San Francisco Theological Seminary

The question of whether religious conversion causes changes in someone’s personality is examined in light of two bodies of literature—the research on personality change and the research on conversion. When the theory and research on personality change is applied to the question of whether conversion causes such change, the answer depends on what level of personality is of concern. Research on the relation between religious conversion and a variety of behavioral, attitudinal, emotional, and lifestyle variables is consistent with this conclusion. Although conversion seems to have minimal effect on elemental functions such as the Big Five traits or temperaments, it can result in profound, life transforming changes in mid‐level functions such as goals, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors, and in the more self‐defining personality functions such as identity and life meaning. This seems to be so whether the process of conversion is sudden or gradual, active or passive, and to a traditional Western or Eastern religion or to a new religious movement. However, most of the research is retrospective and cross‐sectional, and no systematic program of research has ever been sustained. Suggestions for the form of future research are made, and a model for integrating the many factors that must be taken into account and for guiding future research is sketched.

Abstract This essay surveys a generation of scholarship since the death of Beryl Smalley, pioneer in the study of the medieval reception of the bible, in 1984. We try to give a fair representation of work produced in English, French, German, and Italian over the last thirty years. We report on: 1) editions, tools, and translations, 2) surveys and synthetic treatments, 3) work on medieval biblical hermeneutics, 4) studies of periods and individuals, 5) thematic studies and studies of biblical books and pericopes across broad periods, and 6) comparative work on Muslim, Jewish, and Christian exegesis. We describe a rapidly growing quantity of knowledge and expanding perspectives on biblical interpretation in medieval culture. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

This essay explores the constructions of the child developed in the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These child-constructs constitute important psychological source-theories for spiritualities of childhood as each embodies a particular understanding of what childhood means, within the author's understandings of human personhood. After addressing an initial period of agreement between the two thinkers in which both understood the child as preeminently sexual, the essay details Jung's departure from Freud over the latter's theory of infantile sexuality, toward a construction of the child as having a special closeness to the spiritual realms of the numinous and the collective unconscious. This construct of Jung, while upholding a basically hopeful and positive view of the child, risks distortions in over-idealized spiritualities of childhood. Freud's construction, on the other hand, maintained an essentially negative parallel between the child and illusory religion, and the child and so-called primitive societies, that risks reducing children's spirituality to moralisms. At the same time, however, the essay concludes that elements of both of their constructions of the child may be retrieved toward children's spiritualities that promote the thriving of children.

Felix Fabri was a Dominican convent lecturer and preacher of the Swabian city of Ulm who made two pilgrimages to Jerusalem at the end of the fifteenth century (1480, 1483–4). He wrote four distinct works based, in part, on his experiences. A Gereimtes Pilgerbüchlein was composed after his first trip. A detailed, first-hand travel account in Latin called the Evagatorium , a larger vernacular work on the Holy Land called the Pilgerbuch and a devotional book structured around a mental journey called the Sionpilger were finished over the decade after his second return. The Evagatorium was also translated into German. It circulated alone and it was incorporated into the Pilgerbuch . The shorter Evagatorium and the longer Pilgerbuch were recopied as late as the eighteenth century. Adding to Fabri’s early modern fame were six editions of the Pilgerbuch printed between 1556 and 1663. The Pilgerbuch was used by both Catholic and Protestant readers. The Sionpilger by contrast enjoyed a more limited renown. It was copied at least seven times within a decade of writing, but then not reproduced again until rediscovered in the nineteenth century.

Abstract This essay asks the question, is it useful to approach the Reformation as a phase in a linear chronology, a movement away from the Middle Ages? On the example of Matthias Flacius Illyricus and the formation of Lutheran identity in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, I argue that Protestants had a vested interest in the continuity of their beliefs with medieval thought and culture. The familiar idea of a medieval‐Reformation rupture is largely an invention of the nineteenth century. The research of recent decades, which I survey, has shown the limitations of this idea. I conclude with a proposal for seeing cultural change within multiple, overlapping chronologies.

At Ferrara and Florence the healing of the old schism between the Eastern and Western Chruches proved to be more than a hope, and in corresponding measure the breach between the Pope and the Council of Basel became less than a real new Occidental Schism. The Florence-Ferrara conception of Christian unity has led to the doctrine of the Vatical Council and will be of great importance at the council which has been announced by the present Pope. Together with our Roman Catholic brethren we are convinced that a clear understanding of the character of Christian unity must exist prior to all attempts at union or reunion of churches, prior as a condition and as an incentive those efforts.

This is a study of the emotional context of certain medieval anti-Jewish legends. It examines how the stories redefined the composition of society, the relation of this to popular devotion, and the paradox between a religious intention and its effect. After a brief survey of the phenomenon, I suggest that recent views of the psychological sources of the legends do not adequately account for the religious experience that they promote, nor do these explanations sufficiently account for the way the legends encouraged and reinforced social habits—“ruts in the pathways of the mind” that encouraged the maintenance of conformity among members of society. Part one will examine how the libels could help people imagine more specifically the general hostility against Jews widely propagated after the First Crusade and how this superimposed a social uniformity on the town. Part two describes the emotional context of that violence in devotion to the passion of Christ. Part three considers the moral dilemma posed by the function of these legends in popular devotion. My goal is to account for the religious content of anti-Jewish legend and an ethical problem within medieval piety, for which reason it will be necessary to draw on the diverse literature that shaped medieval Christian culture, both learned and popular, from the twelfth century, when the legends first appeared in Europe, to the eve of the Reformation.

Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, and Robin D. S. Yates . Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China: A Study with Critical Edition and Translation of the Legal Texts from Zhangjiashan Tomb no. 247. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 2 vols. - Volume 40

This paper explores exposure learning as a strategy for teaching theology in a Christian seminary, by describing and analyzing one multicultural Asian class's exposure to the “Red Light Districts” of Manila (Philippines). Exposures consist of short‐term experiential learning events through participation and immersion into a specific context, preceded and followed by a process of study and reflection. Exposure learning has the potential to minimize certain forms of student resistance around emotionally‐charged subjects, such as the integration of race, class, and gender into theological education, because it is the experience together with shared critical reflection on it and not the teacher's viewpoints per se that unsettle prior interpretive frameworks. Exposure learning also carries certain risks and ethical dilemmas, and its long‐term effects on transformation remain unclear. In spite of these pedagogical issues which the paper explores in detail, the paper supports exposure learning as an alternative experiential form of education for transformation.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid NgDavid Ng is professor of Christian education at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, California.

In the midst of the debate over ordination of people who are homosexual, Presbyterians worked to understand their different approaches to biblical interpretation. The biblical theology movement, with roots in the theology of Karl Barth, had earlier provided a method of biblical interpretation that enabled the Presbyterian Church to change its stance on divorce and remarriage, and racial equality. Barth did not adhere to his own exegetical method when dealing with women and people who are homosexual, however, and so his writings proved a barrier to change within the church on the issue of homosexuality. Subsequently, the Presbyterian Church commissioned a task force to see if it could come to consensus about the best way to interpret the Bible. Guidelines based on the Reformed Confessions, developed by this task force and officially adopted by the church, now offer the possibility of resolving some of our deepest divisions.

Abstract One of the problems confronting the doctrine of the Incarnation concerns Jesus’ apparent limitation in knowledge. This paper assesses various constructive proposals by modern theologians and philosophers, focusing on three of the most widely discussed solutions, namely Ontological Kenoticism, Two Consciousnesses Model, and Divine Subconscious Model. I argue that despite recent work done on the first two, the difficulties of avoiding the implication that the Logos ceased to be divine (for the first) and the implication of Nestorianism (for the second) remain. I conclude that the most promising solution is to defend Functional Kenoticism and develop the Divine Subconscious Model.

Dilthey, in his famous essay, ‘Die Enstehung der Hermeneutik’, first published in 1900, taught us that Matthias Flacius Illyricus, the mid sixteenth-century Lutheran theologian, was the author of the first significant treatise on hermeneutics. Conceding a classic Protestant opinion once articulated by Flacius, he consigned medieval interpretation to what must have seemed a justified oblivion: he simply ignored the period between Origen and John Calvin. Calvin, Flacius, and especially Friedrich Schleiermacher were the main contributors to the rediscovery of the interpretive force of history and language, which Dilthey surely felt was best appreciated by his own philosophy of culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer later tried to show that Dilthey himself was weak on language and misinformed about history, falling prey to the movement that Gadamer opprobriously called ‘historicism’. Gadamer's own view of the development of hermeneutics—with its subjection of historical knowledge to ‘our own present horizon of understanding’, its accent on language, and its debt to Martin Heidegger—shifted the chronology of hermeneutics even closer to the present According to Gadamer, the ‘hermeneutic problem’ was specifically created by the alienation of exegesis and understanding from ‘application’, the importance of which was discovered only by Romantic philosophy and best redressed with the help of a language-obsessed philosophy of being. But as was the case for Dilthey, the crucial moment in the development of hermeneutics remained the discovery of the role of language in ‘meaning’, in the broadest sense, so that texts could only be understood in the grand context of a philosophy of life or, in Gadamerian terms, in the context of a philosophy that functioned as present interpretation.

