Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church. By Ephraim Radner. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2012. 482 pp. $59.95 (cloth).This rich volume complements Ephraim Radners ground-breaking 1998 book, The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West. Here, Radner (Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto) embarks on a journey to discover an understanding of the unity of the church in its most concrete, historical, and tangible expression. do this he explores what he terms the church's eristology-a neologism that denotes the study of division and disputation within the church. His thesis is both simple and profound: To live is to give up and give away parts of ourselves (p. 1). Radner unfolds this idea throughout the book.In the first chapters, he sets out to refute prevalent notions among Christian theologians that religious disunity is not intimately related to social conflict and violence. The history of Rwanda serves to illustrate that the habits of disunity within the divided church facilitated the atrocities of the Rwandan genocide. For Radner, the church failed to inculcate tangible and concrete practices of coming to agreement, in large measure because of an abstract view of the church's unity. Though there is good theological reason to confess that the church is indeed united in some sense (that is, in Christ), doing so without significant nuance has led to habits of action and thought that fail to engage real divisions in the church.This discussion of the church's failings leads Radner to investigate the ideal of conciliarism and the quest to cultivate agreement. Through an examination of the council described in Acts 15 and patristic views of apostolicity, Radner outlines a theology of synodality. He traces the conciliar ideal throughout the Middle Ages and concludes his discussion with a vision for a Christian life that is patterned on the self-giving love of God as a necessary prerequisite to coming to concordance within the church. Radner also provides an overview of several instances of so-called agreement in the history of the church and analyzes their failings through the lens of contemporary philosophical work that studies the dynamics of coming to real agreement.In the final chapters, Radner describes the role of procedure in the developing conciliar vision of unity. Such procedures provide structures by which engagement with division may take place, but have inevitably failed to produce unity. …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".