Under Construction: Agape as Comparative Category and Christian Criterion of Hindu Truth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In an influential 1985 article, Peggy Starkey proposed radical love of neighbour, agape, as the “central, saving revelation” of God in Christ and thus the primary “criterion” for Christians to recognize saving truths in other religious paths. In this essay, I survey several recent works in Hindu-Christian comparative theology, with an eye to Starkey's proposal and the consequences of translating distinctively Hindu texts and traditions into the idiom of Christian love. Whether one focuses on the more devotional or the non-dualist traditions, the literature reveals an animated conversation on the question of love—including agapic love—and thus supports the continuing relevance of Starkey's claim. At the same time, proper to the distinctive aims and methods of comparative theology, such love has functioned less as a criterion for evaluation than as a conduit for new or renewed insights into Christian discipleship. Christian comparativists are increasingly pursuing the question of love with their Hindu interlocutors, not primarily to test the truth of these traditions but to learn how to love more fully and more faithfully, as Christians and as inter-religious theologians.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 teacher head, 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".