Personal god

the beatitudes, have a personal relationship with God, trust in the Bible, and perform good deeds. Though these actions are not what makes one a Christian, they illustrate that one is in fact a believer in Christ. In Miguel de Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, Mártir, San Manuel Bueno portrays the life of a Christian, but is he truly a believer? To adequately assess one’s belief in Christianity, the characteristics of one’s life must be analyzed. Did that person live the way that God intended them to…

When couples marry, the individual fulfills the first mitzvah in the Torah, which is “be fruitful and multiply” it is believed that God created people so they could marry and continue passing down the Jewish beliefs and traditions. When the groom marries the bride, his obligation is to not deprive her of food, clothing and marital rights. The significance of the chatan (groom) in reading the Torah, the saturday before their marriages is to show that the Torah is central to their lives. In both…

Comprehension of Pertinent Terms The word, spirituality, is abstract, usually connects to religion, especially religious beliefs. It means to pursue the relationship with God, connect to the power of God and communicate with God. In addition, spirituality is intangible but truly exists in one’s feeling and mind, included in one’s subconscious, superconscious and supra-conscious level. It deeply affects our daily basis activities and decisions. Moreover, spirituality can be defined as the…

Freud’s bias. The idea that God is an illusion and that religion is a neurosis is less based on empirical evidence than it is on personal perspectives and biases. It is therefore ironic that Freud attempts to debunk God on the basis of science yet so thoroughly comes short of using the scientific method. Is God an Illusion? Are the majority of human beings worldwide suffering from a mass neurosis? If Freud…

on earth during the Holocaust. Suffering is inevitable at the concentration camps. The constant struggling the Jews face make a great void between themselves and their faith in God. Elie Wiesel, author of Night, was one of those who fell and began to doubt the very existence of God. The Jews and Elie still had faith that God had a greater purpose in mind, and though they opposed the idea of suffering, they would suffer with pride. The reason is that they believed that they were a part of God's…

When God created the world, He created it without sin. However, the prefect beauty of the world was soon corrupted by sin. In response to this, God reacted with grace and mercy, and invited us into relationship with Him. In order to maintain relationship with Him, Christians exercise spiritual discipline. These disciplines, inward, outward, and corporate, reflect our desire to commune with God and demonstrate our need for Him as our savior. In his book Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster…

their selfish natures. With the knowledge that God offers forgiveness, the characters feel the ability to succumb to their own pleasures and God-like dreams. Throughout the novel Perfume, the main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, aspires to gain enough power to become greater than God. With the hope of gaining enough power to control the world, his selfish craving leads him to build up his strength to become superior in all ways compared to God. While Grenouille’s character plays a…

of objective sanctity… that her divine mission is guaranteed until the end of time. But this in no way eliminates the obligatory vocation to subjective and personal sanctity, which is indeed the ultimate reason for her whole institutional and objective side.” This paper will delve into how Balthasar and Victoria Harrison, the author of “Personal Identity and Integration: Von Balthasar’s Phenomenology of Human Holiness,” explain the phenomenon of human sanctity. According to these two authors,…

His mysterious name, YHWH (I AM WHO I AM), God says who He is and by what name He is to be called. This divine name is mysterious just as God is mystery. One of these is that since God is Being, He upholds and sustains all of creation and all creatures in being, enables them to act and brings them to their final end. Father Barron considers Anselm's "Ontological Argument", his description of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought; also God cannot be limited by the categories of…

divine providence, the will of God, God’s relationship with the human race, salvation, and many more topics of discussion still relevant to theologians in the present day. Like many of their peers in the church, they agreed on certain matters, one of which is that the purpose of humans is to love God unconditionally and to respond to God’s Grace that he gave to humanity. They also agreed that evil and human sin pulls one away from the relationship he is meant to have with God. However, when…