Since beginning his Asian teaching mission Dr. Dan has accepted assignments in Cambodia, China, India, Burma [ Myanmar], Malaysia, Laos and Thailand. Some of the courses taught in seminaries and Bible colleges in these countries are listed below. For more information on inviting Dr. Dan to preach and or teach at your church, school or seminary please email us here.

COURSE OFFERINGS

1) Grace vs. Debt: The Heart of New Testament Ethics

“Religion is Grace, Ethics is Gratitude”

This title, taken from a renowned 20th Century British New Testament scholar T.W. Manson, encapsulates the focus of this course. At the center of the Christian religion lies the teaching of God’s Grace extended to us through Christ. Once this center is clarified and grasped, the way we should live and move in this world is clarified. Ethics gains its power and distinctive shape (and impulse) from God’s way of grace in Christ. The way God treats us lays the foundation for the way we are to treat others.

This title, taken from a renowned 20th Century British New Testament scholar T.W. Manson, encapsulates the focus of this course. At the center of the Christian religion lies the teaching of God’s Grace extended to us through Christ. Once this center is clarified and grasped, the way we should live and move in this world is clarified. Ethics gains its power and distinctive shape (and impulse) from God’s way of grace in Christ. The way God treats us lays the foundation for the way we are to treat others.

This course sets out to clarify the ethics that flow from grace by keeping the discussion close to grace’s opposite – debt, and in so doing studying the following N T selections. (1) The signature ‘grace’ parables of Jesus in light of Jesus’ treatment of sinners and the Lord’s prayer “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors (2) What Paul’s teaching of grace vs. debt means for ethics (i.e. the ‘evolution of Paul’s doctrine of grace inside the Jew – Gentile controversy of the early church – Romans 4 and Galatians 3 (3) Grace and giving 2 Corinthians 8 & 9 (4) Grace and intercession – Philemon (5) Grace and unity – Philippians 2 (6) Grace and worship – 1 Peter 2 and Galatians 6 (7) The ethics derived from grace and the direct ethics of law compared and contrasted (8) The roots of the Christian grace vs. debt ethic discovered in the Hebrew Sabbaths and the Jubilee.

In a final section the course seeks to look at contemporary social and cultural patterns in the modern world in light of grace and the ethical impulses that derive from grace. Debtor relations enslave whilst grace liberates, and in many ways, to a greater or lesser degree, forms of debt enslavement have become culturally and socially entrenched. This does not mean that the church and individuals who believe and teach grace are to set about to directly translate grace into moral laws or deduct grace into hard and fast principles so as to govern social relations on earth. This would only end in another attempt to legislate the kingdom of God on earth and result in creating yet another tyranny. What the church must do in its witness in and to the world is expose the dehumanizing affects of debt ethics wherever they manifest themselves and call for changes that reflect the spirit and way of grace. These include areas like employer – employee relations, the male – female relation inside marriage, modern economics especially usury, interest and debt, jurisprudence – crime and punishment, cultures of retribution and cycles of violence that foreclose peace, the nature of productive work (i.e. forceful work that views product or ‘fruit’ as a debt of hard calculated work) and many other areas. One entire class period will be devoted to the film Les Miseralbes by Victor Hugo as way of imaging grace vs. debt ethics in ethics human relations.

An excursus discussion looks at the historic idea of ‘merit’ in the teaching and practices of the Roman Catholic Church (the Council of Trent) contrasted with the grace doctrine in 16^th Century Protestantism with a special interest in the corresponding ethics these two have sponsored. Also the ethical faces of merit in Buddhism and Hinduism are considered in light of the Christian teaching and ethic of grace.

10  1½ to 2 hr Lecture – Discussions

2) Luther’s Evangelical Breakthrough and Its Significance for the Reformation of the Church – then and there and here and now

Luther changed the course of Christianity. This study focuses on Martin Luther’s evangelical breakthrough and why it revolutionized the way he understood the nature of the church and saving faith.  While understanding the nuclei of Luther’s thought and its implications for reform are the primary focus applications are made to the present ( “the church once reformed always reforming”). This course also discusses the challenge that the “New Perspective” backed by N T Wright, D G Dunn and E P Sanders presents to Luther’s understanding of Paul. [Ten 1&1/2 hour lecture /discussions]

20  1½  to 2 hr Lecture – Discussions.

