The light and the night : an ethnographic examination of spiritual warfare
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores spiritual warfare, a term that in Evangelical culture refers to the perceived conflict with evil, and, among most practitioners, specifically to a conflict with demons. Spiritual warfare beliefs are based primarily on pneumatological assumptions as well as on eschatological views. Based on a field study using anthropological methodology, this study examined spiritual warfare beliefs and practices at the Anchor Fellowship in Nashville, Tennessee, and placed the findings in a broader Evangelical intellectual context. The observation portion of this study occurred between May 2009 and February 2010. -- Interviews with individuals claiming to have experienced conflict with demonic forces, observation of exorcism practices, and an analysis of the beliefs and activities relevant to demonological conceptions demonstrate how pneumatology and eschatology merge to effect spiritual warfare beliefs and practices. This research also addresses how people conceive of spiritual warfare, why they practice it, and its function within the culture. -- Individuals subscribing to a doctrine of the Holy Spirit that emphasizes the active, miraculous power of God in the present time and who also accept an eschatological position that includes the ultimate defeat of Satan and demons, adhere to an aggressive understanding of spiritual warfare, which advocates that Christians confront and defeat demons. The alternative position is a defensive posture, which advocates that Christians simply try to avoid or resist demonic influences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".