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Christianity
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|  Essay, Research Paper: Saint Augustine And His Environment |
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| The Confessions of Augustine (354 - 430) show us, more clearly than any other literary work of late antiquity, what it was like to approach Christianity through the outlook of Greek philosophy, and more generally from the literary and cultural background of the later Roman Empire.
Augustine was born in an empire that officially accepted Christianity, but where traditional religion and non-Christian cults and philosophies retained much of their influence. The official Catholic Church, then as now, did not seem to have much to offer to an educated, curious, and intense person such as Augustine. Compared with the zealous Donatist schismatics (who disavowed clergy who had shown weakness in persecutions) or the sophisticated Manichean elite (to be discussed shortly), the body of Catholics seemed lazy and complacent. Ordinary Christians did not understand Christian theology, and Augustine was later appalled by the ignorant and superstitious views that he derived from his Catholic upbringing. Many Catholics accepted their Christianity rather nominally; they believed that once they received baptism they would have to give up sin, and to avoid such a grave inconvenience they did their best to postpone baptism until their deathbed. Augustine's parents and others of their social class held their Christianity together with basically pagan, ultimately Homeric, ambitions for wealth, success, and honour; and for Augustine, as for the young men who admired Gorgias, these ambitions led naturally to a career in rhetoric and public speaking. |
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| Term Paper on Augustine And His Environment » |
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| Essay, Research Paper: The Work of Christ |
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| Paul claims that what the law could not do, and what we could not do by observing the moral law, God himself does for us: 'sending his son in the likeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin, he has condemned sin in the flesh, so that the justification of the law might be fulfilled in us, walking not in conformity with the flesh, but in conformity with the spirit.' Human beings cannot achieve this result by their own efforts. The central Christian rituals of Baptism and the Eucharist express this conviction that the fulfilment of human moral aims and aspirations depends on God's action rather than on the actions of the moral agents themselves. The work of Christ is to 'redeem' or release human beings from their own sin by suffering on their behalf; human beings are acquitted 'as a free gift, by God's grace, through redemption in Christ Jesus, whom God predetermined to be an expiation through faith in his blood'. |
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| Term Paper on Christ's Work » |
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| Essay, Research Paper: Christian Moral Teaching |
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| Early Christian preachers claimed that Jesus was the Messiah expected by the Jews, crucified by the Romans, and raised from the dead; they demand repentance, and they promise forgiveness. The demand for repentance and reform is a traditional theme of the Hebrew prophets, often connected with a threat of punishment. The Jews looked forward to a Messiah, a king who would free them from foreign domination; but the prophets warned them that the coming of the Messiah would bring punishment rather than victory. |
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| Term Paper on Christian Morality » |
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| Essay, Research Paper: Christianity and Greek Thought |
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| To move from Greek philosophy to the first four centuries of Christian thought is to introduce a large new subject. But we would leave a serious gap in an account of Greek philosophy if we said nothing about Christianity. The formation of Christian thought was influenced from the beginning by Greek philosophy. Some of the Jewish scriptures, and especially some of the Apocryphal works, are affected by Stoicism; and Philo's (c. 20 BCc. AD 50) attempt to explain Jewish religion in Platonist terms began a Christian tradition. |
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| Term Paper on Christianity and Greek Philosophy » |
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| Essay, Research Paper: Early Christianity |
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| The earliest evidence for Christian teaching comes from Saint Paul's letters, written from the 50s up to 66 or so (when he probably died in the persecution by Nero). These letters show that some fairly definite beliefs about Christ's teaching were already taken for granted among Christian communities. Paul sharply distinguishes the teaching of Christ from his own inferences from it. He plainly expects members of the Church to assume that Christ had taught definite doctrines, and to have firm and undisputed views about what the doctrines were. 4 Paul's letters, then, show Christian teaching (oral or written) in a fairly developed state in the mid 60s. Other evidence of Christian teaching at this time may be found in the earlier versions of the two written accounts of the life and teaching of Christ, by Saint Mark and Saint Luke, if these versions were written (as they probably were) before the death of Paul. |
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| Term Paper on Early Christians » |
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| Essay, Research Paper: Christianity and Human Nature |
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| Saint Paul believes that 'law brings only the consciousness of sin'; but it brings this consciousness only if we think it demands a degree of perfection that we cannot achieve. Greek moralists agree that the standards followed by the virtuous person are too demanding for ordinary people; but, in their view, a person who acquires the appropriate knowledge and character becomes capable of following the most demanding moral standard that it is reasonable to accept. Christianity stands against this Greek philosophical tradition, in so far as it denies any ordinary human capacity for the sort of virtue that is demanded by the moral law. |
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| Term Paper on Human Nature » |
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| Essay, Research Paper: Christian Doctrine of God |
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| A long series of reflexions, arguments, controversies, schisms, heresies, and persecutions resulted in some measure of agreement, eventually over most of the Christian world, on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The doctrine claims that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three persons (hupostasis), not three Gods, but one substance (ousia). As the so-called Athanasian Creed (late fifth century?) puts it: 'And yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal; as also there are not three uncreateds, nor three infinites, but one uncreated and one infinite.' The Catholic position rejects two accounts of the persons and the substance:
1. If we regard hupostasis as Aristotle's first substance and ousia as second substance, we might think the persons are related as different individual human beings are related to other members of the human species. This view 'divides the substance', since the three persons must have more than the specific unity of members of a species; and so it falls into the heresy of Tritheism.
2. If we regard ousia as first substance, we might suppose that the three persons are simply different aspects of the same individual, as the Prime Minister and the First Lord of the Treasury are the same person performing different roles. Such a view cannot account for the real differences between the persons; it was not God the Father who was crucified. This view 'confounds the persons', and so falls into the Sabellian heresy. |
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| Term Paper on The Doctrine of God » |
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| Essay, Research Paper: The Person of Jesus Christ |
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| Christians formed themselves into local communities, for ritual observances, including Baptism and the Eucharist, for teaching and preaching, on the model of the Jewish synagogue, and for mutual support and practical activities. But they also sought a rational, authoritative account of their faith; and Christian teachers, organized from the earliest times in the orders of bishops, priests, and deacons, claimed universal assent from the Church. Christian thinkers tried to work out a systematic view of the person of Christ and his relation to God that would explain all the New Testament claims about the work of Christ. The doctrinal formulas that were eventually accepted as Catholic teaching and as authentic interpretations of the Apostolic faith were certainly not accepted because they were clear, easy to understand, or immediately plausible. They were accepted, however, because clearer, more easily intelligible, and more immediately plausible solutions seemed not to capture the facts about Christ expressed' in the New Testament accounts of him. |
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| Term Paper on The Person of Christ » |
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