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OCR · A-Level · H573

Religious Studies

Active Recall Guide

1,584 questions

Religious StudiesContents

Contents

7 topics, 89 subtopics

Philosophy of Religion245
Religion and Ethics227
Developments in Christian Thought205
Developments in Islamic Thought222
Developments in Jewish Thought250
Developments in Buddhist Thought218
Developments in Hindu Thought217

Religion and EthicsQuestions

Religion and Ethics

Aquinas and the precepts of natural law

What does the word telos mean, and why is it the starting point for natural law?
How did Aristotle use the idea of telos in his account of nature and the good life?
How did Aquinas take Aristotle's idea of telos and give it a religious development?
What is the difference between Aristotle's eudaimonia and Aquinas' account of the human end?
Why is natural law sometimes called both teleological and deontological?
Name the four tiers of law in Aquinas' scheme, in order from highest to lowest.
In Aquinas' four tiers, what is eternal law?
Within Aquinas' four tiers of law, how is divine law defined and what are its usual examples?
Within the four tiers, what does Aquinas mean by natural law itself?

Religion and EthicsAnswers

Answers

Aquinas and the precepts of natural law

Telos means the end, goal or purpose that something is directed towards. Natural law begins from the claim that everything, including human beings, has a built-in purpose, and that an action is good when it moves a thing towards that purpose and bad when it frustrates it. Morality therefore becomes a question about fulfilling human nature rather than about obeying arbitrary commands.
Aristotle argued that to explain anything fully you must state its final cause, the end it exists for. An acorn is directed towards becoming an oak, and an eye towards seeing — ends belonging to the things themselves rather than assigned to them by a maker. He applied this to humans: our distinctive capacity is rational activity, so the human telos is eudaimonia, a flourishing life lived in accordance with reason and virtue. Goodness is thus measured against a purpose written into nature.
Aquinas, writing as a Christian theologian, kept Aristotle's claim that human beings have a natural purpose but placed that purpose within a created order. On his account, God is the author of nature, so the purposes we discover in ourselves are God's design. He also extended the goal beyond this life: our final end is not just earthly flourishing but the beatific vision, perfect union with God, which reason alone cannot deliver.
Aristotle's eudaimonia is a this-worldly flourishing achieved through the exercise of reason and virtue over a complete life, and it needs no God to make sense of it. Aquinas accepted that as the natural end but held that it is incomplete. For him the supernatural end, seeing God, lies beyond natural human powers and requires grace and revelation, which is why divine law is needed alongside natural law.
It is teleological because the whole framework rests on purpose: acts are assessed by whether they serve the human telos. It is deontological in practice because the precepts derived from that purpose function as binding rules that hold regardless of the outcome in a particular case. This is why natural law can look absolutist at the level of the primary precepts while still being grounded in an argument about ends.
Eternal law, divine law, natural law and human law. They form a descending chain: the eternal is God's own ordering of reality, divine law is what God has disclosed in scripture, natural law is the share in that ordering which human reason can work out, and human law is the concrete legislation of particular states.
Eternal law is, on Aquinas' account, the rational plan by which God creates, orders and governs the whole universe. Because it is God's own mind, no human being grasps it in full; we only ever catch reflections of it. Every lower tier of law derives whatever authority it has from this one.
Divine law is the portion of God's ordering that Christians hold has been revealed rather than reasoned out, given in scripture. Aquinas points to the commandments given through Moses and to the teaching Jesus gives in the Sermon on the Mount. Its function is to supply what unaided reason cannot reach and to correct reason where sin has clouded it.
Natural law is the human being's rational participation in the eternal law. Aquinas held that God has written moral orientation into human nature, so a person of any faith or none can work out its basic requirements by thinking clearly about what human beings are for. This is what makes the theory usable in public argument rather than only inside a believing community.

