Deck 19: Modern Challenges to Christianity

Question 1

French delegates issued the Rights of Man, a charter of human rights:

A) That resembled the American Bill of Rights
B) That was written by the French philosopher Voltaire
C) That was written by the Archbishop of Paris
D) That denied the legitimacy of the King

Answer 1

A

Question 2

The author says that the irony of the French Revolution's anti-Catholicism is that:

A) It was the Catholic Church itself that led the initial revolution
B) Most Catholic clerics were sympathetic to the cause of revolution
C) There had not been much animosity toward the Catholic Church until the revolution
D) Most of the highest ranking members of the revolution were devout Catholics

Answer 2

C

Question 3

After Pope Pius VI objected to the French Revolution, which of the following was the French response?

A) Many principal leaders publically repented
B) The French simply ignored the pope as irrelevant
C) France declared the papacy a heretical body
D) The French invaded the Papal States and exiled Pius to France

Answer 3

D

Question 4

Two years after Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself the Emperor of the French he:

A) And Pope Pius VII reached an agreement to restore the Catholic Church in France
B) Declared war on the Papal States
C) Invaded Russia
D) Provided full religious liberty in France

Question 5

Did Pope Pius trust Napoleon?

A) Yes, but only after Napoleon went to the Vatican and prostrated before Pius
B) Yes, initially, but that did not last as Napoleon exiled every bishop in France
C) No, he had written a letter of resignation before going to Napoleon's coronation in case he was imprisoned
D) No, he had already learned that Napoleon became a Free Mason before taking over France

Question 6

Where did Pius IX receive help in restoring rule in the Papal States?

A) England
B) France
C) Austria
D) The United States

Question 7

Which of the following was not named at an important voice of atheism:

A) Johannes Chaldese
B) Ludwig Feuerbach
C) Sigmund Freud
D) Friedrich Nietzsche

Question 8

What does materialism mean in this chapter?

A) The belief that consuming goods generated wealth for nations
B) The belief that happiness comes from consuming material goods
C) The belief that God is not associated with the material world
D) The belief that the only thing that exists is matter

Question 9

What famous announcement did Friedrich Nietzsche make?

A) The übermensch is everyman
B) God is dead
C) God has left the universe
D) Europe exists so God cannot

Question 10

Sigmund Freud called religious beliefs:

A) The gift of the gods
B) The archetypes of the soul
C) Wish-fulfillments
D) The birth of heaven

Question 11

How many major wars of the twentieth century did the University of Bradford's war audit assess had religion as its core cause?

A) None
B) Three
C) Six
D) Twenty-five

Question 12

Which of the following conclusions did Charles Darwin reach regarding the development of species?

A) There could never be a god
B) Instead of a benevolently provident God acting, he saw a cruel battle for survival
C) Presuming God exists, natural selection was also supernatural selection
D) Natural selection produced the type of life that points to divine providence: the best things survive

Question 13

In Darwin's day, what was the response of Protestant intellectuals to his theory of evolution?

A) Many declared it the death of religion
B) Many regarded it as an intellectual fool's errand
C) They formed the League of Truth to fight it
D) Many publicly embraced it as a new natural theology

Question 14

When did the Catholic Church formally teach that evolution and Christian faith were not in conflict?

A) Virtually immediately, unlike most Protestants
B) By the late nineteenth century
C) In the mid-twentieth century
D) The Catholic Church does not formally teach this

Question 15

In the nineteenth century what did T. H. Huxley mean when he coined the term scientific naturalism?

A) Science is a natural discipline and theology is a supernatural discipline. They are correlated, but not the same
B) Science ought to never appeal to anything other than natural phenomena to explain scientific causation
C) The only things that exist are physical things, which is the purview of science
D) Huxley did not coin this, Steven Hawking did in the late twentieth century.

Question 16

What is scientism?

A) It posits that the only way to secure knowledge is through the scientific method
B) It posits that science is the only true philosophy, as it deals with facts and not theory
C) It posits that science alone can save the human race
D) It posits that science, although important for medical and technical achievements, is philosophically false as an expression of the human condition.

Question 17

Who responded to W. K. Clifford's The Ethics of Belief?

A) Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Will to Believe
B) Noel Coward in his play Will to Believe
C) Mark Twain in his essay Will to Believe
D) William James in his article Will to Believe

Question 18

*Physicist Ian Barbour proposed four types of possible relationships between science and religion. Which of the following was not one of his types?

A) Conflict model
B) Truth model
C) Independence model
D) Integration model

Question 19

What did Christian scholars, using modern forms of biblical criticism, begin to doubt?

A) That God actually inspired the Bible
B) That the Bible was true
C) The factual reliability of the Old Testament
D) The virtual dogma that the world was only 6,000 years old

Question 20

When did the quest for the historical Jesus begin?

