The Word is Very Near You, In Your Heart and On Your Lips: Learning and Telling Scripture by Heart Yields Growing Disciples
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This dissertation considers one issue facing mainline Christian churches and specifically the Anglican Church in Canada today in regard to fulfilling its purpose of forming disciples: declining knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. The decline is due in part to overall lower church attendance and the loss of intimate connection with the Word of God. This dissertation considers one specific spiritual practice that may help to address this gap, that is, the spiritual discipline of learning and telling scripture by heart. This practice encourages deep dwelling with scripture in prayer and study, with the aim of committing the passage to memory. It is the deep internalization of the words rather than mere memorization that makes the practice meaningful and effective. The history of the oral tradition required in pre-literate and non-literate communities, as well as the shift towards more narrative and literary study of the bible, form the foundation for the practice. The gifts and insights from Ignatian spirituality provide inspiration for this method of learning scripture. Through this qualitative study, I explore the experience of nine individuals, who are taught a method for learning and telling scripture by heart. The participants share their reflections on their experience of reading, praying with, studying, and sharing scripture by heart. They consider if/how the experience impacted their knowledge of scripture and/or their relationship with God. Each participant successfully learned and told a scripture passage by heart, and in varying ways expressed change in their relationship with God through this internalization practice. Learning and telling scripture by heart is one way to support the formation of disciples.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it