel and Acts is inclusive in a variety of ways: namely, it includes rich and poor, Jew and gentile, male and female. In addition to these categories, I suggest that Luke’s vision of the kingdom of God includes young and old—a merism that has received far less attention than the other merisms that also make up God’s kingdom in Luke’s narratives. References to characters’ ages in Luke’s narratives are not merely incidental but rather essential elements of Luke’s narrative and wider theological program. Further, I argue that Luke’s portrayal of God’s kingdom values characters of different ages qua their different ages; that is, children are valued as children and older adults as older adults, and the narratives recognize the nuances of these different life stages.