Christian Beliefs and Convictions Vocab

Doctrine

Distinct, Christian teachings

Ecumenical

"The entire inhabited earth", God's salvific love applies to the whole world

Theology

The study of God (Logos: "Word, Reason", Theos: "God")

Dogma

Christian teaching at the highest level of authority and trustworthiness

Wesleyan Quadrilateral

Scripture, Tradition, Reason, Experience

Sola Scriptura

"Scripture alone."

Rule of Faith

Early summaries of Christian doctrine

Creeds

Statements of Christian beliefs

Orthodoxy

Right Christian belief

Heresy

Beliefs that have been rejected by the church as contrary to Scripture

Spiritual Disciplines

Intentional practices meant to help us grow deeper in the spiritual life.

Means of Grace

Ways God has provided for us to be put in touch with the grace that is always there

General Revelation

God's self-disclosure in creation and the human conscience

Special Revelation

God's specific self-revelation in the history of Israel, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and Scripture

Natural Theology

A theology drawn from general revelation, because its evidence comes from nature

Ongoing Continuity

Special revelation does not replace general revelation, but builds on it.

Apologetics

Rational defense of the Christian faith to those who are not believers

Natural Law

Idea that God built a moral framework into creation itself

Unveiled Continuity

Both sorts of revelation convey truth about God, and each is continuous with the other, but we are unable to see this unless God pulls back the veil that obscures nature.

Inspiration

The Spirit's work as the author of the Scriptures, a work the Spirit did in and with the human authors of the biblical texts

Illumination

The ways the Spirit continues to work in and with God's people, as readers of the Scripture, to help us understand and be faithful to what we read there

Hermeneutics

Biblical interpretation

Canon

"measure", the whole of Scripture as the measuring stick, or rule, for Christian faith and life.

Marcion

a man in the Early Church (around year 140) who pushed for a different collection of Biblical texts than what is in the canon, including major edits and exclusion of the Old Testament

Montanist Controversy

Ecstatic prophecies of Montanus, Maximilla, and Prisca claimed to speak for the Holy Spirit, raising questions about the authority of the written Scriptures relative to new claims to truth.

Council of Trent

Roman Catholic rejection of sola scriptura, which affirmed that Catholic theology relies on both Scripture and living tradition and interdependent and authoritative sources for theology.

Second Vatican Council

Official teaching describes both sacred Scripture and Tradition as coming from one source of revelation, the Word of God: Scripture "as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit," and tradition as "the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles."

Succession

The truth of tradition passed from Peter to the current pope.

Inerrant

Scripture is without error

Infallibility

Scripture will not fail

Subordinationism

Trinitarian heresy: Makes Jesus and the Spirit less than the Father

Adoptionist

Makes Jesus into an ordinary human being who merited adoption by God, and it was his "moral progress that won for him the title Son of God."

Modalism

Understands the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three modes in which the one Gods works in the world

Patripassianism

The suggestion that God the Father died on the cross

Arianism

The heresy of Arius that taught that Jesus was God's first and greatest creature.

Nicene Creed

The formal statement or profession of Christian belief originally formulated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and amplified at the Council of Constantinople in 381.

Tritheism

The belief that there are three gods

Perichoresis

"mutual indwelling", used in theology to point to the relational nature of God

Doctrine of Appropriations

Because the works of God are indivisible and any work God does is the work of all 3 persons of the Trinity, its appropriate to talk about the distinct work that each of the divine persons does in the world

Ousia

"Substance" or "essence", the very heart of something

Homoi-ousious

"of similar substance"

Homo-ousious

"the same substance"

Creatio ex nihilo

creation out of nothing

Deism

God holds back, distant and standoffish, from what God has made

Transcendence

The teaching that God, by nature, is beyond this world and beyond the comprehension of human beings.

Immanence

A trait of God that refers to God's intimate union with and total presence to his creation

Pantheism

The belief that the world is itself divine

Panentheism

God and the world are so bound together that God could not rightly exist without the world

Gnosticism

A group of heretical religious movements that claimed salvation comes from secret knowledge available only to the elite initiated in that religion

Hierarchical dualism

Gnostic teaching that divides creation into two realities: material (bad) and spiritual (good)

Holism

The goodness of all that God has made, all things are included under the heading of created goodness.

Providence

God's continuing work in creation

Preservation

God's work and will in upholding all of creation

Concurrence

God's work in and with all things

Governance

God's work in guiding all things to the purpose for which they have been made and God's active rule over creation

Theological Anthropology

The doctrine of the human being---Christian teaching about what sort of creatures we are

Psychosomatic Unities

Creatures who are always both physical and spiritual

Materialism

Denies the existence of the spiritual or reduces the human being to a constellation of body parts and nothing more

Nonreductive Physicalism

a kind of materialism that still recognizes the human being in relationship to God

Holistic Dualism

body-soul dualism

Imago Dei

Image of God, Latin

Substantial View

Sees human beings as sharing in some aspect of God's substance

Functional View

Emphasizing the unique function human beings have in caring for God's creation

Relational View

Begins with God's triune nature, emphasizing God's life as perfect relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To be in the image of God, therefore, might mean that humans are, at our core, beings created to exist in relationship with others.