Date
October 29 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT
Location
Guest Scholar:
A Conversation with C. Kavin Rowe
What If It Were True? Faith, Belief, and Friendship
It’s not uncommon in the academic world to wrestle with competing claims about truth and fundamentally different ways of understanding the world. We debate the best political systems for human flourishing, examine the original intentions of historical documents, and grapple with vastly differing philosophical worldviews. But what about the claims of Christianity? Do we view these claims as just another subject for academic study, or as claims about ultimate reality that, if true, must dramatically alter the way we live and what we believe?
Kavin Rowe, Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, challenges us to reckon with the New Testament as more than a historical document to be analyzed. Instead, he invites us to confront two much bigger questions and consider our own answers: What if this is actually true? If this is actually true, what does that mean about how I live?
But if we take the New Testament’s claims about truth seriously, what happens when we encounter people whose convictions are fundamentally different from our own? For example, Rowe argues that Christianity and ancient Stoicism hold such different views of God and humanity that there isn’t a shared, neutral standard by which to evaluate their competing claims. If this is true, can any meaningful dialogue take place? Rowe suggests that even if we can never agree with or fully understand those who hold a competing worldview, we can still cultivate friendships with them. And, in fact, genuine friendship is a great good in and of itself.
Join us for this meeting of Theological Society as we explore what it means to take the New Testament’s truth claims seriously, how those claims transform our study of Scripture and our lives, and how we can cultivate friendships with those who hold very different understandings of ultimate truth.
Kavin Rowe, Ivey Distinguished Professor and Vice Dean, The Divinity School, Duke University
C. Kavin Rowe is vice dean for faculty and George Washington Ivey Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School. The first of three volumes of his collected essays has recently been published as “Leading Christian Communities.” He also is the author of “Christianity’s Surprise: A Sure and Certain Hope,” “One True Life: the Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions,” “World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age” and “Early Narrative Christology.” He has published dozens of articles and essays, and co-edited “The Word Leaps the Gap” and “Rethinking the Unity and Reception of Luke and Acts.”
He is on the editorial board of several international peer-review journals. Rowe has been a Fulbright Scholar, Regional Scholar for the Society of Biblical Literature, chair of the Society’s Southeastern Region New Testament section, president of the Society’s Southeastern Region, and was elected to the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. He was awarded a Lilly Faculty Fellowship, a Christian Faith and Life Grant from the Louisville Institute, the John Templeton Prize for Theological Promise, the Paul J. Achtemeier Award, and a Distinguished Scholars grant from the McDonald Agape Foundation.
THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
This society seeks to gather Cornell faculty and graduate students to discuss major themes in biblical and theological studies. Discussion aims to satisfy what Simone Weil once described as the basic need of the soul to consider “every sort of opinion, without the least restriction or reserve.” To this end, we invite dialogue that explores and even challenges historic orthodox beliefs as well as those ideas that reign in the contemporary church, academy, and culture.
Our dialogue is collegial and cordial without shying away from the hard questions scholars face in their life and work. Members of the group seek to nurture discussion by listening attentively to one another, guarding the length of our responses, and avoiding diversions to pet issues unrelated to the subject at hand. In short, we seek to embody a uniquely Christian form of intellectual hospitality that we can pass on to future generations.
