Reconciliation as Holistic Redemptive Transformation

Reconciliation is a word often used in Christian circles, but almost as often, it is not defined. Sometimes it is used to indicate intimacy with God, sometimes it means merely being nice to other people, and sometimes it refers to an ambiguous concept of justice. To avoid this conceptual reductionism, we can look to the work of 20th-century theologian Karl Barth, who wrote exhaustively on the concept of reconciliation as an ecology of multi-dimensional salvation -- personal, communal, and societal. For Barth, reconciliation means restored relationship in a theological and holistic sense, such that all reality is redemptively transformed by God in the work of the Son and Spirit through the people of God. Dr. Langford will discuss this ecology of transformation as a framework for thinking about reconciliation in a theological sense