The History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland: From the First Century to the Twenty-First
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gerald Bray is a distinguished church historian—Research Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, and author or editor of numerous books. His History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland is an assured account of Christianity in the Atlantic archipelago over twenty centuries, written with a strong and explicit Christian commitment and produced to a very high standard by InterVarsity Press. Readers of Wesley and Methodist Studies will be particularly interested in the discussion of the Wesleys and the Evangelical Revival in chapters 10 and 11, and there they will find reference to Samuel Wesley’s role in the reforming agenda of the 1710–11 Convocation and a concise account of the eighteenth-century revival, including the tensions between the Wesley brothers, George Whitefield, and the Moravians. Bray thinks that John Wesley misunderstood Calvinism and Arminianism, a view that will not persuade all scholars of the period, and his description of Wesley’s soteriology as a belief that ‘it was up to each individual to decide whether to take up the divine offer of salvation or not’ makes no mention of Wesley’s crucial doctrine of prevenient grace (427). While acknowledging the enormous influence of evangelical hymnody, Bray is prepared to criticize Charles Wesley’s vast output as containing ‘some . . . pure doggerel’ (435). As will be seen, this is a bracing survey, trenchant in its judgements and unafraid to be provocative.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".