Developments in Christian ThoughtQuestions

Developments in Christian Thought

Death and the afterlife

Outline the three broad ways Christians have understood heaven, hell and purgatory.
How do Christians who take heaven literally describe it, and how does that differ from treating heaven as a state?
What is the symbolic interpretation of heaven and hell, and what motivates it?
What does the Catholic Church teach about purgatory, and how do other Christian traditions respond?
How can purgatory be understood as a state rather than a place?
Explain what limited election is, and identify the Christians who have held it.
Explain the difference between unlimited election and universalism.
Why do critics say limited election makes God unjust, and how do its defenders answer?
What does the parable of the sheep and the goats establish about final judgement?

Developments in Christian ThoughtAnswers

Answers

Death and the afterlife

First, realistically: as destinations, real places or conditions a person arrives at after death and where happiness, punishment or purification is actually experienced. Second, as spiritual states: not locations at all, but stages or conditions of the soul's relationship with God after death. Third, symbolically: as images for the moral and spiritual quality of a life lived now, with no reference to anything after death at all.
On the literal account heaven is a real destination where the saved enjoy God directly and consciously, often pictured as the vision of God in the company of the redeemed and, after the resurrection, in bodily form. On the state account there is no location: heaven names the condition of a soul brought into full relationship with God, and the traditional imagery of thrones and gates is understood as pictorial language for that relationship.
On this reading heaven and hell describe conditions of life in this world: a life of love, integrity and openness to others is already heaven, and a life of cruelty, isolation and self-obsession is already hell. It is motivated partly by scepticism about survival after death, partly by the moral worry that threats of post-mortem punishment corrupt ethics, and partly by a reading of the Gospels as concerned with how the kingdom of God is lived now.
Catholic teaching holds that those who die in God's friendship but still imperfect undergo a purification before entering the fullness of heaven; it is not a second chance for the damned but the final cleansing of the saved, and the living may pray for those undergoing it. Orthodox Christians pray for the dead but reject the Western account of purgatory as a place of satisfaction for sin. Most Protestant churches reject it altogether, arguing that it lacks scriptural warrant and undercuts the sufficiency of Christ's atoning work.
On this reading purgatory names a process of moral and spiritual maturing that the soul undergoes as it is drawn towards God - the painful stripping away of self-deception and disordered attachment, felt as suffering only because the person is being changed. Supporters say this preserves the intuition that no one dies ready for the presence of God, without committing anyone to an underground waiting room or to a currency of merit and penalty.
Limited election is the view that God chooses a definite number of people for salvation and that only these are saved, salvation being God's sovereign decision rather than a response to anything foreseen in the person. It belongs to the Reformed and Calvinist tradition, and in its strongest form it becomes double predestination, on which God also determines the destiny of the rest. Its defenders argue it follows from taking grace as wholly unearned.
On unlimited election God's saving invitation genuinely reaches everyone, and Christ's death is sufficient for all, but a person may refuse it, so not everyone in fact ends up saved. Universalism goes further and holds that in the end no one is finally lost, either because God's love eventually wins every response or because the refusal of an infinite good could never be a settled decision. The difference is whether human refusal can be permanent.
Critics argue that a God who passes over people before they have done anything is arbitrary, that it makes the offer of the gospel to everyone insincere, and that it destroys any point in moral effort. Defenders reply that no one is owed salvation, so nobody suffers injustice; that God's decision is hidden rather than arbitrary; and that the elect are chosen for holiness, so far from removing the incentive to good living, election is what makes it possible.
It presents the Son of Man returning in glory and separating all the nations into two groups, as a shepherd separates one kind of animal from another. The criterion is strikingly practical: whether people fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked and visited the sick and imprisoned. Both groups are surprised, because the king identifies himself with those in need, so that treatment of them counted as treatment of him. It ends with two lasting destinies.

