Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Presents a conception of apologetics appropriate for the contemporary cultural context. This conception avoids the destructive and self‐defeating problems of dogmatism and triumphalism, all‐too‐typical of most apologetics. Part I locates apologetics within the context of contemporary culture, discussing the most salient challenges to apologetical conversation in contemporary North American culture: pluralism, postmodernity, the problem of plausibility, and consumerism. Part II moves from analysis of the cultural context of apologetical conversation to a theological and epistemological exploration of the definition of apologetics. It establishes that a proper understanding and practice of apologetics will be located within the context of God's overarching mission of conversion and will also recognize its own limitations in light of several basic principles of epistemology guiding all decision making. This section defines apologetics as including anything that commends the truth, beauty, and goodness of Christianity, thereby rendering it more plausible. Several modes and objectives of apologetics are defined and apologetics itself is defended as a worthy engagement for Christians. In Part III, apologetics is located within the context of basic principles of communication, patterned after the ministry of Jesus Christ. A variety of audience‐specific approaches to apologetics are defined and their usefulness is assessed in light of these principles. Practical applications are then drawn from these principles. The book concludes that apologetics must be reconceived as humble, i.e., as a defense of the faith that lovingly offers our neighbors what we think we know of the gospel of Jesus Christ, with the hope that God will bring others to encounter Jesus – as only he can.
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 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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".