Fluent Essays

You must submit your completed exam on Canvas. Your exam will be run through the plagiarism software. Please submit as an attached document. Please use only one document to answer all of the following parts of the exam. Provide sections and question numbers on the document so that your responses correspond to the sections and question numbers on the exam. You will need to cite the theologians that you are engaging with in order to provide evidence for your claims throughout this exam. Citations should be parenthetical and in text. Cite any ideas that are not your own and any quotations that you pull directly from the text. Use the last name of the author and the page number followed by a period after the parentheses. For example: (Trible, 65) or (Class Notes, 9.20.17). Y​ ou may only use “class notes” as a citation for things thatwehavediscussedinclassthatdidnotappearinyourcoursereadings.​ Youmaynotcite class notes to summarize what a theologian we have read says. You must cite their text directly for full credit. Citations belong at the end of the sentence. I​​ f you do not include citations and page numbers, you will not receive full credit for your response. Helpfultips:​ Thismidtermexaminationisyouropportunitytodemonstratewhatyouhave learned in the first half of this class. Please be sure to be as specific and detailed as possible in your answers in each section below. Define anything that needs to be defined and back up your analysis with evidence from the texts. Be sure to explain any quotes that you use. Take the time to show your work in order to demonstrate your mastery of the material. Make sure to answer all questions in each prompt and focus on the quality and content of your response. Incomplete answers without supporting arguments will not receive full credit. Remember to proofread your work and check your spelling and grammar. Midterm Exam Part I: Quote identification​: Choose any t​ wo​ of the following three quotes. Briefly state (in 1-2 paragraphs) the meaning of the quote a​ nd​ the quote’s significance and relationship to the theologian’s overall project. Use appropriate citations when necessary. (5 points each for 10 points toal) “However, it appears that only a minority of U.S. teenagers are naturally absorbing by osmosis the traditional substantive content and character of the religious traditions to which they claim to belong. For, it appears to us, another popular religious faith -- Moralistic Therapeutic Deism -- is colonizing many historical religious traditions and, almost without anyone noticing, converting believers in the old faiths to its alternative religious vision of divenly underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness.” (Christian Smith, 56). “Rahner’s contribution is to arrive at this insight through the dynamism of human experience, making God’s incomprehensible holy mystery the very condition that makes possible the functioning of our human spirit.” (Elizabeth Johnson, 37). “Before this episode the Yahwist has used only the generic word​ ‘adham.​ No exclusively male reference has appeared. Only with the specific creation of woman (‘​ ishshah​) occurs the first specific terms for man as male (‘ish). In other words, sexuality is simultaneous for woman and man. The sexes are interrelated and interdependent.” (Phyllis Trible, 76). PartII:ShortAnswer:​ chooseany​two​ofthefollowingnumberedpromptsandprovideashort answer (in about 2-3 paragraphs). ​Read the prompt directions carefully and answer all parts of each prompt.​ Use appropriate citations when necessary. (20 points each for 40 points total) In her chapter on “The Crucified God of Compassion,” Elizabeth Johnson examines arguments about whether or not God suffers. What is at stake in these arguments? (In other words, why are there heated disagreements over whether or not God suffers?) Why does Johnson think that any theological attempt to explain the suffering of the world by relying on arguments about God having a plan for the world or by appealing to human freedom is problematic? In what way does John Noonan think that doctrine develops? What are the examples he offers of how Christian doctrine has developed? How does the development of doctrine help us to better understand what it means to say that the Catholic tradition is a living tradition? Sanda Schneiders examines three models of service in light of the foot washing event in the Gospel of John. What are these three models of service and how do they differ? Which model of service does Schneiders think Jesus is enacting in this story and why does Peter object? Why does Schneiders think this interpretation of the foot washing event is significant for Christians today? PartIII:Essay:​  Your answers should draw upon course materials. Your essay should be 850-1000 words, which is about double spaced 3-4 pages in 12 point Times New Roman font​. Read the prompt directions carefully and answer all parts of each prompt.