Theology Final Exam

The reciprocity and asymmetry between the beyond-the-horizon and under-the-ground bear an uncanny resemblance to the reciprocity and contrast between the future and the past.

True

True or False: According to Berry, St. Paul wanted to extend the Christ reality not simply from the personal Christ story to the community story, but to the whole of civilization and even to the story of the universe itself. But this cosmic dimension of Christianity began to disappear when the plague of the Black Death arrived.

True

True or False: According to Berry, a position advanced by Duns Scouts for Christ's appearance was based upon the principle of goodness. For Scotus, goodness by definition is a sharing, a giving of a person's self in an expansive way to others. Therefore, God created out of superabundant goodness, out of the urgency of the divine being to give of itself in the form of Christ's appearance.

True

True or False: According to Berry, because scriptures were written at a time when the cosmos, as revelatory of the divine, was taken for granted and at a time when the world was not facing our present ecological crisis, we must not look to scriptures for resolving this crisis. If we continue to do so, we will drown reading the book.

True

True or False: According to Berry, one of the reasons we do not find much reference in scriptures to religious insights from the natural world is that such insights would have been taken for granted and considered obvious.

True

True or False: According to Berry, possibly the most significant change in human consciousness since the beginning of human consciousness is the change from the perception of the world as cosmos to its perception as cosmogenesis, from being to becoming.

True

True or False: According to Berry, the reason why St. Paul is the first to mention Adam and to place emphasis on the original sin (something even the gospels do not reference Jesus as emphasizing) is that St. Paul needs to exalt the Christ redemptive process and, therefore, needs to argue for why people need to be redeemed.

True

True or False: According to Berry, the world was viewed as mechanistic after Rene Descartes claimed the universe is mind and extension. As a result, everything lost its soul after Descartes except humans, who kept their spiritual souls that could be saved by divine grace.

True

True or False: According to Berry, there is no way of guiding the course of human affairs through the perilous course of the future except by discovering our role in the larger evolutionary process of the earth and the universe.

True

True or False: According to Berry, there is this deep, hidden rage against the human condition in the Western psyche. As such, "resurrection" rather than "evil" is really the ultimate perspective from which to look at Christianity, the human or the universe. For it is resurrection that refers to a comprehensive, glorious new transformation. And transforming ourselves is precisely what is needed.

True

True or False: According to Berry, we worry too much about Jesus Christ and we have been overly concerned with salvation and the savior personality. The redemptive personality is not the whole story, not even the whole Christ story. We therefore might want to give up the Bible for a while, put it on the shelf for perhaps twenty years.

True

True or False: According to Berry, when we think of redemption from original sin and of the Christ incarnation, we must ask: "Where does the natural world fit into the picture?"

True

True or False: According to Campbell, a hero may choose to undertake a journey or he/she may be thrown into a circumstance that he or she did not intend.

True

True or False: According to Campbell, because there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions, it might even be said there is but one archetypal mythic hero whose life has been replicated in many lands by many, many people.

True

True or False: According to Campbell, every human has sacrificed his/her own needs for others.

True

True or False: According to Campbell, not all heroes die to the world, but they all die in some way or another, they died to their old life and born into the hero's life, a new life, a new way of becoming.

True

True or False: According to Campbell, the hero is always ready for the adventure. Whatever adventure the hero is ready for is the one that he/she gets.

True

True or False: According to Heidegger's description, both the past and the future remain hidden from the open presence that they mutually bring about. And yet the way the future conceals itself in its offering is quite different from the manner in which the past is concealed in its giving.

True

True or False: According to Heidegger, meditative thinking involves a releasement towards things and an openness to mystery.

True

True or False: According to Heidegger, the overemphasis on calculative thinking (to the detriment of the significant need of meditative thinking), more than just a mere effect of circumstance and fortune, has led to a loss of rootedness, of the autochthony, of not being at home in the world.

True

True or False: According to the authors, all persons of mature faith engage in theological reflection at some time or another.

True

True or False: According to the authors, truth is a multilayered and ambiguous reality. There seem to be degrees, levels and kinds of truths.

