2015-2016 Inaugural Academic Lectures

Tuesday, October 20, 2015 | 2:00p in the Pamplin Chapel

B. B. WARFIELD AND THE BIBLICAL DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

Lecture Description

B. B. Warfield’s entry on the Trinity in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, published in 1915, has exercised considerable influence on later Reformed and evangelical Trinitarian theology. The lecture examines the revisionist nature of Warfield’s teaching on the triune God, noting historical precedents within the Reformed tradition for his views, and discusses patterns of biblical and theological reasoning that weigh against Warfield’s proposal.

CURRENT ISSUES IN CHRISTIAN COUNSELING

Lecture Description

The landscape of Christian counseling is changing. With the new emphasis on neuropsychology and changing cultural standards, the field of Christian soul care is trying to more clearly define itself.

TOWARD A THEORY OF THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT TEXT

Lecture Description

Since the 1950s the field of NT textual criticism has been struggling to find an overarching theory to undergird its practice. At that time the influx of second- and third-century papyrus fragments of NT books had overthrown Westcott and Hort’s theory of an unbroken line of carefully copying, from the beginning up to the fourth-century codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. What the early period of copying seemed to show instead was a pattern of loose or free copying, denoting a more casual attitude towards the preservation of the text. For the past 60 or more years, then, the prevailing tendency, the default theory, in NT text criticism has been to assume a period of free or even chaotic copying up until the fourth century, when both church and canon were established by the state. This approach leaves us with a significant gap between the “originals” and our earliest copies, a gap which is often seen as unbridgeable due to the lax copying standards of the earliest scribes. The present paper argues that the continued discovery and analysis of NT papyri, as well as recent developments in related fields, have changed our picture of the early NT scribal tradition significantly.  It is time to offer a better-informed model for our understanding of the early development of the NT text.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016 | 3:00p in the Pamplin Chapel

ADVANCES IN NEUROBIOLOGY: A NEW HORIZON FOR CHRISTIAN COUNSELORS

Lecture Description

The past decade has seen an explosion of research in the field of interpersonal neurobiology. By God’s design our brains are inescapably social organs, and the implications of this can enrich Christian counselors’ understanding of the relational nature of sin, sanctification, and the healing process.