Trinity Term 2026
All members of the university and their guests are welcome.
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Repairing Christian Doctrine: A Realist Path to Resilience
Professor J. L. Schellenberg Mount Saint Vincent University Abstract:
In a book I’m writing on Incipient Christianities, a constructive work on the philosophy of Christianity and a companion to my 2024 book What God Would Have Known, I discuss a number of different ways of pursuing what I call resilience in Christian thought and practice, defined as a property possessed by any Christian lifeway that is undisturbed by the first book’s negative conclusions about classical Christian doctrine. Part I of this new book is focused on realist ways of pursuing resilience. Four are distinguished. These four are named Repairing, Reducing, Replacing, and Reconfiguring. Here I share a draft of my chapter on Repairing, a move which seeks to preserve the classical doctrine’s central categories – sin, salvation, and so on – and thus in that sense to keep the doctrine, while in practice reinterpreting the doctrine in the light of critical discussion so as to avoid the development-related problems that bedevil the doctrine as classically interpreted. Repairers think we can still get some truth out of the old doctrines – literal, propositional truth – if the right changes are made, which show sensitivity to human development. So, for example, the doctrine of sin may come to include reference to racism and sexism, the doctrine of salvation our liberation from sin thus understood, and so on. In the elaboration of this approach and discussion of its potential quite a number of classical and contemporary figures will make an appearance, including Kathryn Tanner, Serene Jones, Kevin W. Hector, John Bishop and Ken Perszyk, Rowan Williams, Judith Wolfe, Nancey Murphy, John Macquarrie, Paul Ricoeur, Paul Tillich, Thomas Aquinas, and of course Jesus of Nazareth When 8:30 to 10 pm (Refreshments from 8:15pm) Tuesday 28 April Week 1 Where Large Senior Common Room Oriel College, Oxford |
The Exemplarist Theodicy: A New Response to the Problem of Evil
Dr Joshua Sijuwade University of Birmingham Abstract:
This talk addresses the problem of evil by developing the Exemplarist Theodicy, which argues that suffering is logically necessary for the transformation of individuals into moral exemplars who ground morality itself and spread goodness around the world. After considering why more familiar responses, such as the free will defence, soul-making theodicy, and sceptical theism, do not fully succeed, I propose that suffering plays an indispensable role across four stages of moral transformation: participation in basic goods, self-formation, the acquisition of virtues, and transformative experience. In each case, suffering provides conditions necessary for the relevant form of development. The account is then extended to animal suffering through engagement with contemporary ethology, and to non-exemplary sufferers, including those incapable of moral transformation, through the notion of divine omnisubjectivity, according to which God experiences the suffering of all creatures and manifests virtues connected with limitation. By developing this theodicy, the talk aims to show how an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God could permit the kinds of evil we observe. When 8:30 to 10 pm (Refreshments from 8:15pm) Thursday 4 June Week 6 Where Large Senior Common Room Oriel College, Oxford |
