I just received the news today that my student paper submission for the 2015 Southeast Regional Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society has been accepted!

My theme lately has been to write on Karl Barth and the unity of the Church. At last year's Regional ETS (hosted by my seminary, Beeson Divinity School), I presented an edited version of my undergraduate thesis: Reconciliation and the Lack Thereof: Atonement, Ecclesiology, and the Unity of God. Click the link if you'd like to read the PDF. Here's the thesis:

"This essay endeavors to demonstrate the theological and exegetical legitimacy of viewing the atonement as the act in which the one God fulfills his creative purposes by bringing his uniqueness and simplicity to bear on our sinful, divisive condition through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah in order to save a people to robust unity with himself, each other, and the entire creation."

That paper was a blast to write, because I got to take the doctoral work of my professor (and friend) Adam J. Johnson (God's Being in Reconciliation: The Theological Basis of the Unity and Diversity of the Atonement in the Theology of Karl Barth, now available in paperback!) and "build" an atonement theory based upon the divine perfection of oneness/unity. I hope to expand on that work, drawing upon other theologians than Johnson and Barth, expanding my exegetical arguments for the atonement theory's legitimacy, considering practical implications for ecumenical efforts, etc.

This year, I have submitted a slightly edited version of my final paper fora seminar on the Theology of Karl Barth taught by Piotr Malysz last Fall at Beeson. The Barthian analogy is taking Barth's definition of sin as ontological impossibility – the impossible possibility – and transferring it to thought and speech about the Church. It's a relatively simple idea, with profound ramifications (in my humble opinion) for ecumenical efforts. Here's the abstract:

"Just as sin is ontological impossibility, disunity is ecclesiological impossibility. The tension between the undeniable reality of sin and Karl Barth’s theological definition of sin as an impossible possibility parallels the tension between the obvious reality of a fractured church and the theological definition of the church as the one body of the one Christ. In order to describe in Barthian terms what it means for church disunity to be possible only as sin is possible, the purpose of this paper is to correlate Barth’s anthropological concept of sin as ontological impossibility with its parallel ecclesiological concept: disunity as ecclesiological impossibility. I then conclude by locating this discussion within Barth’s own ecumenical vision – with an eye toward informing and motivating further ecumenical efforts."

I believe this is an important topic to discuss because, as I put it, "each community’s self-examination and pursuit of Christ’s unifying summons will only be as rigorous as its understanding of the absurdity of church fragmentation." That is, we're only going to put effort into being unified as Christ's Church if we have a robust understanding of just how ABSURD division is within the Body of Christ!

If you're interested in this topic, but you can't make it to Lithonia, GA on March 27-28, feel free to read my paper here:

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