Developments in Christian Thought

What Developments in Christian Thought covers

Component 03, one of the five Developments in Religious Thought options. Augustine on human nature, the afterlife, how God is known, the person of Christ, Christian moral principles and action, and the challenges of pluralism, gender, secularism and Marx.

The 12 subtopics

Each one has its own page.

• Augustine on human natureRecall questions on Augustine's reading of Genesis, life before the Fall, concupiscence and the transmission of original sin, the divided will, the two cities and the state, unmerited grace and the summum bonum, Pelagius, and whether Augustine's account is pessimistic, mistaken, or usable alongside evolution.Open →
• Death and the afterlifeRecall questions on heaven, hell and purgatory understood literally, as states and symbolically, Catholic teaching on purgatory, limited election, unlimited election and universalism, the parable of the sheep and the goats, judgement at death or at the end of time, and whether hell is eternal or morally harmful.Open →
• Knowledge of God's existenceRecall questions on natural and revealed knowledge of God, the image of God, beauty, goodness and the order of nature, faith and grace, Jesus Christ, the Bible and the Church, whether God can be known by reason alone, the effect of the Fall, and why some Christians distrust arguments for God.Open →
• The person of Jesus ChristRecall questions on Jesus as Son of God, teacher of wisdom and liberator, walking on the water, the man born blind, the resurrection, the prodigal son, the woman with the haemorrhage, the good Samaritan, his challenge to religious and political authority, and whether he believed he was divine.Open →
• Christian moral principlesRecall questions on why a single Christian ethic is hard to state, the Bible as the only authority, the Bible, Church and reason together, love as the only principle and agape, the criticisms of each approach, whether Christian ethics is distinctive, personal or communal, and grace and moral failure.Open →
• Christian moral action: Dietrich BonhoefferRecall questions on Bonhoeffer's life, the Confessing Church and Finkenwalde, cheap and costly grace, duty to God and to the state, three responses to an unjust state, civil disobedience and the plot against Hitler, ethics as action, the Church for others, and his relevance today.Open →
• Religious pluralism and theologyRecall questions on the theology of religions, exclusivism, inclusivism and the anonymous Christian, pluralism and the criticisms of each, whether a loving God could refuse salvation, whether a good life is enough to be saved, and whether the three positions are genuinely distinct.Open →
• Religious pluralism and societyRecall questions on multi-faith Britain, the responses of the Catholic Church in Redemptoris Missio and the Church of England in Sharing the Gospel of Salvation, inter-faith dialogue and its aims, the scriptural reasoning movement, social cohesion, and whether Christians should seek to convert others.Open →
• Gender and societyRecall questions on changing views of gender roles, the household code in Ephesians, Mulieris Dignitatem and complementarity, Christian responses to changing family life and family forms, motherhood and parenthood, secular gender equality, and whether the Church should be countercultural on gender.Open →
• Gender and theology: Ruether and DalyRecall questions on Ruether on the maleness of Christ, God as female Wisdom and Jesus as Wisdom made flesh, Daly on male language for God, the unholy trinity and her alternative to Christian worship, how the two differ, criticisms of each, and whether Christianity is essentially sexist.Open →
• The challenge of secularismRecall questions on secularism and secularisation, Freud on religion as illusion and God as a father-figure, Dawkins' case against belief and on the harm of religion, Christian replies to both, secular humanist views on public life, education and government, and Christianity's place in society's values.Open →
• Liberation theology and MarxRecall questions on the origins of liberation theology, Marx on alienation, exploitation and religion, structural sin, its use of Marxist analysis, the preferential option for the poor, orthopraxis, its reading of the Bible, the Vatican's 1984 criticisms, and whether it reduces salvation to politics.Open →

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Take Developments in Christian Thought further

The same content, four other ways.

Commonly confused

Pairs that lose marks when they are blurred together.

• Exclusivism vs Inclusivism

  Exclusivism: the position that salvation is found only through explicit Christian faith. Inclusivism: the position that others may be saved through Christ without knowing him.

• Natural theology vs Revealed theology

  Natural theology: knowledge of God reached by reason from the world. Revealed theology: knowledge of God given through scripture and revelation.

• Personal sin vs Original sin

  Personal sin: a wrongful act freely committed by an individual. Original sin: a damaged human condition inherited from the first disobedience.

Questions from this topic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   How does Augustine read the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, and why does that reading matter for everything else he says about us?

   Model answer

   Augustine treats it as an account of something that actually happened to the first human beings, not merely a picture of the human condition. Because the disobedience was a real event in history, its consequences are real and inherited: what went wrong is not simply that each person copies bad examples, but that human nature itself was damaged at its source. Every later claim he makes - about desire, about the will, about the need for grace - rests on that reading.

2. 2

   What, on Augustine's account, was human life like before the Fall?

   Model answer

   Augustine pictures a condition of harmony. Adam and Eve enjoyed friendship with God and with each other, their reason governed their bodily appetites rather than being dragged about by them, and they were free in the fullest sense because they were able not to sin. He even argues that sexual union would have taken place in paradise, but under the calm direction of the will rather than under the compulsion of desire.

3. 3

   Why is it significant that Augustine describes the first couple as friends rather than as master and servant?

   Model answer

   Friendship implies equality of regard and freely given loyalty. By describing the pre-Fall relationship that way, Augustine makes domination of one person by another a symptom of the Fall rather than part of the original design. It also lets him say that what sin destroys is above all relationship - with God, and then between human beings - rather than merely a set of rules being broken.

4. 4

   Explain what Augustine means by concupiscence.

   Model answer

   Concupiscence is disordered desire: appetite that no longer obeys reason and no longer aims at God as its final end. Augustine sees it most obviously in sexual arousal, which arrives and departs without the will's permission, but it runs far wider - greed, ambition, the craving for status. It is not the same as the sinful act; it is the standing disorder in the person out of which sinful acts come.

5. 5

   How does Augustine say the effects of the first sin reach us, and what is the role of sexual reproduction in that account?

   Model answer

   He argues that the damage is transmitted biologically through the act of generation, so that every human being conceived in the ordinary way inherits a nature already corrupted by disordered desire. Humanity is one mass, implicated together in Adam. This is why he insists infants need baptism: on his view guilt and corruption are already present before any personal wrongdoing.

6. 6

   Explain what Augustine means by the divided will.

   Model answer

   He means the experience of genuinely wanting something good and finding that the wanting does not carry through into action, so that a person seems to have two wills pulling in opposite directions and neither wholly in charge. Augustine reads this not as an odd psychological hiccup but as the standing state of fallen humanity: the will is intact as a faculty yet no longer able to command itself, and that inner fracture is precisely what he thinks sin has done to us.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.

Developments in Christian Thought revision questions

What does Developments in Christian Thought cover in OCR A-Level Religious Studies?

12 subtopics: augustine on human nature, death and the afterlife, knowledge of god's existence, the person of jesus christ, christian moral principles, christian moral action: dietrich bonhoeffer, religious pluralism and theology, religious pluralism and society, gender and society, gender and theology: ruether and daly, the challenge of secularism and liberation theology and marx. Each one has its own page with questions and model answers.

How is Developments in Christian Thought organised?

By the OCR H573 specification, subtopic by subtopic, so it matches the order you are taught it in.