2017 HBU Theology Conference Schedule

The schedule for the upcoming 2017 Theology Conference at Houston Baptist University (March 2-4) has been posted. The theme is on the canon and formation of the Bible: "How the Bible Came into Being." My paper will be "The Ending of Mark as a Canonical Crisis" (see the abstract here) and, DV, will be presented on Friday (March 3) in the 11:00 am session. I enjoyed the conference last year at HBU and look forward to it this year.

Conference schedule:

Thursday (March 2)
7:30pm	Plenary Lecture 1 (Belin Chapel)
	James Charlesworth: “New Ways of Looking at Sacred Texts Regarded as ‘Apocryphal’ or ‘Pseudepigraphical’”
Friday (March 3)
9:30-10:30	Session 1a Randy Richards – “Honor/Shame, Plagiarism and Publishing the Gospels Anonymously” Douglas Estes – “Why a Fourth Gospel? A Counterfactual Look at the Need for a ‘Spiritual Gospel’” Session 1b Garet D Robinson – “Thank God for Heretics? Evaluating the Influence of Heterodoxical Movements on the Early Formation of the Christian Scriptural Canon” Adam Harwood – “Weighing the Books: A Model for Evaluating Competing Canonical Traditions”
10:30-11:00	Coffee Break
11:00-12:30	Session 2a Christopher Atkins – “On the Canonical Discussion of The Shepherd of Hermas in the Patristic Era” Jeremiah Bailey – “The Canon in Clement and Clement in the Canon: 1 Clement as Receiver of the New Testament and as Candidate for Inclusion” John D. Meade – “‘Canon’ Terminology of Epiphanius of Salamis” Session 2b Jeffrey T. Riddle – “The Ending of Mark as a Canonical Crisis” Thomas G. Doughty, Jr. – “The New Testament Canon as Tradition and Implications for Theological Method” Nathan Hays – “Genesis 1–3 as Orientation to the Canon”
12:30	Lunch
2:30-3:30	Session 3a Mark Bendall – “The Ethiopian Canon” Rex D. Butler – “Sacred Writings in Perpetua’s Diary” Session 3b Randy Hatchett – TBA Jordan Barrett – “A Theological Account of Canonization”
3:30-4:00	Coffee Break
4:00-5:00	Session 4a Josh Pinkston – “Creating Resonance: The Biblical Canon as Intertext with Jonah as a Case Study”Jonathan Patterson – “The yom yhwh of Zephaniah and the Innertextual Relationship with the Book of the Twelve” Session 4b Charles A. Sommer – ““To Make the Hands Unclean”: The Rabbinic Understanding of CanonTimothy E.G. Bartel – “The Sweetened List: The Strange Case of St. Gregory Nazianzen’s Poem on the Biblical Canon”
5:00	Dinner
7:30	Plenary Lecture 2 (Belin Chapel)
	Lee McDonald “Why and When Was Scripture Written? Looking at the Old Testament Writings”
Saturday (March 4)
6:30 PM	Plenary Lectures 3 & 4 (held at Lanier Theological Library*)
	James Charlesworth “The Theological Value of the ‘Rejected Texts’ and Dead Sea Scrolls for Understanding Jesus”
	Lee McDonald “Why and When Was Scripture Written? Looking at the New Testament Writings”

JTR

Scenes from Houston Baptist University

Image:  The seal of HBU with John 14:6 as the motto.

I got back late Saturday from attending the Erasmus Conference at Houston Baptist University.  I'll be doing several posts this week from the trip and conference.  Houston is a great city to visit.  It is very large and very spread out (in the vein perhaps of everything being bigger in Texas).  As one Texan friend put it, "Houston is like a cancer that just keeps getting bigger!"  Houston is ethnically diverse, with Anglos, Latinos, African-Americans, Arabs, and Asians [there is a sprawling "China Town" around Bellaire Blvd.].  I found the people to be warm and friendly.   I spent most of my time on the attractive campus of HBU, a school with Southern Baptist roots which seems to be aiming for a more broad evangelical identity.

Here are a few scenes from HBU:

Image:  Outside the chapel and fine arts building.

Image: Belin Chapel.

Image:  Courtyard fountain.

Image:  The "Morris Columns" on the lawn, in front of the Hinton Center.

Image:  Walkway.

Image:  I had to check out the HBU baseball diamond.

Image:  Plaque on "The Nature of the College"

I found the above plaque interesting.  The founders of HBU obviously wanted to insure that the school remain committed to traditional, orthodox Christianity.  This reminded me of James Tunstead Burtchael's book The Dying of the Light:  The Disengagement of Colleges & Universities from Their Christian Churches (Eerdmans, 1998), which traces the tendency of schools which begin with a strong Christian identity and mission to drift, compromise, and become secular.  The plaque notes the desire that the school "stand as witness for Jesus Christ" and to that end resolves that the trustees, officers, faculty and staff "must believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, that man was directly created by God, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, as the Son of God, that he died for the sins of all men and thereafter arose from the grave, that by repentance and the acceptance of and belief in him, by the grace of God, the individual is saved from eternal damnation and receives eternal life in the presence of God; and it is further resolved that the ultimate teachings in this college shall always be consistent with the above principles."

It is noteworthy that this statement is influenced by the "fundamentals" approach to defending orthodoxy:  biblical inspiration, special creation of man (denying evolution), virgin birth of Jesus, historical resurrection, etc. It seems also to present a universal view of atonement:  "he died for the sins of all men" assuming the "all men" does not mean all types of elect men (Jews and Gentiles).  One thing it is not--and this is typical for Southern Baptists--and that is confessional (i.e., it appeals to these fundamentals but not to a historic ecclesiastical confession).

I don't know enough about HBU to evaluate where it stands on these principles after more than 50 years, but at the least it hosted a good theology conference.

JTR