Final Exam

Question 1

Theopanism

Answer 1

The idea that God is the source of ll things and becomes all things. This is a heresy that Luther had to avoid.

Question 2

Election

Answer 2

This refers to God’s selection of certain people to salvation while leaving others as reprobate.

Question 3

The doctrine of Limited atonement

Answer 3

This is the Calvinist/Reformed idea that Christ died for the elect, but not the reprobate .

Question 4

Synod of Dort

Answer 4

1618-1619. The Meeting of the Reformed Church of Holland that excommunicated Jacob Arminius and enshrined Calvinism in the Reformed Church of Holland. This is where TULIP becomes a larger part of the Calvinist theology.
Total depravity
Unconditional election
Limited atonement
Irresistible grace
Perserverence

Question 5

Arminianism

Answer 5

The belief system named after Jacob Arminius: we have the free will to choose salvation. His belief was synergistic- that is, God and humans work together for salvation. He wanted to say we are saved by grace through faith, but that we have a role to play in salvation. God seeks salvation for everyone, but he gives us a choice by giving us prevenient grace. It’s not works, its a single choice that it is our responsibility to make.

Question 6

Why does Prevenient Grace allow Arminianism to avoid Pelagianism?

Answer 6

Prevenient Grace avoids the idea that our works have something to so with salvation. It’s not a question of our being able to do good, its about God giving every person enough grace to make a single choice: either accept justifying grace or don’t. We don’t have to choose to do good things, but we do have the choice of accepting the gift of salvation through faith in Christ.

Question 7

“Evangelical Synergism”

Answer 7

The belief that we have free will, which was destroyed in the fall, on the basis of the work of God through Christ and by the spirit of God working through the Word of God.

Question 8

Deism

Answer 8

A belief system that places emphasis on God as the creator. Deism was a result of the Enlightenment movement, where rationalism was the basis of knowledge. This is all about making God make sense. The deists didn’t hold to beliefs in the Trinity, miracles or the incarnation. God created the world and gave it a lot of order, so it can pretty much in itself without his interference. If it can’t be proven through reason or empirical data, we shouldn’t believe it.

Question 9

Rabies Theologicum

Answer 9

“A disease where theologians fight each other like mad dogs.” This is an enlightenment belief that came out of deism. It is based on the 30 years war and other conflicts that arose in the pre-enlightenment era out of religious disputes about the proper theology to hold.

Question 10

The enlightenment

Answer 10

This is the scientific and philosophical revolution that placed emphasis on reason and empirical data rather. This led to Deism and liberal protestant theology. Kant, Newton, Hume, Locke, and Hobbes were all key thinkers of the time They held that faith was alright as long as it conformed to reason.

Question 11

“Faith follows Understanding”

Answer 11

The idea that faith ought to work with, and take its lead from reason. God is rational and people are rational, so faith must also be rational.

Question 12

Gefühl

Answer 12

The feeling of awareness of dependence on something higher than yourself. This is a universal human experience. The Christian experience of Gefühl is the highest and comes from a person’s religious a priori.

Question 13

Ritschl on facts and values

Answer 13

Science (any discipline that is primarily concerned with evidence) deals in facts, and religion deals in values. Science can’t tell us anything about values, so it is silly to think religion can tell us anything about facts.

Question 14

“Kernel” and “Dry husk”

Answer 14

A liberal Protestant view that we have to separate the old, dead dogma from the “good stuff” in the Bible. The good stuff is about morality and the way to live life, the bad stuff is the stuff on miracles and all that. This is built on the fact/value distinction. They didn’t edit the Bible, but they did selectively preach.

Question 15

Fundamentalism as a reaction to Liberal Protestantism

Answer 15

Hodge and the other fundamentalists thought that it was wrong to separate the Bible from facts. They argue that the Bible is the supreme source of factual information and should be thought of in that way. They hold that God made everything and knows everything and that the scriptures were written through Plenary Inspiration, and is, therefore, inerrant. If the Bible says it, it is fact, and where science contradicts the Bible, science is wrong.

