Theology Guide
The Theology Guide in Logos 8 provides a platform for theological study. Input a topic, navigate from one systematic theology to another, compare views, survey related references, and investigate corresponding theological topics.
We've prepared resources to introduce the Theology Guide here:
Feel free to use this Forum thread as a place to post questions and feedback.
Comments
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I am beyond excited for this new feature! Would upgrade for this alone.
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What do you have to buy to get this Guide?
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Sean said:
What do you have to buy to get this Guide?
It's included with the Full Feature Upgrade or a Faithlife Connect subscription - details at https://www.logos.com/compare/feature-sets
A Silver Base package or above would include it.
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This guide seems to consistently display results from "Strongs" systematic theology. Will other systematic theologies be added eventually (Grudem?)
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Logos exits every time I click the picture in theology guide. Do you have same experience? Thanks.
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No, when I click on the picture in the Theology Guide, it opens the same picture in a Media window. Not super helpful... I was expecting clicking on one of the other "stations" would bring up a Theology Guide of that other topic.
On a separate note, Kyle, under the "Recommended Reading" section, the entries are italicized. What does that mean? I was expecting them to be either "locked" (if I don't own the resource) or hyperlinked (if I own the resource). Please advise.
Very useful tool, nice job!
Peter
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PL said:
under the "Recommended Reading" section, the entries are italicized. What does that mean? I was expecting them to be either "locked" (if I don't own the resource) or hyperlinked (if I own the resource). Please advise.
The entries are partly italicised, nameley the resource title. Author names and page numbers etc. are normal font. What I see are light grey open books for entries that are helpful as per the article's author, but are not linked in Logos. Dark grey open books are in my library, locked books are not. Of course, this will change with the various topics, so there could be an article with only open books for you, or possibly even with only grey ones.
Do you see something different?
Have joy in the Lord!
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PL said:
the entries are italicized. What does that mean?
In English, italics are the normal way to indicate the title of a book. Articles are indicated by quote marks.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Mike Tourangeau said:
This guide seems to consistently display results from "Strongs" systematic theology. Will other systematic theologies be added eventually (Grudem?)
At the moment five systematic theology resources have been linked in:
- Berkhof, Systematic Theology
- Packer, Concise Theology
- Ryrie, Basic Theology
- Hodge, Systematic Theology
- Strong, Systematic Theology
More are intended to be added over time.
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Graham Criddle said:
At the moment five systematic theology resources have been linked in:
- Berkhof, Systematic Theology
- Packer, Concise Theology
- Ryrie, Basic Theology
- Hodge, Systematic Theology
- Strong, Systematic Theology
More are intended to be added over time.
Wow, only five so far? This is totally not ready for prime time.
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Sean said:
This is totally not ready for prime time.
Yes, and no ... and maybe maybe [:)] By putting the framework out for us, they can roll out the dataset with more resources on a "whatever" schedule rather than being tied to a 6 week development schedule.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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MJ. Smith said:
Yes, and no ... and maybe maybe
By putting the framework out for us, they can roll out the dataset with more resources on a "whatever" schedule rather than being tied to a 6 week development schedule.Well, because of this tool, FL will probably successfully extract a few hundred more dollars out of me than I had intended to spend on this upgrade cycle. I can understand not everything being in it yet, but it should be a little farther along than "barely started."
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Sean said:
. I can understand not everything being in it yet, but it should be a little farther along than "barely started."
I suspect that Logos expected to be a bit further along but the data updates should be free. It would be useful to know something about what resources in what order will be added. But open this resource: Ward, Mark, Jessica Parks, Brannon Ellis, and Todd Hains, eds. Lexham Survey of Theology. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018. and you'll see that the major work was not aligning the 5 resources we have.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Graham Criddle said:
At the moment five systematic theology resources have been linked in:
Just to clarify this. There are several sections in the Theology Guide. Recommended Reading is a hand-curated bibliography for every theological topic. It will include resources you already own, and those you may not. It's is selective, broad and can be considered "finished".
There's also a section that searches your own library for tagged resources related to that topic. It's this section that only contains the small handful of systematic theologies that were referenced earlier. But truthfully, it's possibly a less useful section because it's not hand-curated.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Barnes said:
Just to clarify this.
Thanks for clarifying Mark. I had made some assumptions about what was being asked that might not have been correct!
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Graham Criddle said:Mark Barnes said:
Just to clarify this.
Thanks for clarifying Mark. I had made some assumptions about what was being asked that might not have been correct!
