Seminarian Sophia Theodoratos was featured at the Seminary’s Monthly Seminar series on Tuesday, May 9.
The Seminary’s Monthly Seminar series is meant to operate as a kind of academic laboratory for scholars, allowing each month’s presenter to share their latest findings to their peers, engage in discussion, and receive feedback.
Sophia’s presentation, “A Seeing Human Being: Sensing Christ and Gaining Sight,” drew from her thesis.
“How and why does John the Theologian use sight and more broadly engage with hearing, touch, smell and taste in his Gospel?” Sophia asks. “Gaining sight is essential to apprehend light from dark and to “see” Christ, who has been revealed as the Light of the World (Jn 8.12).”
Sophia’s study places the event of the human being born blind (Jn 9.1-41) at the center of her review into how sensory perception is used in John’s Gospel. She explains in her thesis’ abstract:
…The beloved disciple engages our senses to enable us to fully perceive Christ through the flesh, beyond empirical boundaries, and to know that God is always forming us, and seeking to lead us back to eternal life in Paradise. In this way John’s engagement with the senses aligns with the reason he gives for writing his Gospel, which is “so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (Jn 20.30-31).
Sophia’s thesis and the theses of other graduating students are made available after completion each year in the Seminary’s Father Georges Florovsky Library.
Sophia Theodoratos hails from Brisbane, Australia. She graduated from SVOTS Master of Arts (M.A.) program in the spring of 2018 and returned to SVOTS for the 2018 fall semester to pursue a Master of Theology (Th.M.) degree.
