• Shuffle
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Alphabetize
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Front First
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Both Sides
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Read
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
Reading...
Front

Card Range To Study

through

image

Play button

image

Play button

image

Progress

1/21

Click to flip

Use LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys to navigate between flashcards;

Use UP and DOWN arrow keys to flip the card;

H to show hint;

A reads text to speech;

21 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back
“But perhaps one might say […], by the testimony of the Spirit, I mean, an inward impression on the soul, whereby the Spirit of God immediately and directly witnesses to my spirit, that I am a child of God; that Jesus Christ hath loved me, and given Himself for me; that all my sins are blotted out, and I, even I, am reconciled to God.”
John Wesley
Christianity as a Religion of Experience
“The word perfect is what many cannot bear. The very sound of it is an abomination to them; and whosoever preaches perfection (as the phrase is), that is, asserts that it is attainable in this life, runs great hazard of being accounted by them worse than a heathen man or a publican […]. Christian perfection… does not imply (as some men seem to have imagined) an exemption either from ignorance, or mistake, or infirmities, or temptations. Indeed, it is another term for holiness. […] Now, it is evident, the Apostle here also speaks of a deliverance wrought in this world. For he saith not, The blood of Christ will cleanse at the hour of death, or in the day of judgment; but, it ‘cleanseth,’ at the time present, ‘us,’ living Christians, ‘from all sin’.”
John Wesley
Christian Perfection
“Reason, I take to be the discovery of the certainty or probability of such propositions or truth, which the mind arrives at by deduction made from such ideas, which it has got by the use of its natural faculties; viz, by sensation or reflection.”
John Locke
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
“When I enter most intimately into what I call myself , I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”
David Hume
A Treatise of Human Nature
“Man himself must make or have made himself into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil, he is or is to become. Either condition must be an effect of his free choice; for otherwise he could not be held responsible for it and could therefore be morally neither good nor evil. When it is said, Man is created good, this can mean nothing more than: He is created for good and the original predisposition in man is good; not that, thereby, he is already actually good, but rather that he brings it about that he becomes good or evil, according to whether he adopts or does not adopt into his maxim the incentives which this predisposition carries with it ([an act]) which must be left wholly to his own free choice).”
Immanuel Kant
Moral autonomy
“Now it is our universal duty as men to elevate ourselves to this ideal of moral perfection, that is, to this archetype of the moral disposition in all its purity—and for this the idea itself, which reason presents to us for our zealous emulation, can give us power. But just because we are not the authors of this idea, and because it has established itself in man without our comprehending how human nature could have been capable of receiving it, it is more appropriate to say that this archetype has come down to us from heaven and has assumed our humanity […] Such union with us may therefore be regarded as a state of humiliation of the Son of God if we represent to ourselves this godly minded person, regarded as our archetype, as assuming sorrows in fullest measure in order to further the world’s good, though he himself is holy and therefore is bound to endure no sufferings whatsoever.”
Immanuel Kant
The Person of Jesus: Jesus as the Moral Archetype
“Now if it were indeed a fact that such a truly godly-minded man at some particular time had descended, as it were, from heaven to earth and had given men his own person, through his teachings, his conduct, and his sufferings, as perfect an example of a man well-pleasing to God as one can expect to find in external experience (for be it remembered that the archetype of such a person is to be sought nowhere but in our own reason), and if he had, through all this, produced immeasurably great moral good upon earth by effecting a revolution in the human race—even then we should have no cause for supposing him other than a man naturally begotten […]. This is not, to be sure, absolutely to deny that he might be a man supernaturally begotten. But to suppose the latter can in no way benefit us practically, inasmuch as the archetype which we find embodied in this manifestation must after all, be sought in ourselves [...]."
Immanuel Kant
The Person of Jesus: The Incarnation
"If a moral religion (which must consist not in dogmas and rites but in the heart’s disposition to fulfill all human duties as divine commands) is to be established, all miracles which history connects with its inauguration must themselves in the end render superfluous the belief in miracles in general; for it bespeaks a culpable degree of moral unbelief not to acknowledge as completely authoritative the commands of duty—commands primordially engraved upon the heart of man through reason—unless they are in addition accredited through miracles […]”
