Originally submitted to Religion 201 sometime in the fall 1997
Before I took this course, one thing that was a stumbling block to my faith was the notion of Hell. If God loves us as much as the Bible says he does, how could he condemn even Hitler to eternal punishment, much less Gandhi. Furthermore, how could simply choosing the wrong religion send someone to eternal condemnation?
However, after learning about the inclusivist and the pluralist positions, I realize that being a Christian does not necessarily include believing that all believers in other religions are destined for Hell. The universalist belief is also very appealing to me. I am particularly attracted to Origen's argument because I have always wondered why Hell would exist after God had conquered evil.
I have not decided whether I am an inclusivist, a pluralist or a universalist, but after having been exposed to them I am convinced that one of these must be true, that God makes some allowance for non-Christians. As a result, I will be more open to people of different beliefs. I will not try and shove Christianity down the throat of every non-Christian friend I have, because I believe they will still be saved. Furthermore, I plan to stop donating money to missionary work, and use it instead to help the poor. I believe my faith will become stronger since I have removed the major obstacle which stood between me and believe in a an all loving God.
Professor's Comments: I hope you have not dismissed the Biblical witness, and see both the strengths and weaknesses of each position. Origen's argument is shaped by philosophy rather than the Bible.
Grade: 95% A
[Again, another paper that doesn't reflect my opinions now, but did reflect my opinions at a particular point in time.]
Showing posts with label Religion Class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion Class. Show all posts
Monday, December 19, 2005
Sunday, December 18, 2005
The Three Approaches for Presenting Christ to People of Other Religions
Originally submitted for Religion 201, sometime in the fall of 1997
Part I: Describe the Approaches
The three approaches for presenting Christ to people of other religions are: particularist, inclusivist, and pluralist.
Particularists believe that Christianity is the only way to salvation. There may be some truth in other religions from general revelation, but nothing revealed in other religions has saving power, and all of it needs correcting from Christianity. This does not mean however that particularists hope members of other faiths will be damned. Many particularists operate off of an assumption that other faiths are not saved, but are still hopeful that this assumption may be wrong. This is known as open-minded particularism. Karl Barth is a good example of this.
Inclusivists say that Christianity is the only true religion, but saving knowledge is avaliable in every religion. This philosophy is based on the belief that God desires to save everyone. People who worship Christ through other religions are called anonymous Christians. Inclusivism has the advantage of working well in interfaith dialogue.
Pluralists believe that not only can people be saved through other religions, but that other religions are just as valid as Christianity. All religions are different experiences of the same God, and no one religion has any superiority over another. Pluralism focuses on a theocentric perspective rather than a christocentric perspective. The problem with this is that not all religions believe in a god. Many people question if pluralism is really a Christian approach.
Based largely on Calvin's ideas of predestination, Reformed theology takes the view of Particularism. According to Calvin, only the elect, those that God has predestined to believe in Christianity, will be saved.
Part 2: Relate the Approaches to Your Own Life Experience
When it comes to being exposed to other faiths, I have led a sheltered life. I have attended Christian schools all my life, and just about all my friends come from church or school. I do not have many friends from my neighborhood, as I live in a rather secluded area, with not many other people my age. However, in my old neighborhood, which I left when I was eight years old, I had several friends of different faiths.
I have stayed in contact with some of these people over the years. One person in particular I used to debate concerning our different religions. I was quite young, not more than seven, when these debates started. He was accepting of the fact that I did not believe as he did, but I was relentless in my attempts to convert him. One day he asked me why I could not just leave him alone and respect the fact that he did not believe what I did. I responded that what he perceived as menace on my part was actually a sign of my caring for him. I was urging him to convert because I did not want to see him burn in hell. In doing this, I took the particularist approach.
The last time I saw him, I was fourteen. As far as I know, he is still a Buddhist.
Professor's Comments; Need to Edit. 78% C+
Part I: Describe the Approaches
The three approaches for presenting Christ to people of other religions are: particularist, inclusivist, and pluralist.
Particularists believe that Christianity is the only way to salvation. There may be some truth in other religions from general revelation, but nothing revealed in other religions has saving power, and all of it needs correcting from Christianity. This does not mean however that particularists hope members of other faiths will be damned. Many particularists operate off of an assumption that other faiths are not saved, but are still hopeful that this assumption may be wrong. This is known as open-minded particularism. Karl Barth is a good example of this.
