THEO:

- faith, spirituality, commitment, things that will bring us salvation

- understanding of salvation varies from person too person
- ppl commit ourselves to christianity because we believe that thier concept of catholic salvation is true

christian understanding of salvation

- what does it mean to be saved?
- we hope that our misconceptions will be clarified and corrected
- how we act as a christian/ as a human is greatly influenced by how we understand these concept of salvation
- many injustices and wrongdoings because they have misunderstood the salvation Christianity proposes
- before correcting these misconceptions, we must look at the source
- source: old and new testamanet = bible
- before going to the understanding of salvation, we must first go to the source
- to understand the bible, we need to look at the historical background
- patriarch time period
- patriarch = oldest male, ruling male as the ruler or the one who makes the decisions, from “pater” -
- ancestros of the israelites: abraham, isaac, 12 sons (labelled as the story of the patriarchs)
- lens of the
- story of abraham: abraham came from the land of —-, he is mesopotainian — land between the river, during this time, egypt was a prosperous
country, if you want to be prosperous, then you go to egypt not only abraham that went there but other Semitic tribes (jewish, etc) Semitic -
- story of noah: one of his sons was named shim means (???), some scholars say he did not exist, it is a term used for people who utter the word of
god and worships god, like the arabs
- traditionally these are the tribes that know and worship God by mention of his name
- mesopotainia went to egypt because of the prosperity although became too much
- where they were able to conquer egypt, was a time they were lead by a Semitic leader
- some scholars say that is the reason why it was easy for the egypts to upset the foreigners like joseph and his other brothers
- scholars say that maybe behind the story, egypt was bring led by a semitic leader and was easy for them to upset their relatives
- later on, the egyptians were able to overthrow the keader and be free once again
- prosperitiy in egypt, semitic tribes went there,
- why there is a sotory in the bible that parallels this
- it restricted their population so they cannot reproduce, they made them build different structures
- israelites were then able to —— the egyptians
- they went to the promised lang
- when they went to canan, they werent a united nation under one leader
- they are more like confederate of different tribes, all lead by different judges
- when we see the word judge, we are not referring to the judge trial court but tribal leaders
- that is why it was so easy for their enemies to harass them, conquer and fight them
- they decided to have a king,
- saul replaced by david, david by solomon, (not sons, was said to be a shady dynasty because it they did not follow the rules
- it goes against the tradition that the king is replaced by his first born son
- during this time, to legitimiate these things, they gathered their traditions to legitimate their dynasty
- became the basis, became a legitimate group
- the want to write the scriptures down was not primarily to preach nor the will of god
- was written to legitimize a dynasty
- there were demands that stressed out the nation
- they revolted against the king who was the son of solomon
- during time of solomon: married a lot of wives from different countries, they brought their tradition and gods with them, was for alliances
- principle of unity = one god lang dapat
- the principle was shaken and weakened the nation
- another weaking was the building of the structures, need gold and labour, need access and the force
- the mation was stressed out bc of these demands and revolted (king wsa the son of solomon, revolt was led by some guy w a weird name)
- kingdonw was divided notrth (israel) and south (judah) the only tribe that was left was juddah
- historians the revision of the kingdom was because of the forced labour
- prophets say its because for the injustices of the poor and idoletry,
- nation divided it was easy for conquerers to conquer
- which is why they were offered by the assyrians, the northern kingdom was conquered, southern was able to escape them through bribing, later on
they were conquered when the babilonians rose to power, they defeated the assyrians and conqured the southern kingdom
- with the fall of the southern kingdom, brought the people of israel to babylon
- hence, there is a period in history
- they were transfered from palestine to babylon
- israelites: exile was a period of punishment for their sins against god, also a time for purification
- during this time, the priest were jobless
- no temple, no sacrifices to be made
- during this time, the people of israel were having an identity crisis
- they were influenced by other people
- since the priest had nothing to do, they collected the tradition for guide so they do not lose their identity
- also they began to look at history from a certain perspective: deuteronomic (not the book of the bible called deuteronomy)
- deuteronomic is a way of interpretting history
- they made sense of history through relating it to their obedience or disobedience to the law
- israel being conquered by the smth, it was bc they were disobedient
- but not might be the true reason, it was hoe it was analyzed through the
- however the babylonians wer econquered by cyrus the great and built temples
- the lingua franca became arabic
- perisians were defeated by the greeks the period called it Hellenic
- spread of greek culture and conquest started with alexander the great defeating smth
- with that they erased the practices and culture of jews
- put up a statue of zeus and they revolted

generations in the bible may not be the actual generation