3) Faith of Our Fathers Part One – The Apostle’s Creed

Billy Graham once said “the things that Christians hold in common are far more significant than the things they differ”. This study discusses the historical challenge which led to the formation of the Apostles Creed before opening up the universal [i. e ‘catholic’] meanings embedded in each phrase. The subject is deemed important not only for its foundational theological content to all Christians but its role in unifying the Church of Jesus Christ. Rather than a static, bland and dogmatic rehearsal of church doctrine this study attends to discovering meaning. Discovering embedded meaning involves the student in an apologetic discipline. While dogmatic asserts something is true  apologetics wants to discover meanings and greater harmonies that witness to its truthfulness.

20  1½  to 2 hr Lecture – Discussions

4) We Walk by Faith and Not by Sight:  The DNA of Christian Ethics

This study captures something elemental in Paul’s ethical teaching and applies it in many directions familiar to everyone’s existence. There is a ‘science’, that is to say, an innate logic to living by faith that turns on a radical premise, which cuts cross grain to human nature. The Spirit and the word exist to lead us to commence a venture of living by faith over against the propensity to live by ‘sight’, feeling, hard reasoning or conservative ‘common sense’ so called – propensities deeply lodged in humans and cultures. Theology and ethics meet in this study and serve to open up the importance and challenge of grounding oneself in something unseen brought near to the imagination and mind by the Word and Spirit. Sorting through and clarifying Paul’s ‘walk by faith not by sight’ dictum is shown to be a, if not thee, most important tool for pastors and missionaries called to guide people through life’s most difficult and potentially destructive challenges. This study is highly practical, experientially insightful whilst keenly theological.

10    1½  to 2hr Lecture Discussions

5) A New Testament Study on Discipleship studied in conjunction with  Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship

Bonhoeffer broke new exegetical and theological ground with his book The Cost of Discipleship and thereby revived the moral nerve in Protestantism.  Long before Bonhoeffer commenced his ministry Mainstream Continental Protestantism,  (born and bred on the Reformation’s Evangelical platform triumphing free grace, faith and Scripture alone), had melded into culture and ceased to exert a salty Christian devotion and ethical witness in society. Bonhoeffer went back to Jesus call to discipleship, exhibited in the synoptic Gospels, and opened it up showing the primitive power and claim of Christ on the believer. Bonhoeffer showed himself here in this work, as in all his other work, to be a gifted and insightful thinker and theologian while possessing moral clarity and rigor. While Bonhoeffer’s book is highly celebrated few get what is going on in it and the theological acuity need to open up the theme of discipleship without compromising Protestantism historic witness to grace      

10   1½ to 2 hr LectureS

6) The Relation of the Church to Political Power: A Biblical and and Historical Survey Climaxing with a exegesis of the Barmen Declaration

The study takes the student on a survey of the relation of the Church to the State from New Testament times to the modern era before focusing on and opening up the significance of the Barmen Confession.  In the 1930’s and early 40’s, threatened by Hitler’s attempt to formally annex the Protestant churches in Germany to his program of National Socialism hundreds of Luthern and Reformed pastors formed the Confessing Church and resisted Hitler’s designs crafting the Barmen Confession. This theological document and history are among the most important and instructive to the church in modern times wherever it encounters the over reach of the state. It is a historical affirmation of faith crafted by the churches in Germany written and spoken to themselves but one openly made whilst facing the State. It is an open confession the Church’s relation to the State. It is crafted with a simplicity, directness and theological acuity rarely matched in the history of the church.

10   1½  to 2 hr Lecture – Discussions

7)  Paul’s Theological Argument in Galatians Made simple: Its Significance to the Church Then and There and Here and Now

This study approaches Paul’s complex theological argument in Galatians from a new standpoint, one that has recently become increasingly attractive to New Testament Scholars: What is Paul doing by what he is saying?  Paul, missionary to the Gentiles, is not only confronting a little problem in the churches of Galatia he is engaging a much bigger battle that has to do with the right to take the Gospel directly to Gentiles without them first becoming more or less Jews.  By first answering this question “What is Paul doing?” and then returning to re-examine Paul’s heady argument this course aims to rediscover and clarify the theology at work in Galatians. Some of the insights of the so called New Perspective I am convinced have merit and have helped me understand the background of Galatians whilst other claims they make I find unconvincing. One must see the ‘forest’ then examine the ‘trees’ i.e. attend to the bigger skirmish regarding what is going on in Galatians and the struggle in the Apostolic church at this time, then read the letter, verse by verse, paragraph by paragraph.

8) Church History II 1517 to 2017

Other courses : The Gospel of John, The Christological Struggle in 1st John & Subsequent Christological Struggles (1st to the 5th Century), The Birth of Christian Hope and the Temptation to break the Tension of Hope in the Late Apostolic Period, Evangelical Ethics , In the Body vs. Out of the Body Existence: Ecclesiology and the Holy Spirit.