Themes in the Study of Religion: God, Revelation, Worship, Language
This domain tests the vocabulary of the discipline across traditions: what it means to call God personal, transcendent or simple; how religions claim to know God; what worship does for the worshipper and the community; and whether speech about God can be meaningful at all. Precision with terms matters more than enthusiasm.
Concepts of God
- Attributes: omnipotence (the stone paradox; Aquinas redefines it as power to do all that is possible), omniscience and foreknowledge, omnibenevolence, aseity, simplicity, eternity (timeless versus everlasting), transcendence and immanence, personality.
- Models: classical theism, deism, pantheism, panentheism. In African traditional religion the Supreme Being is often remote yet approachable through divinities and ancestors; in Islam, tawhid, mercy and sovereignty are named through the ninety-nine names.
- Critiques of anthropomorphism: Xenophanes, Maimonides' negative attributes, Feuerbach's projection theory.
Revelation
- General revelation: nature, conscience, reason (Romans 1:19-20). Special revelation: scripture, prophecy, incarnation, the Qur'anic wahy mediated through Jibril, divination and oracles in ATR.
- Propositional accounts (revelation conveys truths) versus non-propositional accounts (Buber's I-Thou encounter; Tillich's ultimate concern).
Worship
- Elements: adoration, sacrifice, prayer (petition, intercession, thanksgiving, confession), liturgy, sacrament, festival, pilgrimage, fasting, music and dance.
- Ninian Smart's dimensions - doctrinal, ritual, experiential, ethical, social, material - give you a checklist for describing any tradition.
- Functions: communion, thanksgiving, identity, memory, cohesion (Durkheim); the social-control critique (Marx).
Religious language
Aquinas' analogy of attribution versus univocal and equivocal predication; Ayer's verification principle; Flew's falsification parable, Hare's blik and Mitchell's believer; Wittgenstein's language games; Tillich's symbols, which participate in what they point to.
Worked example
"Religious language is meaningless." Assess. Chain: Ayer's principle and its self-referential difficulty; Flew's gardener, where an assertion that denies nothing dies the death of a thousand qualifications; Hare's blik, meaningful but non-cognitive; Mitchell's partisan, falsifiable in principle; then analogy and language games as counter-arguments. Conclude that the challenge is damaging to descriptive literalism but not fatal to all religious speech.
Traps
- Reducing omnipotence to raw power.
- Treating "revelation" as a synonym for "the Bible".
- Describing worship without stating its function.
- Declaring the verification principle dead without showing the argument.