True

True or False: Berry also argues that our language is inadequate, it is carrying the dark side of the total process of civilization. Therefore, we need to recovery a more effective language. Like the Bible, we should also put Webster's Dictionary on the shelf for 20 years.

True

True or False: The universe itself can only presented in a story with a mythic as well as a scientific aspect.

True

True or False: Thomas Berry says "we are in trouble now because we are in between stories. The old story sustained us for a long time but is not functioning and we have not yet learned a new story." Campbell disagrees with that statement.

True

True or False? According to Bear Heart, we ought to learn how to be thankful for when something terrible happens to us because there is a lesson there for us to learn.

True

True or False? According to Marshall, the more we see, the more we know, and the more we know, the more empowered we are.

True

True or False? According to Marshall, the unseen enemy that concerned the bear was the the unseen strength that dwells somewhere within the human. For Grandmother bear, she wasn't sure if it was good.

True

The form of theology that critically reflects upon the very foundations of theological activity is called _______________ theology.

foundational

According to Berry, the _____________ is that we, even now, are deliberately terminating the most awesome splendor that the planet has yet attained. We must adopt a new view of Earth as a one-time endowment.

pathos

According to Campbell, the ___________ function of myth attempts to provide direction of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. This particular function, Campbell states, is the one that he thinks everyone must try today to relate to.

pedagogical

According to Berry, in the new context of a viable human mode of being, the natural world itself would be perceived as (select all that apply):

primary teacher, primary lawgiver, primary healer, primary reality

According to Berry, designating the future as the Ecozoic Era is to emphasize the restoration, in a new context, of the

primordial mode of human awareness

Theology is the ____________________ of reflecting critically upon the way people of a particular religion tradition should live out their faith.

process

Two important elements of reflection that are common to both the narrow and broad sense of the term "theology" include (select all that apply):

reason & faith

The process of investigating why preexisting written sources were put together in a particular final form is known as:

redaction criticism

Theology is the human activity of bringing a religious tradition into conversation with our contemporary situation in a mutually critical way so as to deepen our understanding and commitment to, living out our faith in this situation as well as to transforming the world for the better. These activities include (select all that apply):

reflection, interpretation, construction, transformation

While the open horizon withholds the visibility that which lies beyond it, the ground is much more resolute in its concealment of what lies beneath it. It is this resoluteness, this ________________ of access to what lies beneath the ground, that enables the ground to solidly support all those phenomena that move or dwell upon its surface.

refusal

According to Marshall, the fox, Old Shadow, taught Turtle that ___________ was his best ally.

silence

According to Campbell, the _______________ function of myth helps support and validate a certain social order. It is the function that varies enormously from place to place and deals with the structure of family life, community life, man/woman, man/man, elder/adult/youth/infant relationships, etc. This more so than most of the other functions of myths, Campbell states, has become out of date.

sociological

When our awareness of time is no longer experienced as a homogeneous void (but reveals itself as this vast and richly textured field in which we are corporeally immersed), then this vibrant expanse structured by both a ground and a horizon transform abstract space into _____________________.

space-time

Finish this sentence: At the most primordial level of sensuous, bodily experience, we find ourselves in an expressive, gesturing landscape, in a world that ____________________.

speaks

According to Berry, the historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of ____________ and shared ________________________.

story; shared dream experience

The form of theology that seeks to express the meaning of contemporary Christianity is called ________________ theology.

systematic

According to Berry, the primary obstacle to the fulfillment of this mythic, ecological vision will be:

the mythic power of the industrial vision.

According to Eliade, the two modes of being in the world assumed by the human in the course of his/her history include:

the sacred and the profane

According to Marshall, there was only one being who lived on the grasslands that had no physical abilities that set it apart from other beings. This being was:

the two-legged

According to Berry, a central commitment of the Ecozoic Era involves:

the universe as a communion of subjects rather than as a collection of objects

"Neither the past nor the future are entirely out in the open of the perceivable present, and yet....

they seem everywhere implied."

The __________________________, by refusing its presence, supports or holds up the perceived landscape.

under-the-ground

True or False: According to Berry, the impasse of the believing redemption community involves a Christian redemptive mystique that has had little concern with the natural world.

