Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay was composed at the request of the National Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada to assist the church in considering the matter of the blessing of same-sex relationships. Blessing in the Hebrew Scriptures Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless God’s holy name (Ps. 103:1). This ancient psalm prayer is both praise of God and an ancient confession of the calling of humans: God blesses creation so that all creation in its fullness honours God. We humans who are blessed are freed to use our whole lives to mirror to God the fullness God gives to all that God makes. Blessing names both the activity of God and the freedom of our human calling before God. Human blessing invokes the fulfillment of God’s promises of blessing. At its heart a prayer, human blessing of God “denotes praise, for nowhere in the Bible is there any indication that the power of God is itself increased by human pronouncements ” (Simons, p. 7; emphasis added). In biblical accounts, when God blesses, it denotes a statement of reality, a decree that is certain. Blessing is a primary word in the Hebrew scriptures, used over four hundred times in its verb or noun forms. The berakah Hebrew blessing formula is a primary inheritance from Israel taken into
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.064 | 0.009 |
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".