Immanuel Kant
Moral religion
“A church dispenses with the most important mark of truth, namely, a rightful claim to universality, when it bases itself upon a revealed faith. For such a faith, being historical (even though it be far more widely disseminated and more completely secured for remotest posterity though the agency of scripture) can never be universally communicated so as to produce conviction. Yet, because of the natural need and desire of all men for something sensible tenable, and for a confirmation of some sort from experience of the highest concepts and grounds of reason (a need which really must be taken into account when the universal dissemination of a faith is contemplated), some historical ecclesiastical faith or other, usually to be found at hand, must be utilized.”
Immanuel Kant
Church and Revelation
“If you have only given attention to these dogmas and opinions, therefore, you do not yet know religion itself, and what you despise is not it. Why have you not penetrated deeper to find the kernel of this shell? I am astonished at your voluntary ignorance, yet easy-going inquirers, and at the all too quite satisfaction with which you linger by the first thing presented to you. Why do you not regard the religious life itself, and first those pious exaltations of the mind in which all other known activities are set aside or almost suppressed, and the whole soul is dissolved in the immediate feeling of the Infinite and Eternal? In such moments the disposition you pretend to despise reveals itself in primordial and visible form. He only who has studied and truly known man in these emotions can rediscover religion in those outward manifestations.”
Schleiermacher
The Essence of Religion: Not in Dogma but in Religious Experience
“Christianity is a monotheistic faith, belonging to the teleological type of religion and is essentially distinguished from other such faiths by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth…”
Schleiermacher
The Essence of Christianity: The Redemptive Work of Jesus Christ
“Accordingly, in Christianity the relation of the Founder to the members of the communion is quite different from what it is in the other religions. For those other founders are represented as having been, as it were, arbitrarily elevated from the mass of similar or not very different men, and as receiving just as much for themselves as for other people whatever they do receive in the way of divine doctrine and precept. […] But Christ is distinguished from all others as Redeemer alone and for all, and is in no wise regarded as having been at any time in need of redemption Himself…”
Schleiermacher
The Person and Work of Christ and the Character of Christianity
“It is not simply that Orthodoxy was preoccupied with doctrine and the framing of dogma, for these have been no less a concern of the wildest mystics. It is rather that Orthodoxy found in the construction of dogma and doctrine no way to do justice to the non-rational aspect of its subject. So far from keeping the non-rational element in religion alive in the heart of the religious experience, orthodox Christianity manifestly failed to recognize its value, and by this failure gave to the idea of God a one-sidedly intellectualistic and rationalistic interpretation. And so it is salutary that we should be incited to notice that Religion is not exclusively contained and exhaustively comprised in any series of ‘rational’ assertions; and it is well worth while to attempt to bring the relation of the different ‘moments’ of religion to one another clearly before the mind, so that its nature may become more manifest."
Rudolf Otto
Criticism of Rigid Intellectualism
“ ‘Holiness’—’the holy’—is a category of interpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion. It is, indeed, applied by transference to another sphere—that of Ethics—but it is not itself derived from this. While it is complex, it contains a quite specific element or ‘moment,’ which sets it apart from ‘the Rational’ in the meaning we gave to that word above, and which remains inexpressible—an arreton (Gk.) or ineffabile—in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts. The same thing is true (to take a quite different region of experience) of the category of the beautiful.”
Rudolf Otto
The Idea of the Holy
“By means of a special term we shall the better be able, first, to keep the meaning clearly apart and distinct, and second, to apprehend and classify connectedly whatever subordinate forms or stages of development it may show. For this purpose I adopt a word coined from the Latin numen. Omen has given us ominous, and there is no reason why from numen we should not similarly form a word ‘numinous.’ I shall speak then of a unique ‘numinous’ category of value and of a definitely ‘numinous’ state of mind, which is always found wherever the category is applied. This mental state is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined.”
Rudolf Otto
Numinous
