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This thesis explores the fracture patterns that result from different percentages of combined torsion and bending loads on human femurs. Eighteen matched pairs of femurs were extracted from fresh human cadavers and were subjected to either pure torsion or combined torsion and bending loads. One femur from each matched pair was torqued to failure. The remaining femur from the pair was placed in one of two groups to be subjected to the combined loads. One group was to be twisted to 30% of the maximum torque of its matched pair then impacted with an instrumented steel pipe at approximately 9 m/s. The second group was torqued to 70% before it was impacted. All of the pure torsion tests resulted in spiral fractures as expected. The specimens in the low torque group exhibited fracture patterns associated more with bending loads. Those in the high torque group exhibited a much more spiral pattern.

This thesis is an attempt to display and commend the divine ontology that arises from Barth's doctrine of election set forth in Church Dogmatics II/2. A major source of contention within Barth scholarship concerns how to best understand the significance of Barth's doctrine of election for his conception of God's identity. On the one side of this debate, you have scholars (championed by Bruce McCormack) who advance a maximalist understanding of the ontological significance of divine election and view Barth's doctrine as an eternal determination basic and proper to the very essence of God. On the other side, you have scholars (led by George Hunsinger and Paul Molnar) who advance a minimalist reading of Barth's doctrine and contend that the doctrine of election is exclusively related to activity God chooses to perform in the economy of salvation, with no bearing on an understanding of the original and proper being of God. Following the maximalist line of interpretation, I argue that divine election enables Barth to provide a description of God as essentially subsisting in the act of graciously turning toward fallen humanity in Jesus Christ. Barth thus operates with a divine ontology of grace because he insists that God's very identity is shaped by and ordered to the gracious determination to become humanity's God in the vicarious history of Jesus.