I don’t think there was anything wrong with your answer. But I just wanted to make clear people who don’t yet have access to the Guide there were other sections in addition to the one Mike asked about.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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So as with almost everyone we are lacking "Israelology" in the big scheme of systematics.
Shalom
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Kyle B
I notice in the video two other guides - Biblical Place and Historical Theology. Are these future guides that are coming out, or user defined?
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Donovan R. Palmer said:
Kyle B
I notice in the video two other guides - Biblical Place and Historical Theology. Are these future guides that are coming out, or user defined?
Hi Donovan,
From the icon in the video it looks like the Historical Theology is a custom Topic Guide. At the bottom of the guide menu is get more shared which allows you to download shared guides. I looked and did not see this guide, but found a Theology Guide (passage) by Phil Gons that is interesting.
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PL said:
No, when I click on the picture in the Theology Guide, it opens the same picture in a Media window. Not super helpful... I was expecting clicking on one of the other "stations" would bring up a Theology Guide of that other topic.
The images in the Theology Guide and Lexham Survey of Theology resource are "thumbnails": clicking the image opens a larger, higher-resolution version in MediaTool that's easier to see, and that can be copied into presentations and shared with others. There are also multiple aspect ratios (4x3, 16x9, 22x9) to support different projection scenarios.
This is especially helpful for the expanded version of the Overview image at the beginning of the resource: with 234 different topics, there's a lot going on here.
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Mark Barnes said:Graham Criddle said:
At the moment five systematic theology resources have been linked in:
Just to clarify this. There are several sections in the Theology Guide. Recommended Reading is a hand-curated bibliography for every theological topic. It will include resources you already own, and those you may not. It's is selective, broad and can be considered "finished".
There's also a section that searches your own library for tagged resources related to that topic. It's this section that only contains the small handful of systematic theologies that were referenced earlier. But truthfully, it's possibly a less useful section because it's not hand-curated.
While it's correct that we've only done comprehensive annotation on five systematic theologies so far, the Systematic Theologies section of the Theology Guide is not an automated search. Jessica Parks went through each of these five theologies for each of the 234 Systematic Theology topics and annotated the corresponding spans of text addressing these topics.
Note i said "spans", which has an important benefit: you can search within these annotations. For example, here are instances of the word "heart" in texts that address the theological topic of Human Will:
In that example I searched systematic theologies, but you can also search your Bibles, in which case you're searching within the Key Passages that have been annotated for this topic:
This is a very powerful search feature that would not be possible without the extensive curation that went into the Lexham Survey of Theology.
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Donovan R. Palmer said:
Kyle B
I notice in the video two other guides - Biblical Place and Historical Theology. Are these future guides that are coming out, or user defined?
You're probably thinking of sections that have been available in Guides before, but can now be accessed independently.
The first of these is new: it's a workflow (note the shape has a small point to the right) for studying biblical places. The second is the Biblical Places section of the Passage Guide: entering a Bible reference will provide information about places that are mentioned in that passage.
The third is the corresponding section from the Topic Guide, which will have similar information, but for a topic (like Galilee) rather than a Bible passage.
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Sean Boisen said:
While it's correct that we've only done comprehensive annotation on five systematic theologies so far, the Systematic Theologies section of the Theology Guide is not an automated search. Jessica Parks went through each of these five theologies for each of the 234 Systematic Theology topics and annotated the corresponding spans of text addressing these topics.
I would guess the bolded words here are the key ones, but what is the plan for this guide? How quickly can we expect this to get filled out further? (I know you guys are allergic to giving out dates, but some general idea would be nice.) I can understand starting with these selected works, with their detailed and fairly standard structures, as opposed to more creative works of systematics, but as it is, it seems very limited to me. (I have not purchased yet.)
I'd really like to get a better feel for the direction of this tool before I shell out a couple hundred dollars for it. I don't really need the full feature set otherwise; I want to know if this will really help me as an ecumenical theologian.
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Sean Boisen said:
This is a very powerful search feature that would not be possible without the extensive curation that went into the Lexham Survey of Theology.
Wow, this IS powerful. Can you tell us how many systematic theologies you plan to annotate?
A question about how this works. When I search {Section <LSTO scripture>} in my bible it pulls us an impressive array of verses associated with the search. Is this getting the verses from the Systematic theologies that have been annotated? What is going on "under the hood" if you can say....
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Mike Tourangeau said:
Wow, this IS powerful. Can you tell us how many systematic theologies you plan to annotate?
You can expect that we'll annotate most major systematic theologies in Logos.
