Hermeneutics and the Creation of Theological Meaning: A Critical Analysis of the 1994 Human Sexuality Report of The Presbyterian Church in Canada (PCC)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Controversy surrounding human sexualities is ubiquitous in secular and ecclesial discourse. While an increasing number of governments have voted to extend the rights of LGBGTQI2 persons, social inclusion remains unsettled. Acknowledging an impasse in contemporary debates, this dissertation asserts that the impasse has roots in a larger hermeneutical crisis and that unexamined hermeneutical assumptions and practices prevent constructive dialogue. To expose the hermeneutical crisis underlying the current impasse in the church this dissertation critically analyzes the hermeneutical theory and praxis of The Presbyterian Church in Canada (PCC) as it is manifested in its 1994 Human Sexuality Report. This critical study of one denomination’s official document and its hermeneutic – i.e., the way it reads and uses Scripture and appeals to an authoritative body of literature -- provides a case study. Analysis demonstrates that within the PCC’s Human Sexuality Report there exists several reading strategies that are uncritically mixed. On account of this, there are hermeneutical inconsistencies in the document that continue to fuel ongoing debates in the church. The thesis concludes that established interpretive practices can be structured to account for new knowledge and experience without compromising traditional/historic understandings of ecclesial communities, opening up prospects for a needed intervention that will generate fruitful conversation among Christians who hold variant approaches to and understandings of the biblical text.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.083 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| 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".