Lecture Descriptions
Dr. J. Todd Billings is Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary. An ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America, he received his M.Div. from Fuller Seminary and his Th.D. from Harvard. His first book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union With Christ (Oxford, 2007) won a 2009 Templeton Award for Theological Promise, awarded internationally for the best first books of scholars in theology and religious studies. He is also author of The Word of God for the People of God: An Entryway to the Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Eerdmans, 2010). Since receiving the Templeton award last year, Dr. Billings has lectured at various locations in France, Germany, Scotland, South Africa, Ethiopia, and the United States. He has published articles in a variety of journals, including Modern Theology, Harvard Theological Review, Missiology, and International Journal of Systematic Theology, as well as periodicals such as Christianity Today, The Christian Century, and Sojourners.
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Salvation as Adoption – an Antidote to Today’s Distant yet Convenient Deity
March 16 at 4 pm in Windant Auditorium on Hope College Campus, Dr. Kristen Johnson, Respondent
In America, Christians tend to think that God gives us space for our own autonomy, and yet he is also the convenient source of “eternal life insurance.” This lecture gives a biblical and theological account of how the Reformed tradition’s notion of salvation as adoption and the double grace of justification and sanctification is deeply subversive to such views. In union with Christ, we are adopted by a Triune God who is at once too close for sentimental comfort, too holy to shrug off our sin, and too free to be managed by our attempts at control.
“To Unite Us to Our God”: The Lord’s Supper, the Law of Love, and Justice
March 16 at 7 pm in Mulder Chapel at Western Theological Seminary, Dr. John Witvliet, Respondent
John Calvin claims that the purpose of God’s law is “to unite us to our God,” a union which constitutes “our happiness and glory.” This union with God through the law is enacted in the Lord’s Supper, where believers respond to the presence of Christ with a sacrifice of praise that includes “all the duties of love” – love in the church and loving acts of justice in the world. This lecture brings these themes from Calvin into critical dialogue with the Belhar Confession and early Reformed thought, proposing a theology in which Christian identity and practice emerge from the union with God through Christ that believers taste in the Lord’s Supper.
Total Depravity, Total Communion: Why the Bondage of the Will Mirrors a Theology of Salvation as Communion
March 17 at 1 pm in Mulder Chapel at Western Theological Seminary, Dr. Suzanne McDonald, Respondent
“Total depravity,” often used as shorthand for a Reformed doctrine of sin, can sound like a negative, misanthropic view of humanity. While neither Calvin nor the early Reformational tradition used the phrase “total depravity,” they do claim that no part of human life is unaffected by sin, and that sinful humans cannot perform any “saving good” apart from the Spirit’s effectual work. This lecture argues that this strongly stated Reformed doctrine of sin is not a purely negative statement about the human condition. Instead, the early Reformed insistence on the bondage of the will to sin refracts a theology of salvation in which humanity is created for communion with God—a communion restored through union with Christ by the Spirit.
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