Abstract This article proposes a pedagogy based upon congregational studies to further the contextualization of education in both seminary and congregational settings. Christian congregations and theological seminaries comprise two overlapping yet distinctive “communities of practice” in which teaching and learning the Bible constitutes a primary, even defining, activity. The article describes a seminary course that used congregational studies as its pedagogical framework. It then outlines eight features of a pedagogy based upon congregational studies, concluding with a brief assessment of the dangers and opportunities for a more contextual approach to education in seminary and congregational educational settings. 1A Fall 2004 faculty study leave grant from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion supported the research and writing of this article, for which I am grateful. An earlier version was presented in a section of the November 2004 meeting of the Religious Education Association/Association of Professors and Researchers in Religious Education concerning congregational studies and pedagogy. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues as the Graduate Theological Union (Boyoung Lee, Mai Ahn Tran, Tony Vrame, Tito Cruz, and Carol Jacobson) whose comments in preparation for this session and co-presentations during it helped me to clarify my perspectives. This article also benefited from the many insightful comments and questions by REA/APRRE session participants, and from the experiences with students participating in the “Teaching the Bible in Congregations” course who (although remaining anonymous) gave permission for me to quote them in this article. Notes 1A Fall 2004 faculty study leave grant from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion supported the research and writing of this article, for which I am grateful. An earlier version was presented in a section of the November 2004 meeting of the Religious Education Association/Association of Professors and Researchers in Religious Education concerning congregational studies and pedagogy. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues as the Graduate Theological Union (Boyoung Lee, Mai Ahn Tran, Tony Vrame, Tito Cruz, and Carol Jacobson) whose comments in preparation for this session and co-presentations during it helped me to clarify my perspectives. This article also benefited from the many insightful comments and questions by REA/APRRE session participants, and from the experiences with students participating in the “Teaching the Bible in Congregations” course who (although remaining anonymous) gave permission for me to quote them in this article. 2A full description of our activities is impossible within the limits of space for this article. In brief however, within the congregations and outside of our classroom context, we met with persons from the congregations for oral histories and “space tours,” an activity in congregational studies in which members of the community walk through the facilities and describe its uses and meanings in the life of that congregation. We shared meals in neighborhood restaurants and walked through the communities in which these churches minister, to supplement our census-based demographic studies of these contexts with hands-on, experiential knowledge of the neighborhoods. Other times, pastors from the two churches came into our classroom to offer their perspectives on the congregation and to be interviewed by students about their ministries. Course participants attended a variety of events at the two churches, becoming participant observers in worship, adult education, and fellowship events in both of the congregations. In relation to these ethnographic experiences of congregational studies, our classroom setting operated as a location for focused learning and inquiry about such elements as how demographic features of these particular neighborhoods, or the age, socioeconomic class, and racial-ethnic composition of a congregation in relation to its immediate neighborhood context matter in the shaping of its local theology and mission. 3Features six and seven as worded here were contributions by Mary Elizabeth Moore.

This article examines how ancient authors of different provenances outlined centre and end of world and how this influenced way they evaluated bodies from periphery. Geographic reference, gender and skin colour have especially intersected in sources of medical provenance. The Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26-40 embodies his geographic origin. In considering his case we find that issue of gender is inseparable from other prominent aspects of his identity: his social standing as well as his race and geographic origin - a man from the end of earth. But in this article construct of black eunuch is not so much focused on his otherness, with a universal mission in mind; rather, it is connected with a special geographical and historical perspective that was wellknown in first century C.E. Hence, what is at centre of this story is not missiological search for end of earth, but religious search for middle ground, which is found in an interpretation of Ebed Jahwe citation from Isaiah 53:7-8. Instead of interpreting this text christologically, this article argues that Suffering Servant represents Jerusalem, which is seen by nations, that is Ethiopian eunuch. Therefore embodiment of geographical origin is assigned theological importance: it represents religious search for centre of world, which is Jerusalem.

Das kosmische Heils-Drama. Eine Studie über Paulus unbestrittene Schriften aus anthropologischer und kosmologischer Perspektive.

Abstract The uncomfortable question of Martin Luther’s place in the development of modern anti-Semitism is raised by Luther’s status as a national cultural icon after German unification (1871) and by the fact that the Third Reich (1933–1945) perpetrated what is arguably the most violently racist state policy known to human history thus far. Luther contributed to the symbiosis of religious and secular prejudices. The reception of Luther’s anti-Jewish discourse illustrates the gradual diffusion of religious hostility into a society where churches slid from a central position to the margins of social influence. This can only be understood against the backdrop of a long chronology of religious thinking. The long chronology shows that Luther was more a conduit than a catalyst of European anti-Jewish polemic and feeling.

This article is a response to the six articles on the integration of psychology and theology which comprise this issue. The article is divided into three parts. Part I consists of specific reactions to each of the articles. Part II is a brief overview of three modes of integration. Part III outlines some of the issues and trends which emerge in the six articles and includes projections about the future of the integration task.

This essay explores pedagogical practices and ethical obligations in the embrace of cultural and religious diversity by a faculty team in a theological school course. Attention is given to the interplay of art and ethical dilemmas in an educational praxis that calls into question students’ taken‐for‐granted worldviews and theologies. In the first of three sections the writers identify several assumptions they brought to the conduct of the course regarding diversity, art, and pedagogy. The second section describes student encounters with and responses to art from a variety of cultural contexts. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on ethical and political issues arising from pedagogical practices that engage students with art.

William James's psychology is here examined in the context of his normative ethics and his concern for evolution. James's notion of the strenuous life, the core of his normative vision, is shown to be crucial to his psychology of consciousness, self, attention, and will. Moreover, James's ethical concerns were not only implicit in his psychological writings, but his psychology delineated the human capacities which enable a person to engage in vigorous moral agency for the improvement of the community.