8:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. (Room 107, Truett Seminary)

Session I begins at 9:00 a.m.

9:00-10: 30 a.m. (Room 107)

Moderator: Steven T. Hoskins

Papers:

1. Douglas Strong,  "The Legacy of Pietistic Spirituality in Holiness Abolitionism"

Abolitionism has been known for its activism regarding the termination of chattel slavery and securing equal rights for African Americans.  But the majority of abolitionists were evangelical Christians who also demonstrated a deep, Pietistic spirituality.  It was their spirituality that stimulated, animated, and sustained their activism.  Specific Pietistic elements of abolitionist spirituality can be seen in their self-examination through journaling, their sense of a personal relationship with God, their emphasis on holy living, and their devotional practices of small group discipleship, individual and group prayer ("concerts of prayer"), hymn singing, and testimony.  This paper will concentrate on the newly discovered journal of the Oberlin graduate, missionary, and antislavery advocate, David Ingraham, as a prime example of the Pietistic spirituality that was characteristic of abolitionists.

2. Esther Chung Kim, “John Wesley and the Last Wave of Clerical Medicine in Early Modern Europe"

While John Wesley was clearly devoted to spiritual formation, he was also interested in physical health, especially as his ministry extended to the poor in urban and rural contexts. In 1747, Wesley wrote a book, Primitive Physick: Or, an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases. His views reflected a dedication to healthy living, preventative medicine, and inexpensive treatments for curing disease. The purpose of this essay is not to evaluate eighteenth-century remedies as they compare with current scientific standards of treatment, nor engage in retroactive diagnosis, but rather to examine the role of clerical medicine and its impact on eighteenth-century English society.

As a continuation of the medieval Catholic tradition, many seminary-trained parish priests often had the additional task of practicing medicine. Governments and local people depended on clerical medicine to help with general needs and in times of crisis.  Wesley’s book emerged at the end of an earlier movement in the 16th and 17th centuries that saw an explosion of printing and popularity of medical texts, treatises, and manuals including many recipes such as Wesley himself would have selectively chosen to include in his book. Despite the medieval prohibitions against clerics practicing medicine, such prohibitions were relaxed in the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth century saw a revival in clerical medicine with the encouragement of Continental secular governments that hoped to use the clergy to administer medical assistance in their parishes.[1] Priests, pastors, and deacons involved in early modern poor relief recognized that disease and disability were the causes of poverty. Hence in the efforts of poverty alleviation, medical care, as part of the healing of body and soul, became a major concern of religious and civic leaders. In particular, the clergy assisted the government during times of epidemic. However, the growing professionalism of doctors in addition to the Enlightenment ultimately brought about the end of clinical medicine in Europe while in America by the end of the nineteenth century, every state had enacted legislation that prevented clergy from practicing medicine, as a way to protect the authority of physicians to establish a monopoly and exclude other types of unlicensed healers.

[1] Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 158.

3. Lane Davis, "Pietist Vitality in the Liberal Methodist Tradition, 1870-1920"

Pietism was largely disowned from both the theological left and theological right in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Both Ritschl and Barth disavowed Pietist theology, though for conflicting reasons, and many in both liberal and neo-orthodox camps followed their lead. While theologians might have distanced themselves from Pietist heritage, Pietist emphases can be found in a surprising number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestant communities. This paper will argue that the liberal Methodist tradition in America, particularly expressed in social gospel movements, provides an under-explored theological and social lens for understanding the confluence of individualized and socialized Pietism in American Methodism. Far from being rejected, Pietism's historic emphases were transformed and channeled into diverse religious expressions. Using sources from both MEC and MECS branches of the American church, this paper seeks to challenge the idea that Methodism began an inevitable decline in vitality in the late nineteenth century. Instead, Methodism redirected the theological energy of Pietism into efforts of post-millennial kingdom building that relied on new forms of vitality

Piper Great Hall

11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. (Room 107)

Moderator: Ted Campbell

Papers:

1. Wendy Deichmann, “Who were the women among the 18th Century Precursors and Founders of the United Brethren in Christ?” 

