10:00 am,
Monday,
March 21, 2011
Church-Chapel
Convocation: "True Evangelical Faith and the Gospel of Peace"
Gerald Mast, a professor at Bluffton University in Ohio, will
deliver this year's C. Henry Smith peace lecture. (N.b.: he
will deliver a slightly expanded version of this lecture at
7:30 PM the same day.) Gerald describes his lecture as
follows: "Throughout the twentieth century evangelical
visions of
evangelism and salvation have competed with Anabaptist visions
of nonresistance and peacemaking for the devotion of peace
church communities such as Mennonites and Brethren. While some
have assumed that evangelicalism is the enemy of pacifist
convictions, others have assumed that these theological
traditions can and should be integrated. The lecture explores
the deep history of tension between evangelical soteriology
and Anabaptist ethics, including Reformation era debates as
well as a little known series of conferences at Malone College
in 1970's between World Council of Churches leaders and
members of the National Association of Evangelicals attended
by Mennonite leaders William Klassen and John Howard Yoder.
Using a Pauline rhetoric of assembly, the lecture poses
evangelical faith and peace church practices as gifts whose
solidarity rests on a social vision of justification: The work
of Jesus Christ reconciles us with both God and our enemies
through no effort or merit of our own."
Contact: Joe Liechty, phone 7802, email joecl@goshen.edu