A) Sixteenth century
B) Eighteenth century
C) Nineteenth century
D) Late twentieth century

Question 21

What did the Jesus Seminar conclude?

A) Only 20% of what the gospels report about Jesus is what Jesus actually said or similar to what he said
B) There is no Jesus of history, but only Christ of faith
C) Jesus was an apocalyptic messiah
D) There are solid grounds to think that Jesus may not have even existed historically

Question 22

Does the author think that the quest for the historical Jesus is an important project?

A) He called it something like a fool's errand
B) He said it was a minor project
C) He said that it represents something of the anti-Christian bias in a secular culture
D) He said it was one of the most important scholarly projects in the modern period

Question 23

Neo-Orthodoxy's theological enterprise:

A) Intends something of a fusion of traditional Christian beliefs and the modern cultural ethos
B) Resembles Ian Barbour's conflict model of rejecting science
C) Attempts a liberal Protestant engagement with culture
D) Refuses to accommodate or sacrifice the Christian message to modernity

Question 24

Where does the term fundamentalism come from?

A) A collection of pamphlets called The Fundamentals
B) It is a derisive term coined by the liberal Protestant movement
C) It came from an English mistranslation of the Latin fundamentus
D) Catholic liberals deriding Catholic conservatives

Question 25

What does ultramontanism refer to?

A) The Anglican high church movement of the 1950s
B) The modern Catholic missionary agenda, seeking Christians anywhere and everywhere
C) Catholics looking "over the mountains" to Rome for a sense of security
D) Protestant charges against American Catholics that they were too focused on their religion and not on bettering society

Question 26

What was the author's assessment Catholic fundamentalism?

A) He said that, although it was theologically limiting, it probably preserved Catholic identity during its most oppressed period on modern history
B) He thought it was theologically limiting and, given Catholic intellectual resources, its reactive stance could not be sustained
C) He said that the Catholic Church virtually collapsed under its own theological weight
D) He said that it caused irreparable damage that still haunts the modern Catholic Church

Question 27

When was the Second Vatican Council?

A) 1895-1902
B) 1927-1929
C) 1930-1934
D) 1962-1965

Question 28

According to the author, did the Second Vatican Council actually change church doctrine?

A) Yes, including reversing supposed errors and medieval teachings that were imagined at the time dogmas
B) Yes, but only in tenor and spirit
C) No, but it presented Catholicism in a new light and with new emphases
D) No, the author says Vatican II failed in any doctrinal reform

Question 29

When did modern freedom of religion come to Russia?

A) Stalin allowed it, though with oversight, in 1944
B) Khrushchev allowed in 1962
C) Gorbachev allowed it in 1990
D) Putin allowed it in 2002

Question 30

Now that Protestants and Catholics have religious freedom in Russia, what has been the Orthodox response?

A) The Orthodox started a pan-Christian glasnost
B) The Orthodox accused them of sheep stealing
C) The Orthodox see Protestants and Catholics as having a religious edge of the newcomers
D) The Orthodox formally have welcomed any and all Christians to come to the table

Question 31

Napoleon Bonaparte required all French clergy to swear an oath of allegiance.

Question 32

The French Revolution was decidedly anti-Catholic.

Question 33

During Napoleon's coronation as Emperor of the French, he took the crown from the pope and put it on his head himself.

Question 34

The Napoleonic wars undermined the development nation states and nationalism.

Question 35

The Risorgimento movement worked for a single Italian state.

Question 36

In the late nineteenth century, Archbishop of Canterbury Frederick Temple, denounced evolution as atheism's strawman.

Question 37

The Catholic Church has never embraced evolution.

Question 38

The author claims that scientism is neither scientific nor does it provide sufficient evidence for its truth claim.

Question 39

Most early biblical critics were either agnostic or atheistic.

Question 40

The author identified the largest Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches as aligned with liberal Protestantism.

Question 41

Neo-Orthodoxy is opposed to critical biblical analysis or modern epistemology (philosophy of knowledge).

Question 42

The Catholic reaction to modernism was in 1934 with Pius XI's Editio de Confoundus.

Question 43

Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council.

Question 44

The Patriarch of Constantinople found the Islamic Ottoman Empire its protectorate.

Question 45

The author states that no major war in the twentieth century had religion as its core cause. Make a case for or against this thesis.

Question 46

What do the events of the twentieth century show about the causes of conflict and religion's relationship to them?

Question 47

The author states that the optimism that atheists such as Marx and Nietzsche had for the future of humanity have not proven compelling. Do you think that this then gives credence to a religious worldview?

Question 48

Many atheists of the nineteenth century saw religion as an immature expression of the human condition, and one that continued to keep humans from psychologically developing. In your experience, is this the case? Explain.

Question 49

Among Barbour's four possible relationships between science and religion, what position is most plausible to you and why?