Developments in Buddhist ThoughtQuestions

Developments in Buddhist Thought

The Buddha: Siddhartha's life and intellectual context

Who was Siddhartha Gautama, and why do Buddhists call him the Buddha?
What do Buddhists say about the circumstances of Siddhartha's birth, and why does the story matter to them?
What kind of upbringing is Siddhartha said to have had, and what was the point of it?
What are the four passing sights, and what did each one show Siddhartha?
Why do Buddhists treat the four sights as a turning point rather than simply a sad discovery?
What is meant by Siddhartha's renunciation?
What did Siddhartha's period of asceticism involve, and why did he give it up?
Explain how the failure of both luxury and severe austerity produced the Middle Way.
What do Buddhists mean by Siddhartha's enlightenment, and what is said to have been realised?

Developments in Buddhist ThoughtAnswers

Answers

The Buddha: Siddhartha's life and intellectual context

Siddhartha Gautama was a man born into a ruling family in the Sakya territory of what is now the Nepal-India border region, traditionally dated to around the fifth or sixth century BCE. Buddhists call him the Buddha, meaning the Awakened One, because they hold that he woke up to the true nature of reality by his own effort. The title describes an achievement, not a divine identity: Buddhists do not regard him as a god or a saviour.
Traditional accounts describe a birth surrounded by marvels: a dream of a white elephant, a painless delivery in a grove at Lumbini, and a sage who predicted the child would become either a world-ruler or a great religious teacher. Buddhists read these details as marking out a rare and significant life rather than as a claim to divinity. The prediction also explains his father's efforts to keep him at home, which sets up everything that follows.
Buddhists describe a life of deliberately managed luxury: three palaces for the seasons, entertainment, fine food, a marriage to Yasodhara and a son, Rahula. His father is said to have screened out anything that might prompt religious questions. The point of the story is that indulgence was tried thoroughly and failed. Having everything a person could want did not answer the problem of existence, which is why Buddhists say pleasure cannot be the cure for dukkha.
Riding beyond the palace, Siddhartha is said to have encountered an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and finally a wandering holy man. The first three revealed ageing, illness and death as unavoidable for everyone, including himself and those he loved. The fourth showed that some people had given up ordinary life to search for a way through. Together they present the problem and hint at a possible response.
Because the shock was not the existence of suffering but the realisation that no amount of privilege exempts anyone from it. Buddhists say Siddhartha saw that the pleasures he had were temporary and therefore could not secure him. The sights turn a general fact into a personal and urgent one, and the fourth converts despair into a question worth pursuing. This is why Buddhists treat honest attention to ageing, sickness and death as the beginning of practice, not as morbidity.
Renunciation, sometimes called the Great Departure, refers to Siddhartha leaving his home, family, wealth and inherited position at about the age of twenty-nine to live as a homeless seeker. He is said to have cut off his hair, exchanged his clothing and taken up the wandering life. For Buddhists it models the willingness to let go of what one is attached to, and it is echoed today when a person ordains as a monk or nun.
For roughly six years he practised severe austerities alongside five companions, including extreme fasting, breath restriction and exposure, on the assumption that punishing the body would free the mind. He grew skeletal and nearly died. Buddhists say he abandoned this because it produced weakness rather than insight: a starved and exhausted mind cannot concentrate. Accepting a meal of milk-rice from a woman named Sujata marked the break, and his companions left him in disgust.
Buddhists present these as two experiments, each carried out to its limit. Palace life showed that sensual indulgence does not remove dissatisfaction, only postpones it; self-torture showed that abusing the body does not purify the mind. The Middle Way is the path between them: enough care of the body to support sustained mental training, without pursuing pleasure as a goal. It is a practical discovery drawn from failure, which is why Buddhists say it is testable rather than merely asserted.
Seated beneath a fig tree at Bodh Gaya, resolved not to rise until he had found an answer, he is said to have passed through deep meditative states and, during the watches of the night, to have seen his own former lives, seen beings dying and being reborn according to their actions, and finally understood the arising and ending of dukkha. Buddhists hold that craving and ignorance were uprooted, so that nothing remained to drive further rebirth. Accounts also describe the tempter Mara assaulting and testing him unsuccessfully.

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