True

True or False: According to Berry, the impasse of the secular scientific community, committed to a developmental universe, is the commitment to the realm of the physical to the exclusion of the spiritual.

True

True or False: According to Berry, the terminal phase of the Cenozoic Era has been due to the distorted aspect of the myth of progress.

True

We have already noticed the magic by which the horizon encloses and yet holds open the visible landscape: precisely by concealing, or better, ______________________, that which lies beyond it.

withholding

The process of locating a Hebraic passage within the work of JEDP, is known as

source criticism

"We are situated in the land in much the same way that characters are situated in a _______________."

story

According to Marshall, the bear told Turtle that the ____________ can create the greatest harm.

unseen enemy

_______________ are stories that link an event to a place where by the event involves persons who underwent misfortunes as a consequence of violating cultural standards of right behavior.

'agodzaahi

According to Otto, the human being's religious experience can be frightening and irrational. The human can find:

- ALL OF THE ABOVE - a feeling of terror before the sacred - a feeling of terror before the awe-inspiring mystery - a feeling of terror before the majesty that emanates an overwhelming superiority of power

According to Berry, history is governed by those overarching movements that:

- ALL OF THE ABOVE - give shape and meaning to life - relate the human venture to the larger destinies of the universe - allow for the creation of a movement we might call the Great Work of a people

According to Eliade, Rudolf Otto's "The Sacred" undertook an analysis of the modalities of the religious experience. While succeeding in determining the content and specific characteristics of religious experience, Otto:

- BOTH ARE CORRECT - passed over the rational and speculative side of religion - concentrated chiefly on the irrational aspect of religion

According to Berry, a way to counter the industrial mystique involves (select all that apply):

- a mystique of the land - commitment to the earth as irreversible process - commitment to the ecological age as the only viable form of the millennial ideal - commitment to a sense of progress that includes the natural as well as the human world

Finish this sentence: According to Abram, European philosophy has consistently occupied itself with the question of human specialness, that human beings are significantly different from all other forms of life. As such, language has for a long time been perceived as: ______________________ (select all that apply).

- an exclusively human property - a way of demonstrating the excellence of humankind relative to all other species - the special provenance of the human species

According to Campbell, it is common for a hero to return from the ordeal and the world (the community):

- doesn't know how to receive the gift - doesn't know how to institutionalize the gift - doesn't know how to keep the gift going - doesn't know how to renew the gift - ALL OF THE ABOVE

According to Marshall, the deer taught Turtle (select all that apply):

- eyes forward and ears back - always look and look long - search with your eyes through the sounds you hear - never stand on the crest of a hill - enemies can be where you least expect them

Two major shifts that have occurred in recent understanding of the relationship between belief and behavior or theory and practice include (select all that apply):

- from an individualistic to a social understanding of the relationship - increased awareness of the influence of practice upon theory

According to Berry, the deepest cause of the present devastation is found in a mode of consciousness that:

- has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being - that has bestowed all rights on humans while other-than-human modes of being are seen as having no rights - assigns reality and value to other-than-human beings through their use by the human - makes other-than-humans totally vulnerable to exploitation by all four fundamental establishments that control the human realm: the political, economic, intellectual and religious establishments - ALL OF THE ABOVE

According to Berry, one aspect of the Great Work involves the question of story. We are:

- in trouble now because we do not have a good story - we are in between stories - entranced by an old story that is no longer effective and we have yet to learn the new story - following a story that provided a context in which life could function in a meaningful way which is no longer relevant to our current times - ALL OF THE ABOVE

According to Berry, while each of us has our individual life pattern and responsibilities, the Great Work of a people:

- is the work of all the people - does not exempt any of us from the Great Work - means aligning our personal work needs with that of the Great Work - ALL OF THE ABOVE

According to Heidegger, please select all of the characteristics that apply to calculative thinking

- it remains indispensable - it reckons with conditions that are given - it takes into account a set of givens with the calculated intention of serving a purpose - it does not require the use of numbers or calculating in a mathematical sense - it races from one prospect to another - it never stops, never collects itself, in its line towards producing definite results - it is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates

According to Heidegger, please select all of the characteristics that apply to meditative thinking:

