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Component 2 (7062/2) examines your in-depth knowledge of Christianity (Section A: Study of religion) and, crucially, your ability to bring philosophy and ethics into dialogue with Christian belief in two 25-mark synoptic essays (Sections B and C). Like Component 1, it is a three-hour, 100-mark examination worth 50% of the A-Level — but its shape is different and more demanding, because half of its marks lie in the two synoptic essays, which are the single biggest discriminator on the whole qualification. This lesson covers both the Section A study-of-religion technique and, in detail, the 25-mark synoptic essay.
This course studies Christianity (option 2B). All worked examples below use Christian material; verify every scripture reference against a standard translation, because in the study of religion an inaccurate reference is a citation-integrity failure.
Section A presents two compulsory two-part questions on Christianity, each 10 marks (AO1) + 15 marks (AO2) — the same answer types as Component 1, so the same technique applies, with one addition: in the study of religion, accurate sources of wisdom and authority (scripture, creeds, Church teaching) are explicitly rewarded in the top AO1 band. Questions are drawn from:
"Examine Christian beliefs about the resurrection of the dead." (10 marks)
A Stronger / Top-band response:
Christian belief in resurrection is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus and the teaching of Paul. The traditional view affirms a real, transformed bodily existence after death rather than the mere survival of a disembodied soul. Paul addresses this directly in 1 Corinthians 15, where he contrasts the earthly and risen states: "It is sown a perishable body, it is raised an imperishable body… it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body" (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). The Nicene Creed crystallises this in worship: "we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come". Augustine emphasised the resurrection of the flesh, holding that God will reconstitute the body in a perfected form. Within Christianity there is genuine diversity: some traditions stress a spiritual resurrection over a strictly physical one, and Catholic teaching adds an intermediate state — purgatory — in which those who die in grace but imperfectly purified are made ready for heaven. Process theology offers a further variant: "objective immortality", in which a life is preserved everlastingly in the divine experience rather than continuing as a conscious subject.
Examiner-style commentary: This earns Level 5 because it is accurate, well-organised and richly sourced: it anchors the belief in a precisely cited scripture (1 Corinthians 15:42–44), uses a creedal statement correctly, and attributes the resurrection-of-the-flesh emphasis to Augustine and objective immortality to process thought. It also shows internal diversity (physical vs spiritual; purgatory; process) — which the study-of-religion bands reward — without straying into evaluation. Every reference is verifiable.
"'The Bible should be the only authority for Christians.' Evaluate this view. (15 marks)"
A Mid-band answer describes the Bible, then tradition and reason, and concludes "different Christians think differently". This catalogues positions without weighing them.
A Stronger / Top-band response argues to a judgement. The view is essentially the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, and its strength is real: scripture is the earliest and most authoritative witness to revelation, and making it supreme guards against the accretion of human tradition that the Reformers criticised — a believer can always test a teaching against the text. However, the position faces serious internal difficulties. First, the Bible does not interpret itself: the very canon and the creeds that define orthodox belief were settled by the Church, so scriptural authority already presupposes an interpretive community — a point Catholic theology presses through the Magisterium. Second, scripture under-determines many contemporary questions (the ordination of women, reproductive technologies), so Christians inevitably draw on tradition and reason; the Anglican "three-legged stool" (scripture, tradition, reason) reflects this. Third, a purely literal sola scriptura can collide with knowledge from science, which is why even conservative readers distinguish genre and context. The honest judgement is therefore that scripture is rightly primary for Christians but cannot coherently be the sole authority: its own use requires an interpreting community and the deployment of reason, so the strongest position treats the Bible as supreme within a framework that also includes tradition and reason, rather than in isolation.
Examiner-style commentary: Top-band because it evaluates rather than catalogues: it grants sola scriptura a genuine strength, then presses three precise objections (canon-formation, under-determination, the science clash), each doing evaluative work, and reaches a calibrated judgement ("primary but not sole"). It deploys accurate sources (the Reformation principle, the Magisterium, the Anglican triad) in the service of argument, exactly as the AO2 bands require.
Sections B and C are the most distinctive and most heavily weighted part of 7062. Each is a single 25-mark essay (chosen from two options), combining up to 10 marks AO1 and up to 15 marks AO2, and together they carry half of Component 2.
Key term: Dialogue — the structured, two-way engagement the spec examines synoptically: not "philosophy then, separately, religion", but an argument about how each bears on the other. The mark scheme rewards essays that show the interaction and judge its quality, not parallel monologues under one title.
The synoptic essay is harder than two part (b) answers stitched together for one reason: the discriminator is connection. A candidate can know the problem of evil perfectly (philosophy) and know the Christian doctrine of God perfectly (study of religion) and still write a Level 3 essay, because they set the two side by side without letting them speak to each other. The Level 5 essay, by contrast, makes the philosophy bear on the Christian claim — testing how reasonable, meaningful or coherent the belief is in the light of the philosophical challenge — and sustains that interaction as one line of argument to a judgement.