Inclusivists say that Christianity is the only true religion, but saving knowledge is avaliable in every religion. This philosophy is based on the belief that God desires to save everyone. People who worship Christ through other religions are called anonymous Christians. Inclusivism has the advantage of working well in interfaith dialogue.
Pluralists believe that not only can people be saved through other religions, but that other religions are just as valid as Christianity. All religions are different experiences of the same God, and no one religion has any superiority over another. Pluralism focuses on a theocentric perspective rather than a christocentric perspective. The problem with this is that not all religions believe in a god. Many people question if pluralism is really a Christian approach.
Based largely on Calvin's ideas of predestination, Reformed theology takes the view of Particularism. According to Calvin, only the elect, those that God has predestined to believe in Christianity, will be saved.
Part 2: Relate the Approaches to Your Own Life Experience
When it comes to being exposed to other faiths, I have led a sheltered life. I have attended Christian schools all my life, and just about all my friends come from church or school. I do not have many friends from my neighborhood, as I live in a rather secluded area, with not many other people my age. However, in my old neighborhood, which I left when I was eight years old, I had several friends of different faiths.
I have stayed in contact with some of these people over the years. One person in particular I used to debate concerning our different religions. I was quite young, not more than seven, when these debates started. He was accepting of the fact that I did not believe as he did, but I was relentless in my attempts to convert him. One day he asked me why I could not just leave him alone and respect the fact that he did not believe what I did. I responded that what he perceived as menace on my part was actually a sign of my caring for him. I was urging him to convert because I did not want to see him burn in hell. In doing this, I took the particularist approach.
The last time I saw him, I was fourteen. As far as I know, he is still a Buddhist.
Professor's Comments; Need to Edit. 78% C+
Sunday, December 04, 2005
What Do We Believe About the Bible?
2 Timothy 3:16 says "All Scripture is God-breahted and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness." The Bible is inspired by God. It has many different authors but the same theme runs through it. The personality of the "authors" was not suppressed and the different writing styles are evident. The way God inspired the "authors" is open to debate. Some people think that the Holy Spirit came down and put thoughts into the "authors" heads so that God's feelings came out in the "authors" own words. Others think that God was preparing the "authors" their whole lives, that the Holy Spirit was shaping them, so that they would write down what God wanted when they wrote their book or books of the Bible.
Confusion developed in the early church as to what books were inspired by God. In 397 A.D. a council was called together in Carthage to decide which books to include in the Bible. They developed a Canon to test the books. Here are some of the requirements. The books must have been written by an apostle or someone who had met somebody who knew Jesus after he rose from the dead. The book must recognize the Old Testament as God's word. The book must be in agreement with the other books already accepted and speak of Jesus as the son of God. Some of the books that are part of our Bible that some thought should be excluded are Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, James, II Peter, II and III John, Jude, Hebrews, Revelation, and Esther.
Until 1546 a group of 14 books known as the Apocrypha were considered to be part of the Bible. These books were finally rejected for the following reasons: they were not found in the original Old Testament, they were never quoted from by Jesus or any other part of the Bible, and some of the Apocryphal books disclaim inspiration. The books were rejected from the Protestant Bibles, but are still part of the Roman Catholic Bibles.
The Bible has been around for a long time--for some books of the Bible, over 4,000 years. Shakespeare's plays, written roughly four hundred years ago, have no less than 20 different versions per play, each with significant differences. Since Shakespeare's plays were written much later than the Bible, and after the invention of the modern printing press, wouldn't the Bible, which has been around longer and for a long time copied by hand, greatly have changed since the original copy? Yet when the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered, they were almost exactly like today's Bible. The only changes are those marked by footnotes. The copying of the Bible was done very carefully and slowly. Great care was taken to make sure everything was the same. After the person copying the Bible had finished a sentence they would read the sentence from both copies over. They would then count the number of words in each copy, then the number of letters in each copy and make very sure everything was exact, right down to the number of crossed Ts and dotted Is. The real reason, of course, that the Bible stayed the same was because of God. We now can read the Bible to determine God's will. The Bible is a fantastic book.
