Doctoral Colloquium 2025 – Tuesday, September 2nd

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Abstracts

Student Presentations

R. Coleman (RM): Toward a Dialogical Christology: Academic Reflection and Grassroots Experience in Ghanaian Christianity

This paper examines the tension between academic and grassroots Christologies in African theology using the example of Ghana. Through dialogue between the theoretical models of Pobee and Bediako, who present Jesus as the “Great Ancestor,” and the empirical research by Stinton and Clarke, a significant disconnect is highlighted. While academic theologians emphasize cultural themes such as ancestor and chief, grassroots Christians identify Jesus primarily as Savior, Messiah, and Healer. This disconnect reflects a methodological blind spot of African theology in treating theology as a top-down process rather than dialogically. The paper advocates for critical exchange between systematic reflection and experiential wisdom.

J. Plender (ST): Contested Hopes in those dealing with Parkinson’s Disease

Dutch healthcare faces several crises, such as the ageing population, a shortage of personnel and more specifically an increase of Parkinson Disease (PD). This could result in the emergence or a loss of hope, and chronic patients, such as those with PD, often face a long disease trajectory.

Hope has been conceptualized in several areas, including medicine, psychology and nursing. It has also been defined in several ways, including as agency, a strategy when coping with suffering or as a treatment goal. Also, a positive correlation between hope and a prolonged survival has been found in quantitative research. Physicians and nurses have ethical considerations when reflecting on hope within the context of truth-telling, which has not been explored within the context of PD though. Hope has been described as central topic in spiritual care (including chaplaincy and pastoral care) as well, although its role in spiritual care for patients with PD has not been explored.

The objective of this PhD project is to explore hope experiences among Parkinson patients, relatives and caregivers. In doing so, I will pay attention to related concepts, like faith and by seeking variation of participants with Christian and other backgrounds. As such, this thesis will support the reflection on hope in theology, and more specifically, in spiritual care and ethics, nourished by empirical findings gathered within the context of PD.

A systematic review of literature will be conducted by searching several electronic databases. Then, semi-structured interviews with PD patients, their (in)formal caregivers and physicians, nurses, chaplains will be conducted. This thesis is colored by (hermeneutic) phenomenology in the sense that it has a strong emphasis on the experiences of hope and how people give meaning to their hope in their narratives while suffering from PD.

J. Sherrill (OT): When Love is Disgrace and Grace is Loathsome: Contronymy as a Feature of Hebrew Diachrony

Hebrew, like all languages, exhibits the surprising phenomenon of polysemous words whose various meanings are opposite one another. For example, “to dust” in English may mean to add or to remove fine particles; religio in Latin can mean religious piety or religious offence. The feature is known in modern linguistics as contronymy (among other names), but was known by medieval Arabists as ʾaḍdād. It can be seen not only in Hebrew and Arabic individually, but also cross-linguistically in roots shared by these and other members of the Semitic family tree. Identifying contronyms in contradistinction to other linguistic phenomena, such as homonymy and euphemism, is a difficult task for lexicographers. Yet, besides exegesis, it yields insight into the development of language from both cognitive and historical perspectives. Yet, research into diachronic semantic change has not usually been leveraged for the periodization of classical Hebrew. Thus, the present paper, after introducing contronymy, surveys the phenomenon in Semitic languages related to Hebrew. It defines positively and negatively a method of analysis, and adduces the best examples of contronymy from the Hebrew Bible. Last, the paper proposes that on occasion contronyms can contribute to discussions of the dating of biblical texts alongside other research.

K. Oppong-Konadu (RM): Ghanaian-Branded Methodist and Pentecostal Missions in Western Europe: Challenges, Strategies, and Prospects

By reviewing relevant literature, the study contextualizes the reverse mission phenomenon, where Ghanaian immigrants utilize their unique Christian expressions to create a sense of identity and belonging in European host countries. It asks how branding helps interpret complex dynamics of Ghanaian Methodist and Pentecostal communities in Western Europe. In doing so, the study first reviews the rise and growth of these missional communities within diverse cultural and religious settings with examples from selected Western European countries. Secondly, it adopts a branding and missional identity lens to discuss these communities, looking at how Ghanaian churches adapt their practices, symbols, and outreach to engage both native and immigrant populations. Thirdly, the study outlines internal challenges within these branded identities, including cultural hegemony, class struggles, masculinity, and generational conflict, and highlights strategies used to address them. Finally, it examines some prospects within these communities, specifically how they demonstrate a collaborative enterprise between the diverse internal and external stakeholders, interested parties, or consumers of their distinct brands in the face of power struggles. This study thus contributes to discourses on faith, identity, and migration in the contemporary Ghanaian diaspora in Western Europe.

C. Westerink (HT): Theory of Divine Ideas in the Loci Theologici of Johann Gerhard (1582-1637)

The theory of Divine ideas played an important role in medieval theology. Especially in relation to God’s creation and His knowledge of creation. The locus classicus on this subject is Augustine’s 46th question in his De Diversis Quaestionibus Octoginta Tribus (388-390). From the thirteenth century onwards the ideas became more important and many medieval theologians discussed them. The theory of Divine ideas appears not only in the writings of medieval theologians, but also in the writings of early modern Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians, both Lutheran and Reformed. In this presentation I discuss the passage on the Divine ideas in the famous work Loci Theologici by the important Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard (1582-1637). He seems to have been the first Lutheran theologian to write about Divine ideas in a dogmatic work. Before him, only a few Lutheran theologians and philosophers wrote about the ideas in their philosophical writings. This, together with Gerhard’s importance in the development of the Lutheran theological tradition, makes him an interesting figure for understanding the development of the theory of the Divine ideas in early modern Protestantism. This presentation will consider the content of Gerhard’s discussion of the ideas and how his view relates to other Lutheran and medieval predecessors.

B. Wiskerke (ST): Hope in Agriculture

Although the study of hope has been undertaken in a variety of contexts, the experience of hope among farmers has received comparatively little attention. A literature search was conducted for empirical studies concerning the experience of hope among farmers, followed by an analysis and comparison of the various hope conceptualisations used within these studies, using a modified version of the Hope Matrix by Emma Pleeging to identify antecedents, experiences, effects and objects of hope. This yielded a wide variety of characteristics of hope conceptualisations among farmers, within a small number of studies, revealing a tension between these different conceptualisations of hope, between identifying hope as an emotion or a cognitive state, between focusing on individual or social forms of hope. This reflects the different approaches taken in the disciplines in which the authors are engaged. The analysis furthermore indicates a tendency to neglect the religious and moral dimensions of hope. These results, along with the small number of studies and the absence of empirical studies of hope in the context of large-scale farming, underline the need for further empirical research, concerning the experience of hope among farmers.