Cameroon GCE A-Level Religious Studies flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Exegesis

Critical interpretation of a scriptural text that draws out its meaning from original language, genre, historical setting and literary context, as opposed to reading a preconceived meaning into it.

Sitz im Leben

German for 'setting in life'; form criticism uses it to describe the social situation, such as worship or controversy, in which an oral unit was first used before being written down.

Synoptic problem

The puzzle of why Matthew, Mark and Luke share so much wording and order. The Two-Source hypothesis answers with Markan priority plus a lost sayings source called Q.

Redaction criticism

A method studying how an editor selected, arranged and modified sources to express theological concerns, for example Matthew's fulfilment quotations or Luke's emphasis on the poor.

Four senses of Scripture

Classical Christian reading of a text at four levels: literal (plain meaning), allegorical (what to believe), moral or tropological (how to act) and anagogical (future hope).

Tawhid

The Islamic doctrine of God's absolute oneness. It excludes shirk, the sin of associating partners with God, and grounds Muslim worship, ethics and law.

General revelation

Knowledge of God available to all people through nature, conscience and history, distinguished from special revelation given through prophets, Scripture and, for Christians, Jesus Christ.

Analogical predication

A theory of religious language holding that terms like 'good' apply to God neither in exactly the same sense as to creatures (univocal) nor in a wholly different sense (equivocal), but partly both.

Agnosticism

The position that God's existence cannot be known or that judgement should be suspended for lack of decisive evidence, differing from atheism, which denies that God exists.

Ontological argument

Anselm's argument that God, being that than which nothing greater can be conceived, must exist in reality, since a being existing only in the mind would be less great.

Cosmological argument

The argument that the universe's motion, causation and contingency require a first mover, first cause or necessary being, classically developed in Aquinas' first three ways.

Irenaean theodicy

Hick's soul-making defence: God permits evil and suffering because they are necessary conditions for developing moral and spiritual maturity, with the world as a vale of soul-making.

Hume on miracles

Hume defines a miracle as a violation of natural law and argues no testimony could ever be strong enough to outweigh the uniform experience supporting that law.

Numinous experience

Otto's term for encounter with the holy as mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a feeling of awe, dread and attraction before a wholly other reality.

Logical problem of evil

Mackie's claim that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with a God who is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good, so the two cannot both be true.

Categorical imperative

Kant's deontological test of morality: act only on maxims you could will as universal law, and treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means.

Natural law

Aquinas' theory that moral norms are derived from human nature and reason as created by God, so basic goods and prohibitions are knowable without special revelation.

Principle of double effect

A rule allowing an act with a foreseen harmful side effect when the act itself is good, the bad effect is unintended, and the good proportionately outweighs the harm.

Situation ethics

Fletcher's person-centred, consequentialist approach in which agape is the only absolute and rules are dispensable according to circumstances, guided by principles such as pragmatism and relativism.

Compatibilism

The view that free will is compatible with causal determinism, because acting freely means acting according to one's own desires without external coercion, not acting without causes.

Synderesis

In Aquinas' account of conscience, the innate habit of knowing basic moral principles, which reason then applies to particular acts through conscientia.

Just war criteria

Conditions for morally permissible war: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, proportionality, last resort, reasonable chance of success, plus discrimination and proportionality in conduct.

Nicene Creed

The 325 council's statement of Christian faith, affirming one God and one Lord Jesus Christ, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father.

Five pillars of Islam

The core Muslim practices: shahada (declaration of faith), salat (daily prayer), zakat (almsgiving), sawm (fasting in Ramadan) and hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca).

Shia-Sunni division

The split over leadership after Muhammad's death: Shia hold that authority passed to Ali's line as imams, while Sunni accept the caliphate chosen by community consensus.

Ancestor veneration

African traditional practice of honouring deceased relatives as intermediaries between the living and the supreme Being, expressed in libation, naming and family rituals.

Inculturation

The adaptation of Christian or Islamic teaching and worship to local African cultures, producing independent churches and locally shaped Islamic practice.

Liberation theology

A movement, especially Latin American, reading the gospel through the experience of the poor and demanding social and political transformation, with a preferential option for the poor.

Secularisation thesis

The claim that modernisation inevitably reduces religion's social significance and public influence, associated with Weber, Wilson and Berger.

Religious pluralism

Hick's view that all major religions are culturally conditioned responses to the same ultimate reality, so no single tradition holds the whole truth exclusively.

Non-overlapping magisteria

Gould's proposal that science and religion occupy separate domains of fact and value, so they cannot properly conflict with one another.

Feminist theology

The critical reinterpretation of religious texts, symbols and institutions to expose patriarchal bias and to recover women's experience as a source for theology.