​ Use appropriate citations when necessary. (50 points) 2. What are some of the methods described by Marcus Borg and Richard Clifford that readers can rely on as they interpret scripture? For Catholics, are the stories in scripture “true”? How does the historical critical method differ from hermeneutics? How has scripture been interpreted from the position of people who have been historically marginalized and what sorts of truths have they found contained in scripture? Place Marcus Borg ​and​ Richard Clifford into conversation with ​either​ Kelly Brown Douglas o​ r Lisa Cahill in order to answer the last question.On “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” as U.S. Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Facto Religious Faith1 · Christian Smith My book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton, follows over hun- dreds of pages a variety of topical trains of thought and sometimes pursued diversions and digressions. But what does the bigger picture of the religious and spiritual lives of U.S. teenagers look like when we stand back and try to put it all together? When we get past what we discovered about adolescent inarticulacy regarding religion, systematically sort through the myriad stories and statements about religious faith and practice, and pull apart and piece back together what seem to be the key ideas and relevant issues, what did we conclude? Here we resummarize our observations in venturing a general thesis about teenage religion and spirituality in the United States. We advance this thesis somewhat tentatively, as less than a conclusive fact but more than mere con- jecture. Namely, we suggest that the de facto dominant religion among con- temporary teenagers in the United States is what we might call “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” The creed of this religion, as codified from what emerged from our interviews with U.S. teenagers, sounds something like this: 1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth. Christian Smith is the Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor and associate chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent publication is Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, coau- thored with Melissa Lundquist Denton. Smith is the director of the National Study of Youth and Religion, a research project funded by the Lilly Endowment Inc. ( 46 ) ( 47 ) 2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. 3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about one- self. 4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem. 5. Good people go to heaven when they die. Such a de facto creed is particularly evident among mainline Protestant and Catholic youth but is also more than a little visible among black and conser- vative Protestants, Jewish teens, other religious types of teenagers, and even many “nonreligious” teenagers in the United States. Note that no teenagers would actually use the terminology “Moralistic Therapeutic Deist” to describe themselves. That is our summarizing term. And very few teenagers would lay out the five points of its creed as clearly and concisely as we have just done. But when one sifts through and digests hun- dreds of discussions with U.S teenagers about religion, God, faith, prayer, and other spiritual practices, what seems to emerge as the dominant, de facto reli- gious viewpoint turns oEve and Adam: Genesis 2-3 Reread PHYLLIS TRIBLE On the whole,the Womens Liberation Movement is hostile to the Bible, even as it claims that the Bible is hostile to women. The Yahwist account of creation and fall in Genesis 2-3 provides a strong proof text for that claim. Accepting centuries of (male) exegesis, many feminists interpret this story as legitimating male supremacy and female subor- dination. They read to reject. My suggestion is that we reread to understand and to appropriate. Ambiguity characterizes the meaning of adham in Genesis 2-3. On the one hand, man is the first creature formed (2:7). The Lord God puts him in the garden to till it and keep it, a job identified with the male (cf. 3:17-19). On the other hand, adham is a generic term for humankind. In commanding adham not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the Deity is speaking to both the man and the woman (2:16-17). Until the differentiation of female and male (2:21-23), adham is basically androgynous: one creature incorporating two sexes. Concern for sexuality, specifically for the creation of woman, comes last in the story, after the making of the garden, the trees, and the Phyllis Trible received her Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. She teaches at Andover Newton Theological School and is author of God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Her articles on feminism and biblical faith have appeared in Soundings, Journal oj the American Academy of Religion, and Religion in Life. This essay is reprinted by permission from Andover Newton Qparterly 13 (March, 1973). Eve and Adam 75 animals. Some commentators allege