- it requires greater effort and requires more practice - it is in need of more delicate care than any other craft - it must be able to bide its time, to await as does the farmer, whether the seed will come up and ripen - Heidegger says, "anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits." - it dwells on what lies close and meditates on what is closest - it dwells upon what concerns us, here and now

According to Berry, "Western religious traditions have been so occupied with redemptive healing of a flawed world that they tend to ignore creation as it is experienced in our times. Consequently, one of the basic difficulties of the modern West is:

- its division into a secular scientific community, which is concerned with creative energies - a religious community, which is concerned with redemptive energies - BOTH ARE CORRECT

According to Abram, "the most prevalent view of language considers it to be a set of arbitrary but conventionally agreed upon words or "signs" linked by a purely formal system of syntactic and grammatical rules." In other words, language, in this view is:

- like a code - a way of representing actual things and events in the perceived world without having an internal, non-arbitrary connection to that world - readily separable from the world - ALL OF THE ABOVE

According to Berry, critical reflection is essential in our reinventing of the human because:

- our knowledge needs to be in harmony with the natural world rather than a domination of the natural world - we need the art of intimate communion with, as well as technical knowledge of, the various components of the natural world - it would help us avoid a romantic attraction to the natural world that would not meet the urgencies of what we are about - ALL OF THE ABOVE

According to Campbell, the types of heroic deeds include (select all that apply):

- physical deed - spiritual deed

According to Berry, the confusion and insecurity that we presently experience originated, to a large extent, with the centrally traumatic moment in Western history known as the Black Death. The response to the plague and to other social disturbances led to two developments. These include (Select which two are correct):

- religious redemption out of the tragic world - greater control of the physical world to escape its pain and to increase its utility to human society

According to Tilly, a story is true to the extent that it (select all that apply):

- represents the world (or part of it) revealingly - is coherent or "makes relative sense" - shows ways of overcoming self-deception - shows a person how to be faithful to others - provides a model for constancy in seeking to tell the truth

According to Campbell, a society needs heroes because:

- society has to have constellating images to pull together all these tendencies to separation into some intention - society has to have some way to pull together tendencies to separation to shed light on some path - society has to have an intention somehow to operate as a single power - ALL OF THE ABOVE

In aboriginal Australia, there are basic mnemonic relationships between the Dreamtime stories and the earthly landscape. They are (select all that apply):

- spoken or sung Dreamings provide a way of recalling viable routes through an often difficult terrain - the continual encounter with various features of the surrounding landscape stirs the memory of the spoken Dreamings that pertain to those sites - the land and the language are inseparable

According to Abram, which of the following summarize Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological exegesis of language (select all that apply):

- the event of perception is and inherently interactive, participatory event, a reciprocal interplay between the perceiver (the encounterer) and the perceived (the encountered) - perceived (encountered) things are encountered by the perceiving body (encounterer) as animate, living powers that actively draw us into a relation - our spotaneous, pre-conceptual experience yields no evidence for a dualistic division between animate and inanimate phenomena, only for relative distinctions between diverse forms of animateness - the perceptual reciprocity between our sensing bodies and the animate, expressive landscape both engenders and supports our more conscious, linguistic reciprocity with others - the complex interchange that we call "language" is rooted in the non-verbal exchange always already going on between our own flesh and the flesh of the world - human languages are informed not only by the structures of the human body and human community, but by the evocative shapes and patterns of the more-than-human landscape. - language is no more the special property of the human than it is an expression of the animate earth that enfolds us

One's perception is largely determined by_____________________ (select all that apply):

- the language one speaks - what one perceives - one's landscape - one's story

The ecological vision that Berry is proposing is:

- the only context that is consistent with the evolutionary processes that brought the earth and all its living beings into that state of florescence that existed prior to the industrial age - is considerably less idealized that the wonderworld vision that supports our present industrial system - a mythic vision that evokes the energies needed to sustain the human effort involved and, thus, lead to a sustainable context for survival and continued evolution of the earth and its living forms - ALL OF THE ABOVE

Language is difficult to define because (select all that apply):

- the only medium with which we can define language is language itself - we are unable to circumscribe the whole of language within our own definition, which uses only a fraction of what language encompasses - language has an open-endedness, a mysteriousness - every attempt to define language is subject to a curious limitation

Dreamtime to Aboriginals is not like the western, biblical notion of Genesis, a finished event; it is not like the common scientific interpretation of the "Big Bang", an event that happened once and for all in the distant past. Rather, it is ___________________ of the world from an incipient, indeterminate state into full, waking reality, from invisibility to visibility, from the secret depths of silence into articulate song and speech.

