Christian Beliefs Exam #1 Flashcards
Distinct, Christian teachings
Doctrine
“The entire inhabited earth”, God’s salvific love applies to the whole world
Ecumenical
The study of God (Logos: “Word, Reason”, Theos: “God”)
Theology
Christian teaching at the highest level of authority and trustworthiness
Dogma
Scripture, Tradition, Reason, Experience
Wesleyan Quadrilateral
“Scripture alone.”
Sola Scriptura
Early summaries of Christian doctrine
Rule of Faith
Statements of Christian beliefs
Creeds
Right Christian belief
Orthodoxy
Beliefs that have been rejected by the church as contrary to Scripture
Hersey
Intentional practices meant to help us grow deeper in the spiritual life.
Spiritual Disciplines
Ways God has provided for us to be put in touch with the grace that is always there
Means of Grace
God’s self-disclosure in creation and the human conscience
General Revelation
God’s specific self-revelation in the history of Israel, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and Scripture
Special Revelation
A theology drawn from general revelation, because its evidence comes from nature
Natural Theology
Special revelation does not replace general revelation, but builds on it.
Ongoing Continuity
Rational defense of the Christian faith to those who are not believers
Apologetics
Idea that God built a moral framework into creation itself
Natural Law
Both sorts of revelation convey truth about God, and each is continuous with the other, but we are unable to see this unless God pulls back the veil that obscures nature
Unveiled Continuity
The Spirit’s work as the author of the Scriptures, a work the Spirit did in and with the human authors of the biblical texts
Inspiration
The ways the Spirit continues to work in and with God’s people, as readers of the Scripture, to help us understand and be faithful to what we read there
Illumination
Biblical interpretation
Hermeneutics
“measure”, the whole of Scripture as the measuring stick, or rule, for Christian faith and life.
Canon
a man in the Early Church (around year 140) who pushed for a different collection of Biblical texts than what is in the canon, including major edits and exclusion of the Old Testament
Marcion
Ecstatic prophecies of Montanus, Maximilla, and Prisca claimed to speak for the Holy Spirit, raising questions about the authority of the written Scriptures relative to new claims to truth.
Montanist Controversy
Roman Catholic rejection of sola scriptura, which affirmed that Catholic theology relies on both Scripture and living tradition and interdependent and authoritative sources for theology.
Council of Trent
Official teaching describes both sacred Scripture and Tradition as coming from one source of revelation, the Word of God: Scripture “as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit,” and tradition as “the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles.”
Second Vatican Council
Scripture is without error
Inerrant
The truth of tradition passed from Peter to the current pope.
Succession
Scripture will not fail
Infallibility
Trinitarian heresy: Makes Jesus and the Spirit less than the Father
Subordinationism
Makes Jesus into an ordinary human being who merited adoption by God, and it was his “moral progress that won for him the title Son of God.”
Adoptionist
Understands the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three modes in which the one Gods works in the world
Modalism
The suggestion that God the Father died on the cross
Patripassianism
The heresy of Arius that taught that Jesus was God’s first and greatest creature.
Arianism
The formal statement or profession of Christian belief originally formulated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and amplified at the Council of Constantinople in 381.
Nicene Creed
The belief that there are three gods
Tritheism
“mutual indwelling”, used in theology to point to the relational nature of God
Perichoresis
Because the works of God are indivisible and any work God does is the work of all 3 persons of the Trinity, its appropriate to talk about the distinct work that each of the divine persons does in the world
Doctrine of Appropriations
“Substance” or “essence”, the very heart of something
Ousia
“of similar substance”
Homoi-ousious
“the same substance”
Homo-ousious
creation out of nothing
Creatio ex nihilo
God holds back, distant and standoffish, from what God has made
Deism
The teaching that God, by nature, is beyond this world and beyond the comprehension of human beings.
Transcendence
A trait of God that refers to God’s intimate union with and total presence to his creation
Immanence
The belief that the world is itself divine
Pantheism
God and the world are so bound together that God could not rightly exist without the world
Panentheism
A group of heretical religious movements that claimed salvation comes from secret knowledge available only to the elite initiated in that religion
Gnosticism
Gnostic teaching that divides creation into two realities: material (bad) and spiritual (good)
Hierarchical dualism
The goodness of all that God has made, all things are included under the heading of created goodness.
Holism
God’s continuing work in creation
Providence
God’s work and will in upholding all of creation
Preservation
God’s work in and with all things
Concurrence
God’s work in guiding all things to the purpose for which they have been made and God’s active rule over creation
Governance
The doctrine of the human being—Christian teaching about what sort of creatures we are
Theological Anthropology
Creatures who are always both physical and spiritual
Psychosomatic Unities
Denies the existence of the spiritual or reduces the human being to a constellation of body parts and nothing more
Materialism
a kind of materialism that still recognizes the human being in relationship to God
Nonreductive Physicalism
body-soul dualism
Holistic Dualism
Image of God, Latin
Imago Dei
Sees human beings as sharing in some aspect of God’s substance
Substantial View
Emphasizing the unique function human beings have in caring for God’s creation
Functional View
Begins with God’s triune nature, emphasizing God’s life as perfect relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To be in the image of God, therefore, might mean that humans are, at our core, beings created to exist in relationship with others
Relational View
