Scripture's Role in Discerning Theology in The United Church of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditionally, the Bible has been at the centre of the Church’s life and thought. It has been viewed as the Word of God, a unique work, revealing God and God’s ways to humankind. Authority and the authority of scripture have been questioned, however, in recent years particularly within mainline Protestant denominations. The following study seeks to clarify the role of scripture in discerning theology within congregational life of the United Church of Canada. It begins by examining the view of scripture held by the Protestant Reformers of the 16th and 18th centuries. It moves to discuss how those views have been affected by the rise of modernist and postmodernist thought, and then looks at the changing role of scripture within the history of the United Church. These contextual studies form the base for a case study of the practices and thought of three United Church Councils in the city of Toronto. There, it was found that more experiential factors were the chief influences on United Church lay leaders today as they make theological decisions. Scripture’s influence and engagement of it are limited. Since even the newer model of theological discernment supported by the United Church still requires a knowledge of scripture at a foundational level, this study calls on the Church to clarify its position on scripture and to re-educate the Christian community as to its unique character and value.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".