- the perpetual emerging - an ongoing process

Barr challenged the fundamentalist use of 2 Timothy 3:16-17 ("All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness...". He did so by arguing that (select all that apply):

- this passage does not say anything about the inerrancy of scripture - this passage does not say that since scripture is inspired, it ought to be the controlling, criterion for Christian faith - this passage's reference to "all" scripture was written at a time before when Hebrew and New Testament books were collected to form the modern Christian Bible

According to Berry, the success or failure of this historical age is the extent to which:

- those living at this time will fulfill the special role that history has imposed now upon us - we recognize that the nobility of our lives depends upon the manner in which we come to understand and fulfill are role in the great work - we believe that those powers that assign our role must in that same act bestow upon us the ability to fulfill this role - we believe that we are cared for and guided by these same powers that brought us into being - ALL OF THE ABOVE

According to Berry, we have rights that are limited and relative. We have human rights, trees have tree rights, insects have insect rights, rivers have river rights, mountains have mountain rights. But humans do not have rights:

- to deprive other species of proper habitat - to interfere with migration routes - to disturb the basic functioning of the biosystems of the planet - to own any part of Earth in any absolute manner - ALL OF THE ABOVE

Christian fundamentalism, according to the Niagara Bible Conference of 1895, identified five fundamentals to the preservation of Christianity in a vastly changing society. They include (select all that apply):

- total inerrancy of the Bible - the deity of Christ - the virgin birth - Christ's substitutionary atonement for sin - Christ's physical resurrection and future bodily return

According to Berry, we might begin acquiring this mystique of the land by considering that (select all that apply):

- we need not a human answer to an earth problem, but an earth answer to an earth problem - the earth will solve its problems, and possibly our own, if we let the earth function in its own ways - we need only "listen" to what the earth is telling us

True or False: According to Berry, the greatest challenge facing the reinvention of humans is that we have never had to reinvent ourselves before.

False

True or False: According to the authors, the Doctrine of Redemption is a telling reminder that one's location should not make us overly cautious about universal statements.

False

True or False: Heidegger states that we can only lose that which we once possessed, and the reason we are in a flight from thinking is because we have lost our ability towards calculative thinking.

False

True or False: According to Berry, while St. Paul's argument concerning original sin and redemption is a dramatic narrative that provides the story line for all of history, St. Paul does NOT indicate that the whole universe is involved in both a primordial fault and a primordial healing.

False - According to Berry, St. Paul DOES indicate this.

True or False: According to Berry, there is a dark side to our preoccupation with a savior personality. But we can only get to the bright side if we understand that Jesus won't show up if we let go.

False - Berry says that we will get to the bright side only if we distance ourselves for awhile. We must see a larger picture. We need to let go. If Jesus is who he is supposed to be, he will show up. If Christians are faithful to the divine manifestation in the natural world, Jesus will be discovered.

True or False: According to Berry, we must start with the written Scriptures. After all, the Psalms do indeed tell us that the mountains and the birds praise God.

False - Berry says we cannot start with the written scriptures. The Psalms do indeed tell us that the mountains and the birds praise God. But we do not have to read scriptures to experience that.

True or False: According to Berry, as far as we know, the idea of the original fault or sin is unique to Christian story and people.

False - Original fault is actually quite common, and often flood stories have something to do with purging the original faults. Berry also provides other examples from the Chinese and Hindu worlds.

True or False: According to Berry, one of the basic positions advanced by Thomas Aquinas is that the Christ appearance is a kind of contradiction and "when this transcendent deity is the basic point of emphasis, the notion of an incarnated divinity becomes a scandal, so to speak."

False - One of the basic positions, advanced by St. Thomas, was that the divine appeared in human form to remedy a primordial evil called original sin.

