Final Exam
Please answer four of the following, in two pages double spaced. You must support your answers with quotes and parenthetical references from the relevant books/texts. You may use the slides as a guide, but don't directly quote them. Please turn this in by midnight Sunday, August 7 by email attachment of a Word or PDF document. No Google docs, please: I've had some trouble with those lately.
1. What are the two defining qualities of an awakened/enlightened being? Explain each and how they interact. How might Christianity and Buddhism come together for the sort of activism proposed by ThichNhat Hahn's "Engaged Buddhism" and Jesus' "Kingdom/Reign of God" explained by Knitter as the "kin-dom of God"? What do Christians and Buddhists mean by a commitment to non-violence? What does it mean to BE peace? Use examples.
2. What are the characteristics of the emerging Postmodern paradigm? Explain John Caputo's description of Postmodernism as a "both/and" rather than an "either/or." Now that we have all components of the course completed, How does Küng's explanation of the dangers of scientific positivism support Caputo's argument? How does sunyata, non-dualism and impermanence in Buddhist thought enhance Postmodern thought in the West? How does Einstein's E=mc2 and relativity theory help frame the Postmodern paradigm?
3. Explain how Paul Knitter sees Buddhism as a challenge to Christianity's legacy of adopting categories for God from Greek philosophy, focusing on one of the following: the transcendence of God; the personal nature of God; the uniqueness of Jesus as savior. In order to address what Knitter finds problematic, it would be helpful to review what Hans Küng explains about atheism's critique of religion, on pp. 48-53, as well as Knitter's explanations of how Buddhist thought addresses these problems.
4. Given what we have studied in this course, how is the use of language to be understood in a discipline such as theology? Discuss the problem of language and images or ideas of God. All language for God/Ultimate Reality/Truth fails-so why should we bother with the attempt? Maybe the world would be better off without theologians, because there is nothing we can know about God with provable certainty. Argue the case for the value of studying theology; be my attorney. How should we reconcile the human desire for truth with the incomprehensibility of God and the lack of any one religion to provide absolute truth? Discussions of the postmodern linguistic turn in Caputo and/or words as "fingers to the moon" in Knitter would be helpful here.
5. Explain some of the references Caputo makes to Platonic metaphysics in Truth. In The Beginning of All Things, Hans Küng refers to an alternative metaphysics to the Platonic/Aristotelian trajectory which sees reality as a set of fixed and unchanging entities; this alternative metaphysics is called Process Thought (chapter III, section 3). How is God understood in Process thought and the thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin? How might these philosophies better fit reality as it is understood through the lens of quantum physics?
6. This course spent a great deal of time on the question, "What is real?" How did David Foster Wallace frame the problem of the search for truth? Given what you have studied since, discuss how Caputo believes Derrida would answer the question of what is "real" or "true"; how Einstein would answer this question, according to Kung in Chapter 1 of his book; and how ThichNhat Hahn would answer this question, according to Knitter in chapter 7 of Without Buddha, I Could Not Be a Christian.