Mike Tourangeau said:A question about how this works. When I search {Section <LSTO scripture>} in my bible it pulls us an impressive array of verses associated with the search. Is this getting the verses from the Systematic theologies that have been annotated? What is going on "under the hood" if you can say....
More precisely, we've curated data on the key systematic theology topics (we call this the Lexham Systematic Theology Ontology, or LSTO), which is the information structure for the Survey. External contributors who were chosen for their expertise then supplied the article content, recommended Resources, and Key Verses for each topic.
So a search for an individual LSTO topic, like {Section <LSTO The Trinity and Scripture>} is just searching the same Key Verses as the Theology Guide displays (though this can be expanded into more interesting searches).
In your example, "scripture" is an alias for <LSTO The Bible>: so a search for {Section <LSTO Scripture>} shows all the key verses from this topic (which happens to be a fairly long list).
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I am not getting something. I am looking at the Lexham Survey of Theology, Topic: The Kingdom of God.
A recommended resource is:
Jesus and the Kingdom (Ladd)
I cannot find this resource in Logos even though I thought that the recommended resources were in Logos.
Is this normal? Am I wrong?
Neat resource and it will be valuable to me....I note that most of the recommended resources are locked or grayed out. I can't even find this Ladd resource and I do own all 5 systematic theologies included to date.
I am pretty sure I am missing something.Any assistance is appreciated.
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Rob Lambert said:
I am looking at the Lexham Survey of Theology, Topic: The Kingdom of God.
A recommended resource is:
Jesus and the Kingdom (Ladd)
I cannot find this resource in Logos even though I thought that the recommended resources were in Logos.
Is this normal? Am I wrong?
Unfortunately, it seems you are. As has been explained somewhere by the FL creators of the LST, the Recommended Resources have been supplied by the articles' authors - i.e. in this case presumably by Gerald Bray. Some of those may be Logos resources, and they will show as dark gray open books or dark gray locks, depending on whether you own a license to the resource. But some may not be Logos resources, and they show up as light grey open books(edit: and black text, instead of blue text indication a Logos link /edit), such as Ladd's Jesus and the Kingdom:
(I've looked for a proper bibliography of the non-Logos books recommended, but couldn't find any)
Have joy in the Lord!
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Rod,
In the video for the Theology Guide, I believe it says that some of the recommended resources are not in Logos, they were recommended as good resources to read by the one who wrote the article And Logos kept the in the guide even though that resource is nit in Logos.
Those in Logos has the blue link, those that are in Logos and not in your library will have the lock icon.
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Thank you guys. The video says that all of the recommended resources are available in Logos,....
This explanation helps me.
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Sean Boisen said:
You can expect that we'll annotate most major systematic theologies in Logos.
Could you elaborate more on your plans for this please? I know it's against policy to give a time frame, but a general idea of your plan would be nice. Right now, this tool is the deciding factor as to whether or not I'll go for an upgrade or just stay put with L7. It looks good with great potential, but being indexed to only 5 very conservative North American evangelical theologies means that it's practically useless to me in its present state of development. Please give me some concrete assurance that this is going to become useful in a reasonable span of time. (That is, not everything needs to be in it overnight, but it should be steadily improved at a rate that can be noticed and appreciated by the user. Months, not years, with recognition that some works like Barth's CD may well be impossible to integrate into such a system.)
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Mark Barnes said:
Just to clarify this. There are several sections in the Theology Guide. Recommended Reading is a hand-curated bibliography for every theological topic. It will include resources you already own, and those you may not. It's is selective, broad and can be considered "finished".
Hi Mark
Is there a defined "tradition" for the hand curated lists? Or put another way, can you offer any insight to the criteria used to "recommend" a particular article, author or book.
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Graham Owen said:Mark Barnes said:
Just to clarify this. There are several sections in the Theology Guide. Recommended Reading is a hand-curated bibliography for every theological topic. It will include resources you already own, and those you may not. It's is selective, broad and can be considered "finished".
Hi Mark
Is there a defined "tradition" for the hand curated lists? Or put another way, can you offer any insight to the criteria used to "recommend" a particular article, author or book.
(Not Mark, but ...)
The Recommended Resources come from the authors of the individual articles, and therefore reflect those author's choices. Our editorial direction was to take a broad and inclusive perspective ("small 'o' orthodox") on the topic, rather than a narrow reflection of a particular tradition.
For those authors that have Factbook pages, their bylines are hyperlinked, which might tell you something about their backgrounds.
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Sean said:
but being indexed to only 5 very conservative North American evangelical theologies means that it's practically useless to me in its present state of development.
