Theology Midterm: Glossary Terms

• Logos means word, reason or Christ; a name for Christ, the fully divine part of Jesus of Nazareth
• Incarnation is Christ/Logos made flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth
• Christology is the theory of the nature of Christ, who he is, what his relationship is to humanity, and his purpose
• Soteriology is the theory of salvation
• Anthropology is the theory of human nature
• Martyr means witness in Greek
• Gnosis is Greek for knowledge and for the gnostics, is the secret knowledge that on is divine by nature and that Christ is the redeemer cone to awaken you to your true spiritual being
• A Gnostic is an early Christian who had Christology and soteriology different than what became the orthodox view
• Docetic means seeming and a docetic Christology is one that holds that Jesus only seemed to have a body, only seemed to die
• Imago Dei means "In the image of God" which comes from Genesis 1:26
• Original Sin is the doctrine that all human beings are born inheriting sinful nature that gives them a propensity towards doing sinful things and that necessitates their salvation by a divine saviour
• There are two natures of Christ: Human and Divine

  • Human nature comes through birth to Mary
  • Divine nature is from the divine Logos
• Asceticism means exercise and refers to practices of self-discipline and mortification in pursuit of perfection, making body subordinate to the soul
• Ontological refers to the nature of being
• The Ontological Argument is Anselm of Canterbury's argument for the existence of God in the Proslogion
• "Faith Seeks Understanding" is a slogan from Anselm in Proslogion
• A fool is one who says in his heart there is no God
• A single argument is what Anselm wanted to find to prove God's existence
• Fideism is the belief that faith and reason have nothing to do with one another, and that faith is more real the more 'absurd' it is and true faith does not rely on or appeal to reason in any way
• Rationalism is the belief that faith and reason have nothing to do with one another and true knowledge is produced only through reason and entails no faith
• Scholasticism is the high medieval theological style in which the aim is to reconcile faith and reason, to prove that nothing in faith contradicts reason, but that each can support the other.

  • Anselm and Thomas Aquinas represent this
• Affective Piety is a devotional style in which one meditates on Christ's suffering and death as well as the emotional pain of his Mother and followers
• An Anchorite is a person who was buried in an "anchorhold" with a window into the church to see the altar and receive communion as well as a window and door to receive spiritual pilgrims

  • Julian of Norwich is an example of this
• Jesus as Mother is a metaphor for Jesus as nourishing, birthing, feeding, correcting, and saving humanity
• Epicurean is creation from random spontaneous generation
• Platonic is creation from pre-existent matter
• Homoousios means of one or same essence
• Creatio ex nihilo means creation from nothing
• Subordinationism is the view that the son/Logos is lesser than the Father
• Proslogion is Greek for allocution or address
• In re means in reality and in intellectu means in the mind
• Philosophy can discover truths and make deductions about human nature as it relates to this world
• Theology can go beyond philosophy and draw conclusions about reality and human nature based on revelation and faith
• Potentiality is the possibility or capability something has
• Actuality is the motion, change, or activity that fulfills possibility
• Efficient Cause is the agent of change or movement of a thing separate from that thing
• The final cause is the aim or purpose of a thing
• Teleological is an explanation of a phenomena according to the end
• Contingency is something that happens as a result of something else
• Intrinsic Cause: cause lying within the thing itself