God 's Special Act Of Revelation

In reading this section of editors J.J. Mueller’s Theological Foundations, I have been able to come to an understanding that in order to understand the Bible in its full we must dive deeper into the study of Christ, otherwise known as Christology. In order to begin to break down Christology, we must pose the question “who do you say that I am?” (80). We know that Jesus was a storyteller, He brought fourth his ideas through these stories and parables to teach the Jews and the Gentiles about the kingdom of God and what it has to offer. Not only in this chapter do we get an explanation of Jesus and His amazing stories but we also get an understanding of His unprecedented miracles.

“One who claims to be a skeptic of one set of beliefs is actually a true believer in another set of beliefs” (17). The concept of having faith in a higher power or a set religious belief is meaningless to some Christians. Many people view religion, and Christianity in particular, as unsupported and unaccommodating. Christianity is not only more reasonable than all other belief systems, but it is also more logical than unbelief itself according to authors Norman Geisler and Frank Turek. Geisler and Turek guide the readers through some of the traditional, more well-known arguments for the existence of God our creator. They move into an investigation of the source of morality and how reliable the New Testament is in regard to the accounts of Jesus.

This essay will argue that the eschatology of the Book of Revelation forms an integral part of John’s attempt within the pages of his book to form a literary world in which the forms, figures, and forces of the earthly realm are critiqued and unmasked through the re-focalization of existence from the perspective of heaven. It will attempt to show that, in response to the social, political, religious, and economic circumstances of his readers, the Book of Revelation forms a counter imaginative reality. Through drawing upon an inaugurated sense of eschatology and evocative imagery, John is able to pull the reader in and show them the true face of the imperial world and consequences of its ideology, forcing the reader allegiance to fall

This understanding of Schleiermacher’s religion will become important in our later discussion of the value of Christianity.

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1 KJV). This familiar passage of scripture recorded in the Gospel of John indicates the deity and or preexistence of Jesus Christ prior to time as we know it and before the creation of earth. The strongest proof that the Lord Jesus Christ is God are the divine attributes, divine names, divine works, divine worship, divine claims and divine relationship ascribed to Him.

Throughout antiquity, religion has positioned itself a top priority in man’s quest for happiness and the understanding of life. From Adam to the present, man has attempted countless journeys to understanding why man exists and what one should do about it. Consequently, paganism has seized the opportunity to share in the religious sector in the search for truth. After the death of Christ, the church joined the deliberation to demonstrate the answer to all of life’s questions. The church accomplished this, with numerous trials, by defining and defending the Christian worldview demonstrated through creeds. While the church has suffered its heretical trials, the early church fathers left their legacy of truth within creeds.

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. . . . God is more than god, not less: Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about “parallels” and “pagan Christs”: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than the moralist,

Revelation. Revelation is defined in the dictionary as “a surprising and previously unknown fact, especially one that is made known in a dramatic way.” What this shows us that while others may describe revelation as an event that may only occur once, as Catholics we believe that revelation is a process. The process of revelation is a long laborious process that has taken thousands of years to get to the understanding that we are at right now and it will probably take humanity millions of years to fully understand the process of revelation that Catholics believe in.

This paper seeks to compare two theologians, one male, one female, one Trinitarian and one mythological, Thomas F. Torrance and Sallie McFague.

Revelation applied to the original readers in efforts to save them from losing focus on Jesus Christ. The original address was to persuade Christians to either stop their sinful behavior, or to prevent them from performing sinful behavior. Apostle John addressed the Churches in Asia to turn away from idolatry, immorality, corruption, and to avoid losing their faith in Jesus Christ because of their stagnancy. In addition, Revelation was a warning to mankind. The purpose was to give the non-Christians and the lukewarm Christians an understanding of the devastating events that will occur on those who choose not to follow Jesus.

Historically, man has developed a number of ways of looking at the world, using either theoretical models or empirical demonstrations to unearth the truth behind the unknown. Whilst positivist scientific theory tries to explain the world around us, theology, unlike the scientific method, relies on a greater degree of theoretical and explanatory approaches, rather than focusing on purely practical evidence. For this reason, relying on purely theoretical foundations attracted a range of diverging opinions and conclusions within the early Christian Church, as various participants tended to adhere to their own views based on their grounded beliefs. The Gnostic movement can be linked to the early Christian movement; however, many of the elements are not associated with the current practises of Christianity. However, the underlying belief in a single and absolute higher power remains. In this essay, I will argue that Gnosticism was originally a key factor in the Christian movement, which in turn contributed to the spread of Christianity throughout the world, yet it does not necessarily define the modern view of Christianity, particularly so with regard to the modern missionary movement as compared with the early missions of Christ’s followers.

With the rise of modernity, a technological shift has allowed our society to be more interconnected than ever. The supercomputers that we call cell phones can connect us to one another, to information, and to cultural developments almost instantaneously. However, also following this rise of modernity is a cultural drift that manifests itself as the fall of Christendom, or the divorce between gospel and Greco-Roman civilization that make them as disconnected as ever. The challenges of nihilism and the historical-critical method appear to have severed the historical ties that the Church once had to mainstream culture. Through the modern framework of a divorce of culture and church, Robert Jenson, in his book, A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live?, deconstructs and illustrates various theological concepts in an attempt to answer the greater theological and historical question within his subtitle: is Christian theology a pile of dead bones in today’s society? In an attempt to answer this question, Jenson wields scripture, specifically the overarching narrative of God’s identity, as a gauge of validity that denies, confirms, or modifies various theological concepts that arise out of both historical and social developments. Following Jenson’s central image of the dead bones of Israel, the structural basis, or bones, of Jenson’s body of theology is solely biblical scripture. Through this truth-seeking test of scripture, Jenson vividly and comprehensively illustrates the

Moreover, he also acknowledges that his lectures on mythology and revelation is but one way to tell the history of the relationship between thought and the Absolute. Since what we can understand of the Absolute is just what our conditioned situation allows us to catch, in principle different narratives its relationship to our thought are possible just as different situations are.13 Consequently, the stance in favour of Christianity's superiority is true as Christianity is a particular and unique view of the divine dimension. In this respect, Christianity possesses its own distinctive features which no other tradition can express, as each one of them is grounded on a different understanding of God.14 Furthermore, the same stance is true as an

An important historic doctrine of the second century dealt with the Trinity. Now this term “the Trinity” and all three aspects were not flushed out during this time, but the beginning thoughts mainly on the relationship of the Father and Son were beginning to be discussed. The main cause for the laying of the foundation of the Trinity was Gnosticism. Gnostics “believed in One God who is wholly transcendent, spiritual and far removed from the fallen, material universe, which he did not create (pp. 37).” Additionally, “human beings are sparks of the same spiritual substance that God is ... thus salvation is to escape from the bondage of material existence (pp. 37).” Gnostics “regarded Jesus as the human vehicle for this heavenly messenger”, which meant that they all “rejected the idea of God becoming

If we go back to the beginning of Schelling's lectures on mythology and revelation, we can remember how he argued that the three potencies contained all of the possibilities, and all of the principles of being. In them, says Schelling, we find the entire logic and the entire metaphysics. Hence, the better an image expresses, incarnates, and elucidates the logic and the metaphysics of three principles which we find in God, the better a symbol it is. Crucially, at this point we have to resist the temptation of falling back in a framework/content dichotomy. In the light of the participatory stance I introduced above and to which I ascribe, we must not think of our images of God as more or less precise representations of a transcendent metaphysical