Truth as a ‘Living Bond’: A Dialectical Response to Recent Rhetorical Theology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In recent years, the Radical Orthodoxy movement (especially John Milbank) has developed an influential theological response to the putative nihilism inherent in modern philosophical tendencies to construe the relation between finite and infinite realities as utterly disjunctive and thus incapable of mediation. This response, which generally implies the championing of a ‘participatory’ ontology, has been very hostile to Protestant or ‘dialectical’ theology, whose insistence upon an ‘indirect’ rather than a ‘rhetorical’ form of truth is taken to implicate such theology in the nihilism of a ‘univocal’ ontology. In this article I offer another reading of the dialectical, via Søren Kierkegaard and René Girard, according to which its anti‐objectivism is due not to the inheritance of modern epistemological dilemmas but to a quite biblical existential rigor. I argue, contrary to Milbank, that this rigor is not finally gnostic, but instead that it alone can preserve the form of truth as a living, spiritual form.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.047 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.110 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| 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".