A Confessional Lutheran Reflection on Authority, Hermeneutics, and Institutional Drift Introduction: A Lutheran Beginning Without a Map Authored by: James F. Polk I entered California Lutheran University in 1997 for a simple reason: I was Lutheran. I had grown up in a Lutheran congregation connected to the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) and was baptized at sixteen at Grace Lutheran Church. At the time, I assumed—without suspicion—that a university bearing the Lutheran name stood broadly within the same theological family. I did not understand then that “Lutheran” in America encompassed profoundly…
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Machine Learning Didn’t Prove JEDP—It Exposed Its Assumptions
Machine learning has increasingly been applied to biblical studies, including debates surrounding the Documentary Hypothesis, the theory that the Pentateuch is composed of multiple independent source documents—traditionally labeled J, E, D, and P—stitched together by later editors. Proponents of the classic Documentary Hypothesis argue that these sources can be distinguished by differences in divine names, vocabulary, theology, and literary style, assuming internally consistent authorial fingerprints and relatively clean boundaries between documents. In recent decades, however, machine learning techniques—particularly stylometry—have been used to test whether such distinctions emerge naturally from the…
Read MoreBIOLA and LGBTQ?
Can you summarize from this video which colleges are doing what and where they fall on the continuum compared to what the ELCA began to do after the LCMS Expulsion from the St. Louis Seminary: https://youtu.be/l6bVKawU_Sg?si=VxU2dEqMMdP4SqP4 Here’s a quick, “just-the-facts” digest of who’s named in the video and where they land on a continuum that runs from confessional/LCMS-style orthodoxy to the post-Seminex ELCA trajectory. What the video explicitly says Scope: Dr. Everett Piper (former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University) and host Alisa Childers argue that some CCCU schools are drifting…
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