The Passion of Faith and the Work of Love: Barrett, Augustine, and Kierkegaard
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Is the core of Christianity about loving the neighbour or justification by grace? Kierkegaard and Augustine answer this question with a resounding yes, refusing to give in to one side or the other. This article uses Lee C. Barrett's newest book on the intersections of these two giants of Christianity, Eros and Self-Emptying, to examine this issue. Using a shared metaphor of a road for the reality of faith, and a common understanding of divine love as self-emptying, Barrett reveals insightful ways in which these cardinal thinkers refuse to reduce Christian salvation to grace alone or to love alone. For Augustine, the unquenchable passion and love for God leads to becoming conformed to God's likeness in self-emptying love for the other. And Kierkegaard's theology of love as the human response to God's grace suggests that the works of love toward the neighbour is the follow-through to faith. Salvation for both Augustine and Kierkegaard is a journey of the fruits of grace ripening in fulfilling the command to love the neighbour. Both insist that being a Christian is simultaneously a gift and a task. Further, this integration is not forcing together two opposing positions. Instead each thinker's formulation entwines the work of love and the grace of faith in the practice of Christian living.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| 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".