Catholic Thought - Final Examination (Other (Not Listed) Sample)

Student’s Name Professor’s Name Course Date Catholic Thought - Final Examination Question 1 The journalistic opposition of saints portrays an ignorant adoption of people as role models who prohibited reporters to publish anything negative about them. For example, Gandhi was not the saint westerners traditionally assumed. Rather, his image arose widely as of his martyrdom after the adoption of him as a role model. In fact, despite the credence for leading India to independence from Britain, Gandhi was not a great man. No one will venture to compare him to Jesus, He was politically incompetent because he advised Jews to adopt a nonviolent attitude towards the Nazis and called Hitler his friend. A Catholic perspective gives rise to St. Thomas, which shows that God’s love functions differently compared to that of human beings. According to St. Thomas, people’s love for particular things denotes their perception of good hence, their prompt response to the same. In God’s point of view, nothing portrays any goodness except that an individual endows it with the goodness. To that extent, the Scripture draws a distinct boundary between sinners and saints and further proclaims that all human beings are sinners. According to the book of Mark 10:9, what God has joined, no man can separate. A sinner deters God’s supreme authority over his life and further withholds from God the complete dedication and obedience (Tabor 1). Hence, sinners are habitual hypocrites, ungodly, and deceitful individuals. On the flipside, the title of saint promotes a humbling idea compared to that of sinners. The term saint is endowed with worthiness as such people dispel sin and the flesh, while that of a sinner provides a certain degree of comfort in individual’s iniquities. Question 2 In the Christian life, prayer connotes raising a person’s mind and heart to God or rather requesting good things from Him. Nonetheless, when Christians pray, it is good to humble oneself to receive exalts. The mystery of the Apostle’s Creed founded on faith requires Christians to believe, celebrate, and live from it in a personal and instrumental relationship with the living true God. The Catholic doctrine affirms the fact that providence of God is unchangeable in all aspects. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, God is the controller of all of things through His will, thus is an exemplary of His effects that pre-exists in Him. Given this idea of efficacious prayer and the unchangeable God’s providence, God listens to prayers in a genuine sense. Because faith rests on individual’s infallible truth, the objection rests on a faulty understanding of petitionary prayer. For instance, the Catholic Church believes petitionary prayer is about giving information to God of a fact and persuading Him to respond in a contrary manner to present intention, thus this undermines people’s motivation over petitionary prayer. Question 3 Catholic belief on the significance of prayer among Christians is that it presents individual an opportunity to speak with God For instance, vocal prayer is an important part of the Christian life as taught by Jesus to his disciples. This need to indulge in a sense of inner prayer corresponds to the human nature requirements. According to Bowen, the Catholic Church holds that individuals are made of body and spirit, thus, experience the need to interpret the emotions externally (21). Christians must pray with the entire being to provide all the power possible to one’s supplication. Prayers provide expressions that match the divine requirement as God seeks worshipers in truth and spirit. Consequently, living prayer as for the Catholic thought is a chance of external expression that relates to the body with inner prayer, which renders a person a perfect homage. Meanwhile, meditation in Catholicism is above all a quest because the mind seeks to comprehend the nature of Christian life for it to follow and respond to the Lord’s desires. Through meditation, an individual opens another chapter in their life, which eventually permits steps that stir the heart together. . Question 4 The Catholic Church operates within the realms of liturgical life of Eucharistic sacrifice and the sacraments. Sacraments serve to make Christians holy, resemble the body of Chris and God. In addition to that, they provide teachings concerning the purpose of faith, nourishing, expressing and, strnghening God’s will. Furthermore, the church came into existence following Christ’s complete self-giving for salvation, which remains within the institution of Eucharist and fulfilled on the cross. The foundations of the church signify the blood as well as water that flowed from the crucified Christ. It is from this side of Christ as he died for people upon the cross that there emerged the idea of the sacrament of the entire Catholic Church. As the church arose from the pierced heart of Jesus on the cross hanging dead, the sacrament is divine actions (Bowen 23). Illustratively, the great mystery symbolizing the union of Christ within the realities of human nature represents the fact that human actions and sufferings of Jesus represent divine actions, with which the sacraments are a living continuation of this mystery. Question 5 Protestants have reinforced that the Bible is the solitary rule of faith, suggesting that it entails every material an individual needs in the line of theology which is sufficiently clear that one does not need apostolic tradition or magisterium of the church to help them understand it. In the traditional perspective, the Christian truth rests within the passages of the Bible. As such, anything extraneous to the Bible is simply non-authoritative, wrong, and unnecessary and may well deter one from finding God. On the flipside, Catholics acknowledge that the Bible hardly endorse this perspective. Instead, it remains repudiated in Scripture. The sola scriptura indicates that if a teaching is not explicit in the Bible, then it is unacceptable as a doctrine. It is a bedrock Protestant contending that Scripture alone is the only source of morals and faith for Christians. Question 6 In the book of Ephesians 5:1-2, the Bible suggests an advice to Christians to follow God’s case in point as loved children and show affection, similar to the manner in which Jesus loved people and became a sacrifice to God. It means that adhering to the act of forgiveness as Christ did incorporates sacrifice. For that reason, Christians should prepare to lay down their life for their friends, or involve loving an enemy. According to Borg and Barry (17), Jesus died for people’s sins. As it stands, the sacrifice of animals, fall short of this expectation nor can the sacrifice of an imperfect individual be sufficient. In this way, God delivers the perfect sacrifice in the form of the perfect human, Jesus, making forgiveness possible for individuals who believe that Jesus died for humanity sins. Question 7 If anything, the Romans adopted a concrete attitude towards religion; perhaps the main notion used to explain why they had challenges in absorbing the idea of a single, all-powerful, and all-seeing God. The Romans had their religion, in so far; it rested on the central belief rather than a blend of fragmented taboos, traditions, rituals, and superstitions. A political perspective on the life of Romans and effects of Jesus emphasizes on the arena of careworn empires that conducted war until a single dictatorship of the military, making the Roman Empire gain governorship over border of the Mediterranean Sea. Besides that, an economic view examines the robust system of finance and business that conquered the intercontinental trade, reinforced taxation systems and broadened slave labor (Tabor 1). The conception of these facets connotes the impact of Jesus in the life of people in the Roman Empire in the ancient Mediterranean civilization. Question 8 Discussions of a religion founded on knowledge of Catholic views provid...