[:O]
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Also looking forward to many, many more systematic theologies indexed/linked to the guide.
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Sean said:
but being indexed to only 5 very conservative North American evangelical theologies means that it's practically useless to me in its present state of development.
I, too, hope it will expand significantly, but I imagine this has already been a daunting task. It might help to recommend some theologies you'd like to see included. That might help FL prioritize their effort.
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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Sean said:Sean Boisen said:
You can expect that we'll annotate most major systematic theologies in Logos.
Could you elaborate more on your plans for this please? I know it's against policy to give a time frame, but a general idea of your plan would be nice. Right now, this tool is the deciding factor as to whether or not I'll go for an upgrade or just stay put with L7. It looks good with great potential, but being indexed to only 5 very conservative North American evangelical theologies means that it's practically useless to me in its present state of development. Please give me some concrete assurance that this is going to become useful in a reasonable span of time. (That is, not everything needs to be in it overnight, but it should be steadily improved at a rate that can be noticed and appreciated by the user. Months, not years, with recognition that some works like Barth's CD may well be impossible to integrate into such a system.)
I can give you concrete assurance that it's already useful for me, and i suspect, for many others [:)]
We currently have more than 300 systematic theologies on offer at logos.com, and there's no automated way to do this kind of annotation (that's part of what makes it especially valuable). Our highest priority will be those resources that impact most of our users, which is a combination of most owned, most used, and most important to the field (of course, that last attribute is hard to quantify objectively). How much effort this alignment will take depends greatly on the specific resource, as you suggest, and we have to weigh the cost of this annotation against the value of the book to our customers (one of many reasons Logos resources often cost more than Kindle editions). Some resources may have too few users to justify the cost.
I expect the progress will be noticeable on the scale of months. I also predict (with high confidence) it won't be fast enough to satisfy our users: it won't be fast enough to satisfy me, either. But we're committed to this project, and our goal is to annotate as many systematic theology resources as make sense.
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Sean Boisen said:Sean said:Sean Boisen said:
You can expect that we'll annotate most major systematic theologies in Logos.
Could you elaborate more on your plans for this please? I know it's against policy to give a time frame, but a general idea of your plan would be nice. Right now, this tool is the deciding factor as to whether or not I'll go for an upgrade or just stay put with L7. It looks good with great potential, but being indexed to only 5 very conservative North American evangelical theologies means that it's practically useless to me in its present state of development. Please give me some concrete assurance that this is going to become useful in a reasonable span of time. (That is, not everything needs to be in it overnight, but it should be steadily improved at a rate that can be noticed and appreciated by the user. Months, not years, with recognition that some works like Barth's CD may well be impossible to integrate into such a system.)
I can give you concrete assurance that it's already useful for me, and i suspect, for many others
We currently have more than 300 systematic theologies on offer at logos.com, and there's no automated way to do this kind of annotation (that's part of what makes it especially valuable). Our highest priority will be those resources that impact most of our users, which is a combination of most owned, most used, and most important to the field (of course, that last attribute is hard to quantify objectively). How much effort this alignment will take depends greatly on the specific resource, as you suggest, and we have to weigh the cost of this annotation against the value of the book to our customers (one of many reasons Logos resources often cost more than Kindle editions). Some resources may have too few users to justify the cost.
I expect the progress will be noticeable on the scale of months. I also predict (with high confidence) it won't be fast enough to satisfy our users: it won't be fast enough to satisfy me, either. But we're committed to this project, and our goal is to annotate as many systematic theology resources as make sense.
Sean,
And if you don't get to those in the Wesleyan-Holiness Camp soon enough, I know how to find the sections I am looking for through search in Logos and having used the print version of the Logos resources, for years before having them in Logos. Sometimes we just forget how to do things "old school".
I love this new resource and look forward to using it as I teach Theology during the Spring term.
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Mark Smith said:Sean said:
but being indexed to only 5 very conservative North American evangelical theologies means that it's practically useless to me in its present state of development.
I, too, hope it will expand significantly, but I imagine this has already been a daunting task. It might help to recommend some theologies you'd like to see included. That might help FL prioritize their effort.
That's a very positive suggestion, Mark. Feel free to join the Faithlife group for Lexham Survey of Theology and make recommendations for resources you'd like to see annotated, or add other suggestions for improvements. You could also post them on this forum thread.
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I am finding the Theology Guide very helpful. Today I was reading the section on the Church and Israel in the Lexham Survey of Theology. I came upon this by Brian Collins, the author of this section:
"While the church may have a Great Commission to declare the message of Jesus and the apostles, it does not have a commission to convert Jewish people away from their faith to that of a gentile church."