female subordination based on this _, order of events. They contrast it with Genesis 1:27 where God creates adhom as male and female in one act.3 Thereby they infer that whereas the Priests recognized the equality of the sexes, the Yahwist made woman a second, subordinate, inferior sex. But the Iast may be first, as both the biblical theologian and the literary critic know. Thus the Yah wist account moves to its climax, not its decline, in the creation -r of woman. She is not an afterthought; she is the culmination. Genesis -- 1 itself supports this interpretation, for there male and female are indeed the last and truly the crown of all creatures. The last is also first where beginnings and endings are parallel. In Hebrew literature, the central concerns of a unit often appear at the beginning and the end as an inc/usia device. Genesis 2 evinces this structure. The creation of man first and of woman last constitutes a ring composition whereby the two creatures are parallel. In no way does the order disparage woman. Content and context augment this reading. The context for the advent of woman is a divine judgment It is not good that adham should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him (2:18). The phrase needing explication is helper fit for him. In the Old Testament the word helper (ezer) hTheological Studies 54 (1993) DEVELOPMENT IN MORAL DOCTRINE* JOHN T. NOONAN, JR. Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton THAT THE MORAL teachings of the Catholic Church have changed over time will, I suppose, be denied by almost no one today. To refresh memories and confirm the point, I will describe four large examples of such change in the areas of usury, marriage, slavery, and religious freedom, and then analyze how Catholic theology has dealt with them. Usury The first is the teaching of the Church on usury. Once upon a time, certainly from at least 1150 to 1550, seeking, receiving, or hoping for anything beyond ones principal—in other words, looking for profit— on a loan constituted the mortal sin of usury. The doctrine was enun- ciated by popes, expressed by three ecumenical councils, proclaimed by bishops, and taught unanimously by theologians. The doctrine was not some obscure, hole-in-the-corner affectation, but stood astride the Eu- ropean credit markets, at least as much as the parallel Islamic ban of usury governs Moslem countries today. There were ways of profiting from the extension of credit, ways that were lawful; but these ways had been carefully constructed to respect the basic prohibition; and it was a debated question at what point they crossed the line and were them- selves sinfully usurious. The great central moral fact was that usury, understood as profit on a loan, was forbidden as contrary to the natural law, as contrary to the law of the Church, and as contrary to the law of the gospel.1 All that, we know, has changed. The change can be exaggerated. * A more developed form of the Thomas Verner Moore Lecture sponsored by St. Anselms Abbey, September 29, 1990, at the Catholic University of America. 1 On the whole topic, see John T. Noonan, Jr., Authority on Usury and on Contra- ception, Tijdschrift voor Theologie 6 (1966) 26-50, republished in Cross Currents 16 (1966) 55-79 and The Wiseman Review (Summer, 1966) 201-29. The standard defini- tion of usury was given by Gratian, Decretum, Corpus iuris canonici, ed. E. Friedberg (Leipzig, 1879-1881) 2.14.3.1. The Second Council of the Lateran condemned usury (G. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio [Paris, 1901-1920] 21.529-30); the Third Council of the Lateran declared usury to be condemned by the pages of both Testaments (Mansi 22.231). The Council of Vienne declared that anyone pertinaciously affirming that to practice usury is no sin should be punished as a her- etic (Clement, Constitutiones 5.5, Corpus iuris canonici, ed. E. Friedberg). 662 DEVELOPMENT IN MORAL DOCTRINE 663 Even at the height of the prohibition of usury not every form of credit transaction was classified as a loan from which no profit might be sought. The idea of legitimate interest was also not absent. Formally it can be argued that the old usury rule, narrowly construed, still stands: namely, that no profit on a loan may 4 Reading the Creation StoriesAgain ,,;::::is))t We begin with the Hebrew Bible, commonly known among Christians as the Old Testament. 