Solving a Transatlantic Puzzle?: <em>John Wesley, George Whitefield, and</em> ‘Free Grace’ Indeed!
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the ‘Free Grace’ episode has received considerable scholarly attention, a lingering and largely unexplored transatlantic puzzle remains: the contribution played by an anonymously published pamphlet entitled ‘Free Grace’ Indeed! A Letter to the Reverend Mr. John Wesley, relating to his sermon against absolute election; published under the title of ‘Free Grace’. The publication of ‘Free Grace’ Indeed! set off a series of events that would have lasting ramifications for the burgeoning Methodist movement. It functioned as the ‘spark’ that reignited a dispute over the nature of the doctrine of election that Wesley and Whitefield had hitherto agreed to keep out of the public sphere. Ascertaining when that ‘spark’ was lit is significant, insofar as it explains the provocation behind Wesley's decision to reprint his Free Grace sermon in 1740. Furthermore, ascertaining who lit that ‘spark’ (or, as we shall observe, at the very least eliminating Whitefield as the likely author) is also significant, insofar as it exonerates him from the charge of knowingly reinstigating public debate, all the while professing his innocence in his private correspondence with Wesley. As to the identity of the anonymous author of ‘Free Grace’ Indeed!, for the moment this lingering transatlantic puzzle remains unresolved.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.012 |
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".