'Make me a Fruitfull Vine:' Dealing with Infertility in Early Modern England

An American Body | Politic

SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTING GOD: GENDER, CULTURE, AND A STRATIFIED TRINITY by Landon P. Schnabel Adviser: Darius Jankiewicz ABSTRACT OF GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH ThesisOF GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH Thesis Andrews University Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary Title: SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTING GOD: GENDER, CULTURE, AND A STRATIFIED TRINITY Name of researcher: Landon P. Schnabel Name and degree of faculty adviser: Darius Jankiewicz, Ph.D. Date completed: July 2012 The Problem Both hierarchicalist and equivalentist evangelicals use Trinitarian relations to argue for their opposing views on gender roles. How can this stalemate be broken if the Bible, the typical evangelical foundation for resolving doctrinal disputes, is used by both sides to argue their contrasting positions? Methods and Procedures I explored the cultural determination of worldview, bringing the fields of sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy to bear on this theological debate and considered whether it may be differing presuppositions and subsequent opposing interpretations that cause the conflicting positions, rather than what the biblical text means. By looking through the eyes of experts in this mix of fields, I gained insight on the development and impact of gender presuppositions in regard to role stratification in the conceptualization of the Trinity. Findings I found that culturally determined presuppositions seem to be at the root of the disagreement. It would seem that the divine is being conceptualized and stratified according to contemporary human society. Until each side of the debate can understand their presuppositions and recognize the extent to which they are creating God in their image, constructive dialogue will be limited and I project that the debate will continue passionately and divisively. Andrews University Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTING GOD: GENDER, CULTURE, AND A STRATIFIED TRINITY A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Divinity

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Socially Constructing God: Gender, Culture, and a Stratified Trinity

Recently, scholars have begun to question the Age of Reason’s idealization of and dedication to dispassionate reason, and to chart what one collection calls, somewhat infelicitously, the ‘‘emotional history of the United States’’ (Stearns and Lewis). In his investigation of early American affect, Peter Coviello argues that the nation emerges in the rhetoric of its important polemical writers, Jefferson, Paine and Wheatley, not from particular ‘‘state dictates’’ or political theories, but through the strategic evocation of potent emotions of loss and separation that enable a quite disparate and widely separated colonial populace to bond together imaginatively as a unified whole (441–42). This ‘‘odd civic intimacy’’ not only precedes and makes possible the political constitution of the new nation but it establishes the capacity for impassioned response as a prerequisite for virtuous republican citizenship. This requires a reconsideration of the standing of women and people of color, who were traditionally excluded from participation in the public realm because of their perceived link with untrammeled emotion (Coviello 457, 443). A ‘‘seminal’’ precursor of this emotional collectivity, according to Coviello, is JohnWinthrop’s famous address, ‘‘A Model of Christian Charity,’’ delivered in the spring of 1630, probably at Southampton to a band of Protestant dissenters on the eve of their departure to establish a ‘‘purified’’ commonwealth in the new world.1 What Jefferson ‘‘retrieves’’ from this lay sermon, in Coviello’s account, is an early blueprint for American exceptionalism in which affect is central ‘‘to the mutuality that defines a civic body’’ (462).While ‘‘exceptionalism’’ may indeed be a legacy of the visionary Puritan leader, Winthrop does not dwell on the ‘‘agonizing affection’’ Jefferson invokes at the dramatic climax of his initial version of the Declaration of Independence, which Coviello analyzes so adeptly, but on a form of Christian love indissolubly entangled with classical, early Christian, and

John Winthrop's "Model" of American Affiliation

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Amy Schrager Lang

Papers

Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England.