Guys, I wonder if this is true. From what I know, it isn't.
Is there a way to further dive into this to get a better idea where Brian got this???? Or to contact the author???? Or, am I just plain wrong?
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Rob Lambert said:
"While the church may have a Great Commission to declare the message of Jesus and the apostles, it does not have a commission to convert Jewish people away from their faith to that of a gentile church."
Guys, I wonder if this is true. From what I know, it isn't.
This forum isn't supposed to be a place to discuss theology. But I guess that what Brian is trying to say is that you don't need to stop being Jewish to start being a Christian. All the earliest Christians were Jews and they would all have said that they retained their Jewish faith even as they stopped offering sacrifices, keeping Sabbath and food laws, and worshipping in the Temple.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Sean Boisen said:
That's a very positive suggestion, Mark. Feel free to join the Faithlife group for Lexham Survey of Theology and make recommendations for resources you'd like to see annotated, or add other suggestions for improvements. You could also post them on this forum thread.
Off the top of my head, as mentioned above, I'd suggest some of the 19th century Wesleyan Arminian theologians you have in Logos such as Miley and Pope. They would be good in comparison to the other theologians you already have. Also, their structures should lend themselves well to this task. Ditto for Orton Wiley.
From the continent, Bavinck should be a top priority. Berkouwer's Studies would be awesome to have in this, but I imagine it would take a lot more work than many others. Pannenberg would also be great.
Again from older theologies, Franics Hall and Joseph Pohl would be good additions.
Useful popular systematics would be Erickson and <gulp> Grudem.
Those would be excellent as a next step. Expanding in those directions should improve the tool's utility for comparative study of theology.
ETA: And Calvin's Institutes! How could I leave off that? How could you, for that matter? It should go in ASAP. [:P] Seriously, though, there's a lot of useful theology out there besides Princeton/Westminster and Dallas. Most of it doesn't bite. Why did you have to do both Hodge and Berkhof before getting to some of these others?
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Kenneth Neighoff said:
And if you don't get to those in the Wesleyan-Holiness Camp soon enough, I know how to find the sections I am looking for through search in Logos and having used the print version of the Logos resources, for years before having them in Logos. Sometimes we just forget how to do things "old school".
So do I. The same can be said about the resources already in the guide--Berkhof is already my default resource for answers fast. But if I'm paying a couple hundred $ to get this in Logos (my main if not sole reason for buying a feature set), I'd really like for it do more.
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Mark Barnes said:
...you don't need to stop being Jewish to start being a Christian. All the earliest Christians were Jews and they would all have said that they retained their Jewish faith even as they stopped offering sacrifices, keeping Sabbath and food laws, and worshipping in the Temple.
[:S]
ASUS ProArt x570s Creator, AMD R9 5950x, HyperX 64gb 3600 RAM, ASUS Strix RTX 2080 ti
"The Unbelievable Work...believe it or not." Little children...Biblical prophecy is not Christianity's friend.
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Thanks Mark...
Now I understand what he was trying to communicate.
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Rob Lambert said:
Now I understand what he was trying to communicate.
Really?? That's a trick! I can think of at least half-a-dozen to a dozen issues in that statement that are so mish-mashed and disputable that extricating anything worthwhile seems well-nigh impossible. For starters, there's the fact that Jews might not be Jewish. Let the slidy slope commence...
For the sake of clarity, I see problems with the original quote and Mark's "elucidation".
ASUS ProArt x570s Creator, AMD R9 5950x, HyperX 64gb 3600 RAM, ASUS Strix RTX 2080 ti
"The Unbelievable Work...believe it or not." Little children...Biblical prophecy is not Christianity's friend.
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I disagree with Brian Collins. Like others have said that is faulty thinking.
Keith Pang, PhD Check out my blog @ https://keithkpang.wixsite.com/magnifyingjesus
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Let's please keep the thread on track discussing the Theology Guide, not forbidden theology topics. [:D][:#][A][;)]
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Systematic theologies to consider: Ryrie voigt frame [systematic theology] john macpherson bloesch berkhof [History of Christian Doctrines] feinberg beet
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scooter said:
Systematic theologies to consider: Ryrie voigt frame [systematic theology] john macpherson bloesch berkhof [History of Christian Doctrines] feinberg beet
I strongly second Bloesch. Also, Thomas Oden's ST is excellent for the many links it has to other resources, especially the fathers, that otherwise wouldn't lend themselves to the Guide's structure.
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