The 25-mark bands (from Lesson 1) combine AO1 (max 10) and AO2 (max 15). In practice the AO1 is satisfied by accurate, relevant knowledge drawn from both sides of the dialogue, deployed in support of the argument; the AO2, the larger share, is satisfied by sustained, well-evidenced critical evaluation with a clear conclusion. The single most useful instruction is: knowledge is the fuel, evaluation is the engine — never let a paragraph idle in description.
"Assess the view that the problem of evil makes belief in the Christian God incoherent." (25 marks)
A Mid-band attempt would explain the problem of evil in one half and Christian beliefs about God in the other, concluding "so it is a difficult issue for Christians". This is the classic two monologues failure: accurate but unconnected, with no sustained evaluation of coherence and no real judgement.
A Stronger / Top-band essay argues a single connected line:
Whether the problem of evil renders belief in the Christian God incoherent turns on what "incoherent" demands: strict logical contradiction, or merely serious tension. The Christian God is classically affirmed as omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent — the Nicene Creed's "Almighty, maker of heaven and earth" — and it is precisely these attributes that the problem of evil targets. J. L. Mackie's logical problem alleges an outright contradiction between God's omnipotence, God's goodness and the reality of evil; if that triad were genuinely inconsistent, then Christian belief would be incoherent in the strict sense, not merely improbable. So the charge, taken at its strongest, is a charge of incoherence, and must be met on that ground.
The strongest Christian reply is that the triad is not strictly inconsistent. Plantinga's free will defence shows it is at least logically possible that God permits moral evil as the unavoidable price of genuine creaturely freedom — a freedom that Christianity values as the precondition of love and moral goodness, since a world of automata could not love God or one another. Because defeating a charge of contradiction requires only possibility, the free will defence is sufficient to show that affirming God and evil is not logically incoherent. Christian scripture supports the dignity of this freedom: humanity is made "in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27) and called to love freely (Matthew 22:37–39). At the level of logical coherence, then, the challenge fails.
But coherence is not only a logical matter, and the evidential problem presses harder. Rowe's version concedes consistency yet argues that the scale of apparently gratuitous suffering — natural evils such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, or animal suffering across aeons before humans existed — makes a wholly good, all-powerful God improbable and the belief strained. Here the free will defence is weak, since natural evil is not obviously the product of human choice. Christianity's better resource is Hick's soul-making theodicy, which reads the world as a "vale of soul-making" in which genuine challenge is necessary for the free growth of moral and spiritual character towards God — a reading with scriptural roots in the idea that "suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope" (Romans 5:3–4). This preserves both omnipotence and benevolence and gives suffering a purpose. Its cost, however, is real: it struggles to explain suffering that destroys rather than develops, and the suffering of those who never grow from it.
A further Christian option abandons one attribute rather than defending all three: process theology (Griffin) holds that God is not omnipotent in the classical sense but works persuasively, luring creation towards good without coercive control. This dissolves the problem of evil at a stroke — God cannot simply prevent evil — but at the price of the very omnipotence the question is about, so it answers the challenge by changing the conception of God rather than vindicating the classical one. That is a coherent move, but a Christian must decide whether the God so described is still recognisably the God of classical theism.
Stepping back to evaluate the dialogue itself: the philosophical challenge and the Christian tradition are not simply locked in conflict. The challenge has forced theology to clarify what it means by omnipotence and goodness, and the theodicies show that a reasoned Christian response is available; equally, the persistence of the evidential problem shows that no response is cost-free. The most defensible judgement is therefore that the problem of evil does not make Christian belief incoherent — the free will defence settles the logical charge, and the theodicies offer coherent (if contestable) accounts of why a good God might permit evil — but it does leave belief under a genuine evidential strain that faith, rather than proof, must carry. Incoherence is too strong a verdict; serious, unresolved tension is the right one.
Examiner-style commentary: This reaches Top-band because it does four things the two-monologue answer cannot. (1) It connects the philosophy to specifically Christian belief throughout — the attributes, the creed, scripture, the theodicies — rather than describing each in isolation. (2) It interrogates the key word "incoherent", distinguishing logical contradiction (which the free will defence defeats) from evidential strain (which it concedes), so the verdict tracks the argument. (3) It matches responses to problems accurately — free will defence for the logical problem, Hick and Griffin for the evidential — and attributes Mackie, Plantinga, Rowe, Hick and Griffin correctly, using the spec-named responses. (4) It evaluates the dialogue itself before judging, which is exactly what Section B rewards. Every scripture reference is accurate and used, satisfying the AO1 demand for relevant sources, while the centre of gravity stays firmly on AO2.
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