MST and Eastern hosted their first ever Student Paradosis Conference on Friday, 21st of September 2018. The idea behind this endeavour was to encourage rigorous biblical and theological scholarship, and to promote a research culture at MST and Eastern. A total of six students from both colleges presented their papers: Lindsay Fairhead, Zech Foo, Chris Groszek, Ernie Laskaris, Freyja Saunderson and Alex Zavadil.
The conference was well attended by a number of students, faculty and friends of the Colleges. Conference attendees enjoyed a host of fine undergraduate and graduate student presentations on an array of topics. The scholarly rigour exhibited by these student researchers was excellent, and the audience witnessed a combination of spiritually edifying and theologically enriching talks on a variety of missional, biblical and theological topics.
Some of the student presentations included: an affirmation of the central importance of Scripture for contemporary evangelical theology, both for the revelation of God but also for the spiritual formation of Christ in believers; an exploration of the evidence for covenantal same-sex relationships and sexual orientation in antiquity, and whether these phenomena were known to the apostle Paul; a reply to the cultural despisers of Christianity, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, regarding the experience of Christian guilt; an observation of how the prayers of thanksgiving in Israel often
moved from crisis to deliverance to thanksgiving to God for His help in time of need; a study of the liturgical interludes in the book of Revelation and how these reorient the book’s audience to their situations of persecution and affliction; and finally a response to argument’s against Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus) and the importance of these texts to the biblical doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture.
Overall, we are very thankful for the successful running of our first Student Paradosis Conference. It capably represented MST’s and Eastern’s mandate to raise up a generation of leaders for the Church, who will be better equipped and informed to share the Good News of salvation with a hurting and needy world.
We look forward to seeing what God will do with this space in the future, and encourage all supporters of both Colleges to hasten such future endeavours as we seek to make Christ known to the world by word and deed.