...14 June 2015 Explaining the Doctrine of Atonement, Erroneous Theories and Jesus’s Incarnation The Doctrine of Atonement is a very important part of what the Christian Church believes. It lies at the very heart of the Christian system, and even Paul the Apostle exclaimed that “For I deliver unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; And that he was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the scriptures “(I Corinthian 15:3, 4). This document describes the forgiving of sin through the death and resurrection of Jesus and how, with his death, man was forgiven for all his sins and is able to receive redemption from God. The atonement is who Jesus is, along with what Jesus has done. There have been a few different explanations of the atonement according to C. S. Lewis, yet no one theory has been explained as the being valid. There are 3 main principle theories in Christianity, but many more still exist. The first main principle theory is the ransom theory. Who did Jesus pay his life to? Was it the devil to pay for man’s freedom from sin? This theory came from Irenaeus of Lyons. He claims that God actually tricked the Devil into thinking that the ransom of Jesus soul would go to him, but the ruse was that Jesus was actually God himself and the Devil was unable to hold His soul. There does not seem to be any scriptures to support this theory, but it has been taught frequently by most Churches...
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...theology that says Jesus’ death is the supreme saving act, and that the equation of guilt, punishment and grace worked out through the execution of the innocent, divine victim in place of a rightly condemned humanity provides the essential sum of Christianity itself. This theology is composed of many elements in scripture and tradition -- references to Jesus’ death as a sacrifice, ideas of redemptive suffering, and a deep tradition of eucharistic remembrance that Jesus died "for us." These elements appear in all branches and eras of Christian tradition. But the organization of them into a complete substitutionary view of the atonement is much less universal, Such a view has never been prominent in the Eastern Christian church, and it was not the dominant view in the Western church for the first half of its history. Many think the rise of atonement theology represented a terrible wrong turn, plunging Christian spirituality into a...
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...Institute of Philosophy and Religious studies. Affiliated to The Catholic University of Malawi PHILOSOPHY OF KNOWLEDGE (Epistemology) Student: OTIENO STEPHEN MBAKA Class Notes INTRODUCTION Fundamental Notions THE "PHILOSOPHY OF KNOWLEDGE" is that branch of philosophy which tries to determine in a general way what the nature and scope of man's capacity to know are. Precisely what this determi-nation will turn out to be cannot be foreseen at the beginning of our investigation since the very reason for undertaking such a project is to find that out in a methodical and systematic way. Nonetheless, even at this point, we do have a vague sense of what we are after, and, presumably, we have had enough experi-ence of our ignorance and capacity for error to motivate us to take up this arduous task. Our common-sense notion of nature tells us that an investigation into the "nature" of anything means at least that we are ask-ing "what sort of thing is it?" To be sure, this question is none too precise, but it will do for a beginning. Again, our common-sense notion of "scope" tells us that an inquiry into the "scope" of any-thing means at least that we are asking "how far does it extend?" Again, this imprecise query will do for the moment. Notice that we are not asking whether we know anything at all. The reason is, as we shall see in detail later that this question cannot be asked at all, because to have asked it is to have answered...
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