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Record W4417487916 · doi:10.14428/thl.v10i1.85983

Could God Incarnate as an Animal?

2025· article· it· W4417487916 on OpenAlexaff
Travis Dumsday

Bibliographic record

VenueTheoLogica An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageit
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMedieval Philosophy and Theology
Canadian institutionsConcordia University of Edmonton
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAnimismChristianityFocus (optics)HumilityNatural (archaeology)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In Mark Wallace’s When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World (Fordham University Press, 2019), two interrelated claims are pursued: (1) that Christianity and animism are complementary; and, (2) that the Holy Spirit literally became incarnate as a bird at Christ’s baptism. In this paper I mostly focus on the second claim, bringing his view into dialogue with those of two mediaeval Scholastics who remain highly influential in Catholic thought: St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas. I examine what they have to say on two questions relevant to assessing Wallace’s striking claim regarding the Spirit’s avian incarnation: first, whether the Holy Spirit could become incarnate at all; and second, the question of whether any divine Person could become incarnate in a non-rational nature.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.460
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.005
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.045
GPT teacher head0.334
Teacher spread0.289 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueTheoLogica An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical TheologySame topicMedieval Philosophy and TheologyFrench-language works237,207