Religious StudiesQ&A by dot point

Component 1 religious identity through practice: baptism (infant and believers') and the Eucharist (transubstantiation, consubstantiation, memorialism, spiritual presence) as practices that form and divide Christian identity.

Component 1 religion, secularisation and Christian response: the meaning and evidence of secularisation, secularism as ideology, and the range of Christian responses (accommodation, resistance, re-evangelisation).

Component 1 religion and the challenge of poverty and injustice: Christian approaches to poverty (charity versus structural change), liberation theology (Gutierrez and Boff), the preferential option for the poor, and the use of Marxist analysis.

Component 1 the early Church and the state: persecution and martyrdom, the conversion of Constantine and the Edict of Milan, the move from persecuted sect to imperial religion, and the consolidation of doctrine and authority.

Component 1 religious identity in the context of wealth, migration and equality: Christian attitudes to wealth and poverty, to migrants and refugees, and to equality and discrimination (gender, race), and how differing interpretations shape identity.

Component 1 Jesus, his birth and resurrection: the Gospel and 1 Corinthians 15 accounts, historical versus theological readings, and the views of Vermes, Sanders, Wright and Bultmann.

Component 1 religious identity through ethical teaching: the key moral principles of Christianity (love of neighbour, agape, forgiveness, sanctity of life, imago Dei) and how they shape Christian identity and conduct.

Component 1 the atonement: the models of how Christ's death saves (ransom and Christus Victor, satisfaction and penal substitution, moral exemplar), their biblical roots, and their strengths and weaknesses.

Component 1 the Bible as a source of wisdom and authority: models of biblical authority (literalist, conservative, liberal), Scripture and tradition and reason, and the Bible in worship, ethics and decision-making.

Component 1 the nature of God: the attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, eternity), personal versus impersonal models, and the challenge that evil poses to God's nature.

Component 1 the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit as one God in three persons, the biblical roots and creedal development, the heresies it excludes, and its significance for worship.

Component 3 conscience: Aquinas's rational account (synderesis and conscientia) against the psychological accounts of Freud (the super-ego) and Fromm (authoritarian and humanistic conscience), with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 3 divine command theory: the claim that morality depends on God's commands, the Euthyphro dilemma, and the strengths and weaknesses of grounding ethics in the will of God.

Component 3 Aquinas's natural law: the four tiers of law, the primary and secondary precepts, real and apparent goods, the doctrine of double effect, and its application to issues of life and death, with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 3 Hoose's proportionalism: the distinction between moral and pre-moral (ontic) goods and evils, the idea of a proportionate reason, its relation to natural law, and its application to life and death, with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 3 the relationship between religion and morality: the autonomy, heteronomy and theonomy of ethics, whether morality needs God, and the views of Kant, Aquinas and secular critics, with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 3 virtue theory: Aristotle's account of eudaimonia, the doctrine of the mean, moral and intellectual virtues, and the role of practical wisdom, with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 2 the cosmological argument: Aquinas's Third Way (contingency), the Copleston-Russell debate, and Hume's challenges, with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 2 the ontological argument: Anselm's first and second forms, Gaunilo's perfect island objection, and Kant's claim that existence is not a predicate, with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 2 religious belief as a product of the human mind: Freud's account (wish-fulfilment, illusion, the Oedipus complex) and Jung's account (the collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation), with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 2 religious experience: mystical experience (James), the numinous (Otto), Teresa of Avila, and the value of experience for belief (Swinburne's principles of credulity and testimony), with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 2 religious language: the via negativa, the verification and falsification debate (Ayer, Flew, Hare, Mitchell, Hick), analogy and symbol (Aquinas, Ramsey, Tillich), and Wittgenstein's language games, with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 2 the teleological argument: Aquinas's Fifth Way, Paley's design argument, Tennant's aesthetic and anthropic arguments, and the challenges of Hume, Mill and Darwinian evolution.

Component 2 the problem of evil and suffering: the logical and evidential problem, the Augustinian theodicy, the Irenaean (Hick's soul-making) theodicy, and the process theodicy (Whitehead, Griffin), with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 3 the application of ethical theories to issues of human life and death: abortion and euthanasia under natural law, proportionalism, situation ethics and utilitarianism, and whether ethical theories can be applied, with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 3 determinism: hard determinism, philosophical determinism (Locke), scientific determinism and psychological behaviourism (Skinner), and the implications for moral responsibility, with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 3 libertarianism and the compatibility of determinism and free will: Sartre's radical freedom, the libertarian case, and compatibilism (soft determinism), with the implications for moral responsibility and strengths and weaknesses.

Component 3 religious concepts of predestination: Augustine on grace and the Fall, Calvin's double predestination, the relation to divine omniscience and human freedom, and the implications for justice and responsibility, with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 3 Fletcher's situation ethics: agape as the one absolute, the four working principles and six fundamental principles, conscience as a verb, and its application to life and death, with strengths and weaknesses.

Component 3 utilitarianism: Bentham's act utilitarianism (principle of utility, hedonic calculus) and Mill's rule utilitarianism (higher and lower pleasures, the harm principle), with their application to life and death and their strengths and weaknesses.