7:30 pm,
Monday,
March 21, 2011
Administration Building, Room 28
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. He 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 (574) 535-7802, email joecl@goshen.edu