1 As in most recent scholarship, I will use the term Hebrew Bible instead of Old Testament, for two reasons. The first is respect for Judaism. For Jews, the Hebrew Bible is the Bible, not the Old Testament. The second reason pertains to Christians. For many Christian readers, the adjective old implies outmoded or superceded, as if the New Testament were intended to replace the Old Tes- tament. Commonly accompanying this usage is the notion that the Old Testament speaks of a God of law and judgment, whereas the New: Testament speaks of a God of grace and love. Though this stereotype is widespread among Christians, it is simply wrong: both visions of God appear in both testaments. The notion that the New Testament (and its God) replaces the Old Testament (and its God) was rejected by earlyChristianity in the second century.? Despite a continuing Christian tendency to relegate the Old Testament to second place, it is for Christians 57 58 THE HEBREW BIBLE just as much Biblc.tjusr as sacred scripture, as is the New Tes- tament. When Christians do not see this, we not only reject much of our heritage but impoverish our understanding on esus, the New Testament, and Christianity itself. Within the Jewish tradition, the Hebrew Bible has three main divisions. In English, they are called the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. In Hebrew, they are, respectively, Torah, Neviim, and Ketbuvim. The first letters of each of the Hebrew terms form the acronym Tanak, a common Jewish term for the Hebrew Bible as a whole. The Torah is the first and foundational division of the Hebrew Bible. Itconsists of fivebooks: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Num- bers, and Deuteronomy. Though the books themselves do not say anything about their authorship, both the Jewish and Chris- tian traditions have attributed them to Moses. Thus they are sometimes spoken of as the fivebooks of Moses. And though the most common English designation for this group of books is the Law, the Torah contains much more than what is com- monly meant by the word law. The word torah itself means more; it can be translated as instruction or teaching. The Torah does indeed include the laws of Israel, but it also contains the stories of her origins. It is instruction and teaching about the peoples story and identity, aswell as the foundation of their laws. In other words, it combines narrative and legal traditions. The Torah is also commonly called the Pentateuch (as we sawearlier), a Greek word meaning the fivescrolls. In fact, this is probably the most commonly used term for these fivebooks. The Pentateuch begins with Israels stories of creation, to which we now turn. Israels Stories of the Worlds Beginnings Ancient Israels stories of the worlds beginnings in the first eleven chapters of Genesis are amonGLOBAL JUSTICE, CHRISTOLOGY, AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS LISA SOWLE CAHILL Borton Col/ege ~CAMBRIDGEV UNIVERSITY PRESS i-( IS- 0 ~s ))/ -:s CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge Uruvershy Press The Edinburgh BUIIJmg, Cambndge c B2 BRO, v K Published in the United States of America by Cambridge Umverury Press, New York www.cambndge erg Information on chis ririe: www.cambndge.org/978IJ07028777 © Lisa Sowle Cahill 1013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any pare may take place without the written permISSIOn of Cambridge Umversiry Press. First published 1013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue recordfOr thn publIcatIOn isavarl4ble from the British Library Library ofCongrm Cataloguing in Publication data Cahdl, Lisa Sowle, author. Global justice, Chrisrology and Chrtsdan ethics I Lisa Sowle Cahill. pages em. - (New studies in Chnsrian ethics) Includes blbhograpbrcal references and index. ISE:!978+1°7-02877-7 (hardback) I. Chnsdanuy and jusnee. 2. Globalization-Religious aspects-Christianity jesus Christ-Person and offices. 4. Christian ethics 5. Bible-Theology. L Title. BR1I518q} 201} 241-da3 Wl20404J5 ISBN 978-1-1°7-02877-7 Hardback Cambridge Universny Press has no responsibility for the petslstence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-parry internet websires referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such .....ebsires is, or will remam, accurate or appropriate. Creation and evil 45 is precisely the function of religious narratives, stories, and practices ori- ented around maxims such as All are made in the image of God, Love your neighbor as yourself, or Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Though the absolute claims of religions can be co-opted for violent ends, I submit that rhe heart of true religiosity, asdemonstrated in all the major world religions, is humility and gratitude before God; uniry of all in the name of God; and, in moral terms, mutual forbearance, a spirit of reconciliation, inclusive cooperation, and compassionate action againsr suffering. GENESIS CREATION NARRATIVES Christian faith puts love and mercy at the center of the narrative of redemprion culminating in Jesus Christ. Readers of the bible and theologians alike often see crearion as mere background ro rhe story of salvation carried forward by Abraham, Moses, Exodus, Sinai, and Jesus. They understand Gods liberation of Abrahams descendants and Gods covenant at Sinai as signs of saving love.A sort of prelude ro Gods action in history, creation is but the first chapter of a human career that went horribly wrong with rhe fall. Theologians like Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin understand creation ro have established a certain ordering of human life