Augustine on human nature

Augustine teaches that human nature was created good and lived in harmony before the Fall. Through the first sin, humanity fell into original sin, and our nature became disordered.

• Our desires are now marked by concupiscence — disordered longing that reason struggles to control.
• The will is divided: Augustine describes his own inability to do the good he wants.
• We cannot save ourselves; we depend on God grace. As he writes, 'our heart is restless until it rests in you'.

Augustine on the Fall

Knowing God: natural and revealed

Christians distinguish two ways of knowing God:

• Natural theology — knowledge of God through reason and the observation of creation (general revelation). Calvin spoke of a sensus divinitatis, an innate sense of the divine.
• Revealed theology — knowledge given through faith, scripture and above all Jesus Christ (special revelation).

Karl Barth firmly rejected natural theology: sin so corrupts human reason that God can be known only as God chooses to reveal himself in Christ.

Natural vs revealed

The person of Jesus Christ

Christians have understood Jesus in several complementary ways, and scholars debate the emphasis:

• As a teacher of wisdom — his moral teaching on love, forgiveness and the Kingdom of God.
• As a liberator — challenging injustice and standing with the marginalised.
• As the Son of God — his authority, miracles and resurrection pointing to his divine status.

How far Jesus was divine, and in what sense, has been central to Christian thought since the early creeds.

Christian moral principles and Bonhoeffer

Christians disagree about the sources of moral authority: the Bible alone, or the Bible together with Church tradition and reason. Many centre ethics on agape love.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the set example of Christian moral action:

• He contrasted costly grace (discipleship that costs everything) with 'cheap grace'.
• He led the Confessing Church and actively resisted the Nazi regime, valuing solidarity, community and obedience to God over the state.
• He was imprisoned and executed in 1945, and wrote of a 'religionless Christianity' lived for others.

Bonhoeffer

Natural or revealed theology?

Tap a claim, then which route to knowing God it fits.

Pluralism, society and gender

Religious pluralism asks how Christianity relates to other faiths. Three positions:

• Exclusivism — salvation only through explicit Christian faith.
• Inclusivism — Christ saves, but others may be included; Karl Rahner spoke of 'anonymous Christians'.
• Pluralism — John Hick: the great faiths are different human responses to the one ultimate reality.

Gender and theology: feminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether critique patriarchy and treat sexism as a sin; Mary Daly argued 'if God is male, the male is God', moving to a post-Christian position. Others defend reformed, inclusive readings of the tradition.

Pluralism

The challenge of secularism

Secularism challenges the place of religion in public life, and some thinkers attack belief itself:

• Sigmund Freud called religion an illusion and a form of wish fulfilment — a comforting projection of a father figure, even an 'obsessional neurosis'.
• Richard Dawkins argues belief in God is a delusion, unsupported by evidence and often harmful.
• Secularisation describes the declining social influence of religion; debates continue over 'procedural' (neutral) versus 'programmatic' (anti-religious) secularism.

Christian responses argue that Freud and Dawkins attack a caricature, and that faith remains rationally and morally serious.

Liberation theology and Marx

Liberation theology, associated with Gustavo Gutiérrez, arose in Latin America. It reads the gospel as good news for the oppressed:

• A preferential option for the poor — God sides with the marginalised.
• Praxis (orthopraxis): faith must issue in action against injustice, not just correct belief.
• It uses Marx analysis of class and structural injustice as a tool to expose 'structural sin' — while many theologians reject Marx atheism and the Vatican has cautioned against uncritical use of Marxism.

Thinker and theme

Tap a thinker, then their contribution.

Liberation theology

The big ideas to take into the exam

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