Postgraduate Seminar 2008
Jonathan Edwards
CTE Seminar Series, Second Semester 2008Open to all comers
6-8 pm Thursdays, Room 308, Building W6A
7 August
Edwin Judge: ‘Who needed a third race and why?’
'Between 135 and the end of the century, Christians attained a self-identity based on their sacred literature, the New Testament, their distinctive liturgy, their rule of faith, and their wide-ranging organisation. All this clearly marked them out as the 'third race' which in terms of religion they claimed themselves to be' (W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984) 162).
4 September
Brian Roberts: ‘Crossing Thresholds: the Bible, the BCA, and the Pilbara’
CEO of Bush Church Aid, Brian Roberts has been in Britain recently exploring the applicability of the concept of ‘liminality’ to the development of mission strategies. Here he analyses the usefulness of the concept to a mining community in Western Australia.
Jim Gibson: ‘The 'sensus divinitatis’ in John Calvin's understanding of the knowledge of God’
Jim is a lecturer in theology at Malyon Baptist College in Brisbane. He is researching the role of the human understanding of God which is prefatory to the understanding which comes from acceptance of the gospel. Here he looks at Calvin’s view of this knowledge.
18 September
Mike Thompson: ‘The worlds of Reinhold Niebuhr: Anglo-American Christianity in war, peace, and world crisis, 1920s-1940s’
Mike is a PhD Candidate and tutor in the History Department of the University of Sydney, working in the field of U.S. history. His work on Niebuhr was recently published in the special "Religion and Politics" issue of the US-based American Quarterly. He has also written on Christianity, war, and US foreign policy for the Centre for Public Christianity and for the Centre for Apologetic Scholarship and Education (CASE) at New College, UNSW.
9 October
Darrell Paproth: ‘Evangelicals and intellectual righteousness in colonial Melbourne’
Darrell lectures in Church History at the Bible College of Victoria. He is the author of a PhD and subsequent book on the Victorian evangelical leader, C. H. Nash. For this, his second doctorate, he is studying Victorian evangelicalism in the Victorian Age.
Raymond Heslehurst: ‘Political Reform and Religious Allegiance: Robert Isaac Wilberforce’
Raymond, an Anglican priest, is studying the transmission of faith across generations, from the Clapham evangelicals of the late eighteenth century to their descendants, the Bloomsbury freethinkers in the early twentieth century.
30 October
Barry Chant: “ ‘This is revival -- or is it?’ A biblical and historical investigation into the phenomenon of Christian revival”
Barry Chant has a PhD in history from Macquarie University. He wrote the first major history of Pentecostalism in Australia. He was the founding president of Tabor College, Australia, and is currently the Senior Pastor of the Wesley International Congregation in Sydney.
6 November
Martin Simms: ‘Archbishop West-Watson, the man and his times: the challenges of writing biography as history’
Martin has been selected to participate in a workshop at the ANU on history and biography. His paper will reflect his experience of the workshop.
David Pettett ‘Samuel Marsden; plagiarist?’ Marsden has been accused of “dishing up Simeon’s skeletons with very little lean meat on them”.
David’s research so far shows that many sermons were heavily dependent on Charles Simeon. In this paper David seeks to determine just how independent Marsden was.
Open to all comers
6-8 pm Thursdays
Ancient History Documentary Research Centre, Room 308, Third Floor, Building W6A
A pdf of semester 2 2008 Program is available by clicking here.