Question 16

The Fundamentals

Answer 16

This was a text created, in part, to expose Liberal Protestant theologians/theologies. The precepts found therein include:
Biblical inerrancy
Trinitarian doctrine
Virgin birth
The fall/original sin
Substitutionary atonement
Bodily resurrection and ascension
The Fundamentals asserted that all Christians had to believe in these things.

Question 17

The Doctrine of Plenary Inspiration

Answer 17

This is the idea that the entire Bible is fully inspired
This means that nothing can be excluded
This is not the spirit writing through a person in a possession kind of way
This is the idea that each person who wrote the scriptures were specially gifted with the particular skills and knowledge to write exactly what needed to be written to make an inerrant text

Question 18

Hegel’s philosophy of religion (immanentism)

Answer 18

Hegel believed that the God, or the kingdom of God, were becoming increasingly more immanent in the world. As God, thesis, becomes closer to the world, antithesis, the world becomes more like God and god like the world, synthesis. In this theory God needs the world as much as the world needs God, because the relationship between the two is where discovery of self happens. The problem/benefit is that it makes God immanent.

Question 19

Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel

Answer 19

HE wants to know how you could come by the information Hegel supposes to know. This ind of knowledge is really impossible outside of being God. He argues that we are limited by our own interpretive horizon. HE argues that our human natures limit our ability to really assess the kinds of things Hegel supposes.

Question 20

The infinite qualitative difference between God and humans

Answer 20

Barth- God cannot be imminent because this would mean that God is party to whats going on in the world. more importantly, if God is imminent, then you can’t question the things that are going on in the world, because it would appear that God is in them. God must be transcendent, he must be infinitely and qualitatively different. because if He is, then we can say that the things going on in the world are, in fact, bad.
This principle establishes the Freedom of God from bondage to the world. God first says no to the world (judgement) and then yes to the world (revelation and salvation).

Question 21

Neo-orthodoxy/Barth’s view of the Bible

Answer 21

For Barth, the Bible was the means through which God speaks to humanity, but it is not the literal word of God. When God speaks through the Bible, it is the word of God, but it is still a book, and should not be worshiped itself. the Bible is special because God uses it to speak to humanity, not because it is somehow inerrant.

Question 22

Barth’s Actualism

Answer 22

the idea that God reveals Himself through acts of self disclosure. We cannot rely on the Bible to reveal God every time, look at all the people who read the Bible and never find God, instead, we must look to God for revelation, and if that happens to be through the Bible, then thats good, but God can show Himself through whatever means he chooses.

Question 23

Deus Dixit

Answer 23

“God has spoken” This is a foundational belief for Barth. It means that God chooses to speak to people through the scriptures, but that the scriptures themselves have no special power to reveal God. When we look at the scriptures, we are looking at a way God chooses to speak.

Question 24

Scandal of Particularity

Answer 24

This is the question of what makes/made Jesus special. Barth argues that the pronouncement that Jesus is the Son of God is what gives him a special status. His resurrection was an apocalypse, it is the moment when God revealed Godself in person and established a new paradigm in which God reveals Himself to man.

Question 25

Aid

Answer 25

This is the help offered by individuals who are moved by the spectacle of widespread destitution. It is helping people in a bad situation rather than actually liberating them from that situation. Aid doesn’t see people as being put in a situation by the actions of others.

Question 26

Reformism

Answer 26

Seeks to improve the condition of the poor within the existing social structures. This still limits the good it does, since it does not address the fundamental problems inherent in the society in which the poor are found.

Question 27

Liberation

Answer 27

The freeing of people from the social situation in which they are poor. It is not an improving of position, but a structural reorganization of society.

Question 28

Conscientization

Answer 28

The process by which the poor come together, understand the structures that oppress them, organize into movements, and act in opposition to those structures.

Question 29

Theology as the “second step”

Answer 29

This is where theology and faith begin to reflect and support liberation movements. The idea is that Jesus was a liberator and has compassion for the poor, and that, as Christians, we are to act as Christ: to help those in need and to support the efforts of liberators who are seeking to change social structures for the betterment of oppressed groups.