[Editor's notes: This was a paper I wrote for my confirmation class in 8th grade. The confirmation class was for 2 years on Wednesday nights from 7th to 8th Grade, at the end of which we all had to write papers from a list of possible topics, and then (if memory serves) I think we read these papers aloud at a special ceremony.
We wrote these papers ourselves, submitted the rough drafts to our pastor, who went through and red-lined them and then had brief one on one meetings with us and gave us suggestions on our final draft. (If memory serves, in my case the pastor only gave me suggestions on style, so any mistakes of content in this paper are my own fault and not his.)
We were not required to cite sources for this paper, and so being a typical lazy 14 year-old, I didn't cite any of my sources. A lot of the information in here came from my memory anyway so I wouldn't have been able to cite it--little bits and pieces of information that I had accumulated over 14 years of Sunday School and 8 years of Christian School. (One of our middle school teachers at used to read to us from various Christian apologetic books, and I absorbed a lot of this information even if I couldn't have given the page number. If memory serves I think the books were written by Josh McDowell, probably his Evidence that Demands a Verdict Book.) Also worth noting this paper was written in 1992 before the Internet made information so readily available.
Have my views changed since I was 14? Oh yes. But it's still useful to remember where we came from, so I am including this paper here anyway even though I would disagree with much of it now.
I don't have the time now to refute everything in this paper, but here are just a couple of highlights:
* I seem to have been confused about the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The council at 397 decided the books of the New Testament. I'm muddling the issue by including a list of controversial Old Testament books in the same paragraph.
Likewise the Dead Sea scrolls are relevant only to the Old Testament books. And even here, they are only a partial collection.
* Catholics wouldn't call it the Apocrypha. They call it the Deuterocanon.
* Shakespeare may have released different versions of his plays during his own lifetime, which accounts for some of the different variations. It's not really a fair comparison. Besides which there actually are a number of significant textual problems with the Bible. Even though the Dead Sea Scrolls are not too far off from our current Hebrew versions of the Old Testament, The Greek (Septuagint) and Hebrew versions of the Old Testament differ significantly. There are also problems with the New Testament. The resurrected Jesus does not originally appear in the Gospel of Mark and was added later. The story about the adulterous woman does not originally appear in John and was added later. I Corinthians 14 originally does not contain the commandment for women to keep silent in Church meetings and was added later. Et cetera.
* I don't remember where I got the criteria for testing canonical books in my 2nd paragraph, but it is a flawed criteria. For example books like Hebrews were written anonymously. Jude quotes from apocryphal material. I and II Peter are likely forged and not written by Peter and I and II Timothy were not written by Paul. ]
Confusion developed in the early church as to what books were inspired by God. In 397 A.D. a council was called together in Carthage to decide which books to include in the Bible. They developed a Canon to test the books. Here are some of the requirements. The books must have been written by an apostle or someone who had met somebody who knew Jesus after he rose from the dead. The book must recognize the Old Testament as God's word. The book must be in agreement with the other books already accepted and speak of Jesus as the son of God. Some of the books that are part of our Bible that some thought should be excluded are Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, James, II Peter, II and III John, Jude, Hebrews, Revelation, and Esther.
Until 1546 a group of 14 books known as the Apocrypha were considered to be part of the Bible. These books were finally rejected for the following reasons: they were not found in the original Old Testament, they were never quoted from by Jesus or any other part of the Bible, and some of the Apocryphal books disclaim inspiration. The books were rejected from the Protestant Bibles, but are still part of the Roman Catholic Bibles.
The Bible has been around for a long time--for some books of the Bible, over 4,000 years. Shakespeare's plays, written roughly four hundred years ago, have no less than 20 different versions per play, each with significant differences. Since Shakespeare's plays were written much later than the Bible, and after the invention of the modern printing press, wouldn't the Bible, which has been around longer and for a long time copied by hand, greatly have changed since the original copy? Yet when the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered, they were almost exactly like today's Bible. The only changes are those marked by footnotes. The copying of the Bible was done very carefully and slowly. Great care was taken to make sure everything was the same. After the person copying the Bible had finished a sentence they would read the sentence from both copies over. They would then count the number of words in each copy, then the number of letters in each copy and make very sure everything was exact, right down to the number of crossed Ts and dotted Is. The real reason, of course, that the Bible stayed the same was because of God. We now can read the Bible to determine God's will. The Bible is a fantastic book.