“Let us consider the deepest and most fundamental element in all strong and sincerely felt religious emotion. Faith unto Salvation, Trust, Love—all these are there. But over and above these is an element which may also on occasion, quite apart from them, profoundly affect us and occupy the mind with a well-nigh bewildering strength. Let us follow it up with every effort of sympathy and imaginative intuition wherever it is to be found, in the lives of those around us, in sudden, strong ebullitions of personal piety and the frames of mind such ebullitions evince, in the fixed and ordered solemnities of rites and liturgies, and again in the atmosphere that clings to old religious monuments and buildings, to temples and to churches. If we do so we shall find we are dealing with something for which there is only one appropriate expression, mysterium tremendum. It might be objected that the mysterious is something which is and remains absolutely and invariably beyond our understanding, whereas that which merely eludes our understanding for a time but is perfectly intelligible in principle should be called, not a ‘mystery,’ but merely a ‘problem.’ But this is by no means an adequate account of the matter. The truly ‘mysterious’ object is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something ‘wholly other,’ whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb...”
Rudolf Otto
mysterium tremendum
“The qualitative content of the numinous experience, to which ‘the mysterious’ stands as form, is in one of its aspects the element of daunting ‘awfulness’ and ‘majesty,’ which has already been dealt with in detail; but it is clear that it has at the same time another aspect, in which it shows itself as something uniquely attractive and fascinating.”
Rudolf Otto
The Fascinating
“Not many theological systems have been able to balance these two demands perfectly. Most of them either sacrifice elements of the truth or are not able to speak to the situation. Some of them combine both shortcomings. Afraid of missing the eternal truth, they identify it with some previous theological work, with traditional concepts and solutions, and try to impose these on a new, different situation. They confuse eternal truth with a temporal expression of this truth. This is evident in European theological orthodoxy, which in America is known as fundamentalism. When fundamentalism is combined with an antitheological bias, as it is, for instance, in its biblicistic-evangelical form, the theological truth of yesterday is defended as an unchangeable message against the theological truth of today and tomorrow. Fundamentalism fails to make contact with the present situation, not because it speaks from beyond every situation, but because it speaks from every situation of the past. It elevates something finite and transitory to infinite and eternal validity. In this respect fundamentalism has demonic traits. It destroys the humble honesty of the search for truth, it splits the conscience of its thoughtful adherents, and it makes them fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly aware.”
Paul Tillich
The Problem of Fundamentalism
“The ‘situation’ theology must consider is the creative interpretation of existence, an interpretation which is carried on in every period of history under all kinds of psychological and sociological conditions. The ‘situation’ certainly is not independent of these factors. However, theology deals with the cultural expression they have found in practice as well as in theory and not with these conditioning factors as such. Thus theology is not concerned with the political split between East and West, but it is concerned with the political interpretation of this split.”
Paul Tillich
The Situation
“The method of correlation explains the contents of the Christian faith through existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence. The answers implied in the event of revelation are meaningful only in so far as they are in correlation with questions concerning the whole of our existence, with existential questions. Only those who have experienced the shock of transitoriness, the anxiety in which they are aware of their finitude, the threat of nonbeing, can understand what the notion of God means. Only those who have experienced the tragic ambiguities of our historical existence and have totally questioned the meaning of existence can understand what the symbol of the Kingdom of God means. Revelation answers questions which have been asked and always will be asked because they are ‘we ourselves.’ Man is the question he asks about himself, before any question has been formulated. In using the method of correlation, systematic theology proceeds in the following way: it makes an analysis of the human situation out of which the existential questions arise, and it demonstrates that the symbols used in the Christian message are the answers to these questions. The analysis of the human situation is done in terms which today are called ‘existential.’ Such analyses are much older than existentialism; they are, indeed, as old as man’s thinking about himself, and they have been expressed in various kinds of conceptualization since the beginning of philosophy.”
Paul Tillich
The Method of Correlation
“Therefore, it is certainly not unbiblical to use the term ‘estrangement’ in describing man’s existential situation. Nevertheless, ‘estrangement’ cannot replace ‘sin.’ Yet the reasons for attempts to replace the word ‘sin’ with another word are obvious. The term has been used in a way which has little to do with its genuine biblical meaning. Paul often spoke of ‘Sin’ in the singular and without an article. He saw it as a quasi-personal power which ruled this world. But in the Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant, sin has been used predominantly in the plural, and ‘sins’ are deviations from moral laws. This has little to do with ‘sin’ as the state of estrangement from that to which one belongs—God, one’s self, one’s world. Therefore, the characteristics of sin are here considered under the heading of ‘estrangement’.”
Paul Tillich
Sin as Estrangement