According to Abram, two philosophers/phenomenologists strove toward the end of their lives to express a primordial modality of awareness, a more immediate dimension whose characteristics are neither strictly spatial nor strictly temporal, but are both at once. Which two philosophers was Abram referring to?

Martin Heidegger & Maurice Merleau-Ponty

According to Campbell, religion begins with a sense of wonder and awe and the attempt to tell stories and perform rituals that will connect us to gods. Then it becomes a set of theological works in which everything is reduced to a code and creed.

True

The form of theology that is primarily concerned with serving and building up the Christian community is called ______________ theology.

pastoral

Given the context of this course thus far, would you suppose that we might also want to consider our "ecological" location as to impacting who we are and where we are?

Yes

According to Eliade, when something appears as wholly different from the profane, when the sacred manifests itself through the profane, everyday world, that is, when the sacred shows itself, this is known as:

a hierophany

Heidegger refers to the past and the future as ___________________ that by their very absence concern us and so make themselves felt within the present.

absences

According to Berry, there are three controlling terms in human-earth relations for the foreseeable future (select all that apply):

acceptance, protection, fostering

The ___________________, by withholding its presence, holds open the perceived landscape.

beyond-the-horizon

According to Bear Heart, ____________ gives meaning to life. It is what gives us strength.

coping with suffering

According to Campbell, the __________________ function of myth deals with the dimension with which science is now mostly concerned; and that dimension from which the myth attempts to convey the shape, history, order of the universe in such a way that the mystery comes through.

cosmological

According to Berry, the human formation is governed by three basic principles. These are (select all that apply):

differentiation, subjectivity, communition

___________________ is the systemic scheme for interpreting all of history on the basis of the Bible.

dispensationalism

Taken together, the Yahwist, Elohim, Deuteronomic and Priestly sources of Hebrew Scriptures form what is known as:

documentary hypothesis

"A mystery cannot be represented precisely because it is never identical with itself, it is outside of itself or:"

ecstatic

_________________ promises one's spiritual destiny; it offers clear-cut distinctions between right and wrong; it provides firm rules for living; and it gives those who adhere to it a sense of identity in a world of pluralism and apparent relativism. It can be said to perceive a God of judgement and punishment rather than a God of love and mercy. It is a response to a dramatically changing world centered upon fear that society is losing its scriptural, traditional and moral foundations.

fundamentalism

According to Bear Heart, ____________ resulted in feelings of loss that engulfed him that were difficult to describe.

his son died in a plane crash

The form of theology that seeks to reconstruct and understand the process by which the Christian tradition was formed is called _________________ theology.

historical

Who we are and where we are shape our understanding of reality. This assertion finds immediate confirmation if we think about the following location(s) (select all that apply):

historical, cultural, social

According to Bear Heart, __________ is something to connect with, something to hold onto.

hope

According to Abram, ______________ is not primary. Instead, it is the sensuous, perceptual life-world, whose wild, participatory logic ramifies and elaborates itself in language that is primary.

human language

According to Abram, we now "suspect that the complexity of _________________ is relate to the complexity of the __________________, and not to any complexity of our species considered apart from this matrix."

human language; earthly ecology

____________________ is the belief that while the Bible reveals fundamental religious and moral truths "without error," its historical and scientific descriptions are not necessarily without error.

limited inerrancy

For the Apache and Navajo, the 'agodzaahi narratives express a deep association between _______________ and the land and, when heard, are able to effect a lasting kinship between persons and particular places. The events that the 'agodzaahi narrates belong, as it were, to the ____________ and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.

moral behavior; place

According to Otto, the human can find religious fear before:

mysterium fascinans

According to Campbell, myth (stories), serve four functions. For starters, myth helps us realize what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder we are, and they help us in our experiencing of awe before mystery. In this way, the ____________ function of myth opens the world to the dimension of mystery, to the realization of the mystery that underlies all forms.

mystical

Now, Eliade, on the other hand, has a different grasp of myths. He defines their function/structure according to five points. Which of the following is NOT correct?

none of the above are part of his definition

Theology is _____________________ conversation because we change and also because our context and environment change.

on-going

"hoot," "quack", "cluck", "sook'eeyis deeyo", "tick", "boom", "rush" are all examples of:

onomatopoeia