[Editor's notes: This was a paper I wrote for my confirmation class in 8th grade. The confirmation class was for 2 years on Wednesday nights from 7th to 8th Grade, at the end of which we all had to write papers from a list of possible topics, and then (if memory serves) I think we read these papers aloud at a special ceremony.
We wrote these papers ourselves, submitted the rough drafts to our pastor, who went through and red-lined them and then had brief one on one meetings with us and gave us suggestions on our final draft. (If memory serves, in my case the pastor only gave me suggestions on style, so any mistakes of content in this paper are my own fault and not his.)
We were not required to cite sources for this paper, and so being a typical lazy 14 year-old, I didn't cite any of my sources. A lot of the information in here came from my memory anyway so I wouldn't have been able to cite it--little bits and pieces of information that I had accumulated over 14 years of Sunday School and 8 years of Christian School. (One of our middle school teachers at used to read to us from various Christian apologetic books, and I absorbed a lot of this information even if I couldn't have given the page number. If memory serves I think the books were written by Josh McDowell, probably his Evidence that Demands a Verdict Book.) Also worth noting this paper was written in 1992 before the Internet made information so readily available.
Have my views changed since I was 14? Oh yes. But it's still useful to remember where we came from, so I am including this paper here anyway even though I would disagree with much of it now.
I don't have the time now to refute everything in this paper, but here are just a couple of highlights:
* I seem to have been confused about the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The council at 397 decided the books of the New Testament. I'm muddling the issue by including a list of controversial Old Testament books in the same paragraph.
Likewise the Dead Sea scrolls are relevant only to the Old Testament books. And even here, they are only a partial collection.
* Catholics wouldn't call it the Apocrypha. They call it the Deuterocanon.
* Shakespeare may have released different versions of his plays during his own lifetime, which accounts for some of the different variations. It's not really a fair comparison. Besides which there actually are a number of significant textual problems with the Bible. Even though the Dead Sea Scrolls are not too far off from our current Hebrew versions of the Old Testament, The Greek (Septuagint) and Hebrew versions of the Old Testament differ significantly. There are also problems with the New Testament. The resurrected Jesus does not originally appear in the Gospel of Mark and was added later. The story about the adulterous woman does not originally appear in John and was added later. I Corinthians 14 originally does not contain the commandment for women to keep silent in Church meetings and was added later. Et cetera.
* I don't remember where I got the criteria for testing canonical books in my 2nd paragraph, but it is a flawed criteria. For example books like Hebrews were written anonymously. Jude quotes from apocryphal material. I and II Peter are likely forged and not written by Peter and I and II Timothy were not written by Paul. ]
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Worldview
Google: drive, docs, pub
Joel Swagman
February 8, 1999
Entry 1
Section C
Worldview
My worldview is the way I view the world. It helps me make sense of what I encounter and how I deal with things.
I believe that the purpose of human beings is to help make the world a better place for others. Each human being, by virtue of simply existing, uses up resources. They must justify the use of these resources as best they can by giving back to the world. (Also, humans should try and live as simply as possible, using up no more than they need). As creatures created by God, furthermore, we have a responsibility to help other human beings out who are in need or trouble. God created us to be loving creatures.
I believe that the universe in which we live is ultimately under the control of God. This should be a comfort, when we are in trouble we know that God will ultimately prevail. However, God allows evil to happen. Therefore, the world we live in is plagued by evil. However, we must remember that God is in control and the world and the creatures in it are essentially good.
The main problem that keeps humans from attaining fulfillment is sin. More specifically, greed and selfishness. These two evils cause people to try and obtain all they can, and ultimately leaves them unfulfilled. People must realize that happiness does not lie in material possessions, and struggle to overcome our instinctive urge to obtain more. People likewise must realize that a life which they spend trying to only please themselves is going to end up in misery, because we were created to care about more than just ourselves.
Humans must realize that fulfillment and true happiness can only come from God, and a life spent serving him. People can serve God in many different ways, or from many different beliefs.
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