Exam Prepp

Question 1

Karl Marx

Answer 1

Marx views capitalist society as oppressive, religion is part of the oppression, giving people some sense of false security that if they don’t make it in this life, they’ll at least be better off in the next. He said that religion is the opium of the masses. He continued his argument against God by saying that in the world of reason, God is a stranger and is non existent. Intellectual capacity is the highest divinity.

Question 2

Sigmund Freud

Answer 2

Freud dismissed all religion as infantile delusion without seriously examining its claims. He however came up with the origin of this illusion, which he boils down to four parts: Ignorance, fear, fantasy and guilt.
Ignorance: a pre-scientific guess of how nature works.
Fear: Heaven is a substitute for our earthly father who dies or sends us away into the frightening world of responsibility.
Fantasy: God is a product of wish fulfilment, that there is a providential force in the impersonal appearance of life.
Guilt: God ensures moral behaviour.

Question 3

Frederick Nietzsche

Answer 3

The death of God is the key to the salvation of humanity. Religion is ugly and distorted, however the life of the Ubermensch is beautiful and perfect. According to Nietzsche salvation is a super human act of the human will. Nietzsche’s mad man calls humanity to accept the fact that God is dead because of religion. Therefore humanity should discard God and evolve into the “Ubermensch.”

Question 4

Ludwig Feuerbach

Answer 4

God is a name of humans highest aspirations, which are projected upwards and outwards. These human values are objectified, i.e. transposed into an objective entity out there.

Question 5

Cosmological Proof

Answer 5

Starts out from the phenomenon of movement, change, causality in the external world of experience. Since infinite regression is pointless, with the aid of causality, there must be a first cause. The first cause is God.

Question 6

Teleological Proof

Answer 6

Starts out from the order, and purpose of all natural happenings. It argues that everything must have a purpose. It excludes the possibility that things happens by chance. There must be a world creator and orderer for the world to exist.

Question 7

Ontological Proof

Answer 7

That which nothing greater can be conceived. God’s existence is inferable from a clear and distinct idea of a supremely perfect being.

Question 8

Moral Proof

Answer 8

Starts out from the necessity of achieving agreement between morality and man’s aspiration to peace. Belief in God is the best explanation for human morality.

Question 9

Agnosticism

Answer 9

There is no way to know about gods

Question 10

Animism

Answer 10

The belief that everything has a soul

Question 11

Atheism

Answer 11

The absence of the belief in a Deity/’s

Question 12

Deism

Answer 12

The belief god exist, but does not interact with the universe

Question 13

Dystheism/Maltheism

Answer 13

The belief that God is evil

Question 14

Henotheism

Answer 14

More than one deity, but one is supreme

Question 15

Kathenotheism

Answer 15

More than one deity. Only worship one at a time. Each is supreme in turn.

Question 16

Monolatry

Answer 16

More than one deity. Only one is supreme and should be worshipped.

Question 17

Monotheism

Answer 17

The belief of one god, or the oneness of god.

Question 18

Nontheism

Answer 18

Absence of a clearly defined belief in any deity.

Question 19

Panentheism

Answer 19

God is immanent in the universe, but he also transcends it. The universe is part of God.

Question 20

Pantheism

Answer 20

God is in all, and all is in God, therefore God is all and all is God.

Question 21

Polytheism

Answer 21

Worship of multiple deities

Question 22

Theism

Answer 22

Gods or deities exist, and they interact with the universe.

Question 23

Transtheism

Answer 23

One or more deities who transcend the universe and are yet immanent in it.

Question 24

Original Sin

Answer 24

Original sin is that sin and guilt that we all posses in God’s eyes as a direct result of Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden.This is also referred to as inherited sin, since it forms part of our nature even before we are old enough to commit conscious sin.

Question 25

Pelagianism

Answer 25

Humanity has full control, and thus full responsibility for obeying the Gospel in addition to full responsibility for every sin committed. Humans are sinners by choice, they are therefore criminals who need the atonement of Jesus. Sinners are not victims, they are criminals who need pardon.

Question 26

Semi-Pelagianism

Answer 26

This denotes that the first steps toward God’s grace can be taken by man, though additional grace is needed for salvation. We can accomplish grace by ourselves out of our own effort, without God’s grace, and once we’ve been justified we do not need additional grace to persevere until the end of life.

Question 27

Martin Buber: “I-Thou”

Answer 27

Buber has 2 ways of engaging with the world; I-it which is experience, and I-Thou which is encounter. The It is the objectifying of the other, and is seen as a thing. The I is the subject, where the It is the object. The Thou, however, is entering into a relationship, and both participants are transformed. We encounter the Thou in its entirety and not as a sum of qualities.

Question 28

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s: “I-You” Clifford Green

Answer 28

A Person is an independent, willing subject who exist in relation to others. An individual only exist in relation to an other. Individuality does not mean solitary, but rather community. People encounter each other by making ethical claims upon one another. It is this ethical encounter that forms part of Bonhoeffer’s fresh look at the image of God.

Question 29

Daniel Migliore: New Humanity in Christ

Answer 29

New humanity in Christ is the recreation of the three distinct aspects of the above mentioned structures. 1) If being the image of God means living by the grace of God, and if such a relationship with God is denied by the sins of self-glorification and self-abnegation, then faith is that simple trust and confidence in the benevolence of God extended to us in Jesus. 2) If being in the image of God means life in mutual, helpful relations with others and if this created structure of human life is distorted both by despising others and by hating ourselves, then love is that new way to be human with and for others expressed in Jesus Christ and awakened in us by the Spirit. 3) If being in the image of God means a hunger for the coming of God’s kingdom, and if this hunger is denied or distorted by the sins of despair and presumption, then hope is the new freedom toward God’s future for us.
Faith love and hope are thus the expressions of a new human freedom in relationship, a new way of being human in the solidarity with others, made possible by the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

Question 30

Wolfhart Pannenberg’s understanding of “Person”

Answer 30

We are all persons in our psychosomatic totality. The premise of existence is that my existence is grounded in the person of the other. We are all persons in our necessary particularity, yet, personhood transcends all the singularities and changes of circumstances because it finally draws upon the relation to God as the source of its integrity.

Question 31

Jurgen Moltmann’s concept of perichoresis and the unity of the trinity

Answer 31

The devlopment of trinitarian doctrine consists of two concepts: the metaphysical and the Biblical approach. Moltmann contrasts the two approaches against each other pointing out their weaknesses. He then suggests that the perichoretic form of unity is the only conceivable trinitarian concept of the unity of the triune God, because it combines threeness and oneness in such a way that they cannot be reduced to each other, so that both the danger of modalism and tritheism are excluded. This view of the trinity is social and declares the trinity open because of the overflow of love which gives created beings their place for livingness.