Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. This essay appropriates creedal tradition of Christian theology in order to propose doctrinal framework for ethic. This task is pursued in three stages: first, by situating present argument with respect to nonviolent perspective within contemporary Anabaptism; second, by outlining doctrinal framework of Christian theology that coheres with orthodox tradition of ecumenical creeds; and, most important, by demonstrating that such doctrinal framework, far from inevitably accommodating violent ethic, is not only fully compatible with ethic but also contains cogent rationale for such an ethic. INTRODUCTION In taking up task of constructing doctrinal framework for ethic, and thereby demonstrating compatibility of Christian creedal tradition with ethics of nonviolence, I am conscious of two concerns raised by late Mennonite theologian A. James Reimer. First, echoing Canadian philosopher George Grant, Reimer observed that contemporary theology needs to reclaim classical ontology as foundation of Christian ethics. In modern paradigm of technological reason and historical time, he argued, contemporary theology lacks capacity to believe any longer in an eternal God whose transcendent reality provides metaphysical ground for ethical imperatives.(1) Second, having examined anti-ontological bias of Mennonite theology in twentieth century, (2) and having diagnosed the central crisis of modern age as the loss of accountability to transcendent reality,(3) Reimer stated: The Anabaptist-Mennonite emphasis on an ethic of nonresistant love formulated simply in terms of historicist view of time and reality is just not adequate to meet present crisis. It must be rooted in an affirmation of Jesus as somehow transcendentally and metaphysically grounded--the way classical trinitarian and christological formulations attempted to do so--so that our faithfulness to normativity of Jesus is not one of pragmatism or legitimizing of modern project but one of obedience to Jesus as Cosmic Lord, because what he is, does and teaches is eternally true or intrinsically right.(4) Reimer thus proposed neo-classicist project, new articulation of doctrinal tradition--the trinitarian and christological affirmations of early church--that could provide an adequate ground for that distinctive trait of tradition, the normative claim of Jesus' ethic of love.(5) By seeking to make constructive contribution to Reimer's proposal, my aim is to be a scribe trained for kingdom . . . who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old (Mt. 13:52).(6) Some readers may be concerned at outset that this project implies an agenda to re-orthodize Mennonite theology, in opposition to non-creedal orientation of tradition. Such suspicion is warranted, at least this much: I do intend to directly challenge what has become prevailing presupposition in Mennonite theology. In pursuing this project I am cognizant, as contemporary Mennonite writers sometimes are not, that Mennonite theology today is not without its own orthodoxy, an assumed way of correct thinking. Although it is almost de rigueur for many Mennonite writers to dismiss doctrinal orthodoxy, Mennonite writers often embrace new form of orthodoxy--ethical orthodoxy--even if it is not named as such. Mennonite thinking has come to be driven by orthodoxy of nonviolence: in effect, nonviolence is new creed. This emergent orthodoxy, which privileges ethics over doctrine and ensconces nonviolence as prime imperative of ethics, has developed over several stages. The first stage was inaugurated by Harold S. Bender's Anabaptist Vision (1944), which made ethics essence of discipleship.(7) The middle stage was galvanized by John H. Yoder's Politics of Jesus (1972), which established nonviolence as both ethical norm for Christian discipleship and hermeneutical norm for interpreting New Testament. …
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 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 | 0.010 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".