The Law of Embrace: Satisfaction, Forgiveness, and the Cross in Aquinas, Lonergan, and Volf
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A dialogue between Aquinas and Volf mediated by Lonergan illuminates the practical significance of Christ’s redemptive work. Aquinas contemplates the mystery of Christ’s passion as an act of satisfaction proceeding from charity that makes amends for wrongdoing. Lonergan specifies this satisfaction as a fitting expression of sorrow for the granting of forgiveness. He further identifies the essential meaning and practical significance of redemption as the transformation of evil into good, and calls it the law of the cross. Volf delineates the significance of the cross for practices of reconciliation, the movement from exclusion to embrace through repentance, forgiveness, and making space for the other. I suggest that Volf’s framework is undergirded by Lonergan’s law of the cross and assists retrieving the latent practical significance of Aquinas’ contemplation. Satisfaction for another is interpreted as forgiveness in the movement from exclusion to embrace proceeding from charity interpreted as the will to embrace.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".