Autonomy and Church Membership: Resolving Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dilemma through John Zizioulas’s Ecclesiology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the theological implications of being a church member in a contemporary context that highly values individual autonomy, by engaging with John Zizioulas’s ecclesiological framework. Initially, the article elucidates the notion of the ‘autonomous self’, drawing upon the intellectual contributions and life experiences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It posits that Rousseau’s dilemma of losing self or suffering from loneliness represents the challenge faced by those holding this autonomous anthropological assumption. The article subsequently employs John Zizioulas’s constructs of ontological personhood and communion ecclesiology as counterpoints to this quandary. It contends that Zizioulas’s trinitarian-informed theological anthropology offers an ecclesial means to surmount this existential dilemma, arguing that church membership is an act of participating in divine and familial communion.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| 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".