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| The study of God. A faith seeking understanding. |
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| According to Scripture, that loving trust in God based upon God's wondrous Self-manifestation in creation and his saving deeds in the past. Or can also refer to what is believed, the doctrinal content of faith. |
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| Any official teaching of the church interpreting her traditional belief in Jesus Christ in a way designed to speak to the world today. |
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| The study of how faith impacts the way we live |
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| A settled disposition or habit that causes one to behave in a morally good way. |
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| The basic characteristic of being a human that allows one to know and to do good. It includes awareness of personal responsibility, sense of right and wrong, and a conception of what is truly important. |
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| The purposeful or intentional disobedience of a creature to the know will of God. |
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| The law implanted in nature of a rational creature by the Creator, which such creatures can discover by the light of natural reason. |
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| Formal pastoral letter addressed by the pope to the whole Catholic Church, and often to all people of good will to convey timely teaching and instructions on matters of Christian faith and morals. |
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| Sacred writing so inspired by God as to be normative when taken as a whole of the faith of the church |
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| Seen from various perspectives as (1) the church's inner life in Christ, (2) the truth content of that life and (3) the process by which that true life is handed on in the church to each successive generation. |
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| The science of the methods of exegesis, or interpretation, which is the act of explaining a text, involving translation, paraphrase, or commenting on the meaning of a text in order either to describe the author's meaning or to apply that meaning to a contemporary situation. |
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| Within Catholicism: the pope and bishops in union with him considered either separately or especially in unison, in their function as official sacramentally ordained teachers of the faith of the Catholic Church. |
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| God's self-disclosure through the created world, human events, words and actions of Jesus Christ. |
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| That which exists apart from the material universe |
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| A narrative that communicates transcendent meaning within a culture, through symbolism, which reveals the cosmic dimensions of this narrative. |
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| A reliable trustworthy relationship based on commitment which includes both promises and obligations usually sealed by a rite. |
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| The escape of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery by Moses |
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| A name occasionally applied to the early Israelites. |
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| The Ten Commandments delivered by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai revealing to the Isralites the basic demands of their God-given human nature. |
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| The special person spoken of in the Old Testament prophecy as the one whom God would appoint from the lineage of David and invest with special powers for the salvation of the Israelite people |
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| The entire Christian message, especially that of Jesus' death and its significance in God's saving plan and redemption of humanity. |
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| Someone called and sent by God to preach the Gospel. Founders of the church. |
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| A ritual cleansing of the body effecting a change in one's statues before God. |
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| The sacramental celebration of the Paschal Mystery - Christ's Passion, Death and Resurrection - the central worship of the church. |
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| The saving transition of Jesus through suffering and death into resurrected life. |
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| A cruel and shameful form of capital punishment, in which a person is nailed or bound to a cross or tree in order either to execute someone or to expose a corpse for humiliation. |
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| A returning to life after one's death. |
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| A Greek word used to announce the arrival or presence of a person |
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| A Greek translation of the Hebrew word "Messiah" |
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| A member of the highest order of ministers in the church, those established through sacramental ordination as successors of the Apostles |
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| A careful literary composition possibly by a particular historical situation but destined for a wider audience. It resembles an essay devoted to the discussion of some theme. |
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| the unbroken continuity through history of the God-given ministry of the college of bishops, to teach, safeguard and celebrate the basic beliefs and practices of the church received from the Apostles |
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| Any philosophical or religious system holding that all reality originates from or consists in two irreducible principle or gods |
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| An emphasis on salvation through secret, personal knowledge, not divine mediation through Christ's death and resurrection. It has several forms, but all solved the problem of evil through metaphysics; matter is evil, but spirit is good. |
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| A baptized person's conscious and deliberate rejection of his or her own church's personal dogma. |
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| An understanding of God in which the Son is seen as inferior in divinity to the Father, and the Holy Spirit inferior to both the Son and the Father. |
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| A religious truth that the church has defined as divinely revealed. Every one is a doctrine, but not every doctrine is one. |
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| A set of propositions that are performed every week by Christians in worship. It has five functions. |
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| The Study of Jesus Christ, His humanity and His divinity, and His saving mission. |
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| A person who exercises authority over another person. |
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| Branch of theology which investigates the church's faith in Christ as Savior of the world. |
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| The fundamental article of the church's faith in one God in three persons. |
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| The alienated state of human beings before God into which all humans are born as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve. |
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| A habit of good behavior which enables one to do what is right with increasing ease, joy, and consistency. |
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| Means submission to the will of God. It is a religion preached by Muhammad, and one practicing Islam is known as a Muslim. |
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| A formal institutional division in or separation from a church or religious body. |
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| The event or process by which sinful human beings are made acceptable to God. |
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| The holiness of union with God realized in and through God's self-gift in Jesus Christ to human beings, bringing about interior transformation. |
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| God's gift of Self freely given to human beings in a way that transforms them into daughters and sons of God in Christ, endowed with God's own divine life. |
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| The religiously motivated movement of the 16th century responding to abuses in the Catholic Church by reliance solely on scriptural word of God. |
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| A confessional movement within the Western Church, tracing its origins to the theology of Martin Luther and various other formulae collected in the Book of Concord. |
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| The theological system of John Calvin, as interpreted by some of his later followers. |
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| The belief that the fall of Adam resulted not only in a loss of supernatural grace, but was also a radical corruption of humanity's total nature, so that apart from Christ, one can do absolutely nothing that is pleasing to God. |
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| That theological understanding according to which God knows and even foreordains from all eternity which human persons are to be saved. |
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| A Christian heresy identified with a wandering British monk, Pelagius, teaching that human beings can achieve salvation through their own sustained efforts, independently of divine grace. |
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| The universal community of believers, called together by God, who have undergone Christian conversion. It is marked by unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. |
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| That branch of theology which studies the church, her origin, nature, structures, and mission. |
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| A Greek word meaning universal. |
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| The essential liturgical rites of the church in which God acts through the church's faith to communicate his divine life to people and through which its participants experience the love and power of God (grace) that flows from Christ's passion, death, and resurrection. |
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| The study of the ultimate destiny both of the individual soul and of the while created order. |
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| A term used since the 19th century to refer to the emphasis upon human reason and autonomy, characteristic of much of Western European and North American thought during the 18th century. |
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| The belief that God is the intelligent creator of the world but after its creation, has not guides or intervenes in any way with its course or destiny. |
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| A dialectal style of theology, prevalent in the early part of the 20th century, that emphasizes the "otherness" of God, and opposes the optimism of Protestant liberalism. |
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| A theological manifestation of feminism that seeks to emancipate women from the perception that religions treat women as second-rate to human beings. |
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| A theological manifestation of the belief that all human thought is "situated" in a particular history, which implies that human thought has no fixed certainties, absolutes, or foundations. |
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| A theology of black liberation. It seeks to understand the condition of African Americans in the light of God's revelation in Jesus Christ, in order to emancipate African Americans from white racism. |
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| A theological movement that is oriented toward the poor and seeks liberation from their powerful and wealthy oppressors. It argues that the poor have a central importance of the Christian faith. |
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| A theological movement often confused with evangelicalism. It is a counter-cultural, Christian movement, designed to combat secular culture by emphasizing the absolute liberal authority of Scripture ad the premillennial return of Christ. |
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| A trans-denominational trend in theology that lays particular emphasis upon the place of Scripture in Christian life. It also emphasizes the uniqueness of redemption through the Cross, the need for personal conversion, and its urgency. |
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