On June 4, 1726, in Dillenburg, Nassau, Germany, Wilhelmina Henrietta Otterbein gave birth to a son, Philip William Otterbein.  She played an essential and influential role in his faith, life, and ministry, including his decision to respond favorably to a call from the German Reformed Church for pastors to cross the Atlantic to serve in ministry in North America.  Yet, along with most other women in the movement that became known as the Church of the  United Brethren in Christ, little is widely known about her. This paper will explore historical resources to identify additional women who were participants and influencers among the precursors and founders of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.  Who were they?  What did they do?  What roles did they fill?  How have they been recorded in the movement's churches and written histories?  What difference do their stories make in the telling of the history of Pietism and the history of Christianity? 

2. Scott Kisker, "A Manifest Move of God: The Miraculous in Early 19th Century American Pietism"

Those German American Pietist denominations that merged with the Methodist Church in 1968 to form the United Methodist Church had come into being during the period of American religious history commonly referred to as the Second Great Awakening.  They were, in face, major shapers of, and were in turn shaped by, that religious environment.  From their European heritage they had inherited the language and expectation of the work of the Holy Spirit in conversion and sanctification.  This vocabulary and experience gave emerging German Pietist denominations like the United Brethren in Christ and Evangelical Association a language of God's immediate action, which both interpreted and perpetuated the events they saw occurring around them.  In the religious landscape of early nineteenth century revival, those attracted to and helping to form the United Brethren in Christ and the Evangelical Association expected God's immediate, dramatic presence and action through the miraculous. Dreams, signs, "falling exercises," all confirmed and invigorated the work of revival, spurred the growth of their churches, and helped define both American Pietism and these emerging denominations. 

3. Andrew Kinsey, "The Holy Communion Epiclesis of the EUBs: Partaking of the Divine Nature as the Means to Unity"

This paper will argue that the epiclesis prayer in the Evangelical United Brethren Church liturgy of Holy Communion finds its scriptural basis in 2 Peter 1:4 (‘being partakers of the divine nature) and provides the means to unity in a fractured church and world. This particular prayer of invocation is significant in the church’s journey toward sanctification and in the hope of a new future, especially of those within the wider Pietist and Wesleyan traditions. The petition to the Father to send down the Holy Spirit and the Word so that the bread and the wine will become the body and blood of Jesus Christ and that the gathered assembly as a whole will become the body of Christ - points to the same Spirit who make the church one in Christ. This partaking actualizes the reality of God’s presence and so draws us as the church into a fuller ecclesial unity. The actual prayer from the EUB liturgy that this paper will focus on is as follows:

Hear us, O merciful Father, we most humbly beseech thee; and bless and sanctify with thy Word and Holy Spirit, these thy gifts of bread and wine, that we, receiving them, according to thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ’s holy institution, in remembrance of his passion, death, and resurrection, may be partakers of the divine nature through him. 

(The Book of Worship of the United Methodist Church, 43-44.)

Such words help us to see how in the Pietist tradition of the EUB that the res of Holy Communion is the unity of the ecclesial community: not only is the Holy Spirit involved but the Word too – a double-double, so to speak, with both ‘Spirit and Word’ blessing and sanctifying the ‘bread and the wine’ and the ‘gathered body’.  

Piper Great Hall

1:30-2:30 p.m. (Room 107)

Baylor Black Gospel Archives Project, Hosted by Stephen Newbie, Moody Library

Black Gospel Archive | University Libraries, Museums, and the Press | Baylor University

Piper Great Hall

3:00-5:00 p.m.  (Room 107)

Joint Session with the Wesleyan Dogmatics Group

Panel: The Theology of William J. Abraham: Themes & Trajectories 

Panelists:

Frederick Aquino, Southern Methodist University

Thomas McCall, Asbury Theological Seminary

Douglas Koskela, Seattle Pacific University

Outside Room 107, Truett Seminary

Wesleyan Dogmatics Group

6:00 p.m. (Room 107)

United Theological Seminary Doctor of Theology Lecture:

Kimlyn Bender, Baylor University

“The Church as the Body of Christ: A Brief Historical Survey of a Contested Image and a Theological Investigation of Its Underlying Convictions"

Nazarene Historical Society

6:30 p.m. (Room 309)

Steven Hoskins, “Holy Places as Historic Sites: An Initiative for Charting The History of the Church of the Nazarene”

Tom Miles, “Protest Against a Changing Church: The Church of the Bible Covenant and the Church of the Nazarene”

Ryan Giffin, “Phineas F. Bresee’s Editorial ‘Reaching Men’ as a Window into his Theology of Evangelism”