Christopher Dorn

This exegetical study of II Kings 6:8-23, which contains the story of the encounter between the prophet Elisha and the forces of the King of Aram in the city of Dothan, reflects the early stages of my evolving interest in the stance(s) of the Bible towards violence. I indirectly make the case here that texts such as this one suggest the Old Testament is more ambivalent towards violence than we are led to suppose.

A version of this essay was published in Probing the Frontiers of Biblical Studies, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 111, eds. J. Harold Ellens and John T. Greene (2009), 9-20.

The paper represents a further refinement of the research I have done on the impact of the twentieth-century liturgical and ecumenical movements on liturgical theory and practice in Presbyterian and Reformed churches in North America. A different version of this paper appears in a compilation of essays published under the title Reforming the Catholic Tradition: The Whole Word for the Whole Church (Leesburg, VA: Davenant Institute, 2019), 135-152.

Early research paper that I had hoped to develop into a larger project on the history of the Eucharist/Lord's Supper in the West since the Reformation. The paper relies extensively on David Power's The Sacrifice We Offer (1987), which led me to the original Latin sources in Jedin. The Luther citations need to be checked and corrected where needed.

In view of the recent dissolution of the Association of Reformed & Liturgical Worship (AR&LW),, with which I had been connected almost since its inception in 2004, I thought it appropriate to post this article, in which I give an overview of history of worship in the mainline Presbyterian tradition in America. I originally prepared the article for a joint convocation of the AR&LW and the Mercersburg Society, which took place in summer 2013. A version of this article appeared in the New Mercersburg Review, I believe in the same year.

This early paper combines my interests in psychology and trauma theory and liturgical studies, the last of which was my area of academic specialization.  For it I consulted with veteran John Zemler, who was convening at the time of my research and writing a support group for young veterans  coping with PTSD after combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

God's self-revelation in the gospel and how men and women are to grasp this revelation were above all what Martin Luther and the Reformers sought to understand and communicate. In the gospel Luther discovered a God who comes to us. God condescends to us to meet us in our need as Savior and gives himself for us. Jesus Christ is God for us (Deus pro nobis) and our God (Deus noster).1 The character of the God revealed to us through the self-offering of Jesus Christ (Deus oblatus) consists in free and unbounded giving. God desires nothing from us in return for the gifts of creation and redemption. Our only appropriate response is thanksgiving; in our expression of thanks we acknowledge that God is the merciful giver of every temporal and spiritual gift. In this perspective, Luther understood the Lord's Supper above all as a gift to be received by a gracious God. For this reason, he resolutely opposed the idea of the Mass as sacrifice (sacrificium, bonum opus, meritum), according to which Christ, through the ministry of the priest, represents his self-offering in an unbloody manner under the appearances of the bread and wine. For Luther, the daily Masses in which the priests offer up the host amounted to an express denial of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, made once for all as a perfect atonement for sins (Heb. 9:12, 26). How then did Luther conceive of this gift to be received in the Lord's Supper? Luther insisted that to observe the Lord's Supper properly and to understand what if offers, one must above all comprehend the meaning of the words by which Christ instituted it. In these words, the very sum and substance of the Lord's Supper consists: Take and eat, this is my body, which is given for you. Take and drink of it, all of you, this is the cup of the new and eternal testament in my blood, which is poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.2 To explain the meaning of the Lord's Supper as divine gift, Luther singled out a term from these words of institution, and opposed it to the idea of sacrifice: God's gift to us is testamentum; our gift to God is sacrificium. In Luther's conception of the Lord's Supper as divine gift the two are mutually exclusive. The concept of testamentum is central in Luther's treatises on the Lord's Supper, and therefore needs to be clarified. A testament is a promise made by one about to die. In it the testator expresses how he wishes his property to be disposed after he dies and confirms these wishes by a seal. The property is the inheritance; those appointed by the testator to receive it after his death are the heirs. Luther maintained that from the beginning of the world God has never dealt with men and women otherwise than through a promise. And all the promises God made from the beginning of the world foreshadow the testament of Christ and derive their value from it. The meaning and content of the promises made to Adam (Gen. 3:15), Noah (Gen. 9:12-17), Abraham (Gen. 22:18), Moses and the people of Israel (Deut. 18:18), and especially to David (II Sam, 7:12-16) are only disclosed in the most perfect promise of all, namely, that contained in the testament of Christ.

The proportion of contingent faculty to full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty teaching in American colleges and universities has increased dramatically in recent decades. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, the ranks of the former grew from 268,883 in 1975 to 885,803 by 2005. During that same period the numbers of the latter increased from 353,681 to only 414,574. Nor does this trend give any sign of abating. Contingent faculty continue in growing numbers to teach classes part-time or on limited-term contracts, without permanent appointments, adequate compensation or appropriate professional support. Higher education researchers deplore this casualizaton of academic labor, which, they argue, results in an unstable workforce, impaired academic freedom, and diminished educational quality.

Today there is the widespread conviction that Christian faith and evolutionary theory are incompatible. This conviction is even found among educated clergy, notwithstanding the fact that they have learned to affirm the findings of science in the course of their theological education. Increasingly, some form of creationism, based more or less on a “literal” reading of Genesis, is promoted as the only “Christian” alternative.

Before we can answer the question how and where “places of epiphany” can be found, we must clarify what the concept implies. Convinced that this is a necessary preliminary step before the presentation of case studies that make these places of epiphany known, we propose to explicate the concept itself. We proceed by comparing it with another concept, “the signs of the times.” We begin by tracing the historical origins of this concept. Next, we demonstrate how it has been applied. Then we point out its limitations and suggest corrections to make it more suitable for use in determining how and where to locate “places of epiphany”. Thus the burden of the paper is to show how the concept “signs of the times” is a useful heuristic that can help us arrive at a critical understanding of what we are doing when we go in search of  “places of epiphany” in our world today.

This is a draft of a commentary on Galatians based on a six-week course of lectures that I gave for an adult education class. The content reflects the influence of J.M.G Barclay's magisterial Paul & the Gift, which I was reading at the time. Only in retrospect did it occur to me that I could have developed it for publication and wider distribution in view of the 500th commemoration of the Reformation in 2017, since together with Romans Galatians exerted a decisive influence on Martin Luther's formulation of the doctrine of justification by faith, which has been regarded as the "material" principle of the Reformation. .

Annotated anthology of sources representing the stances of the Christian traditions (Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox) on peace and war, violence and non-violence. What distinguishes this volume from those like it is its emphasis on the contributions of the World Council of Churches, which commissioned me to compile this anthology in 2012. The book is limited in its availability. I offer the full manuscript here and only ask that you cite it if you draw from it.