Theology/Denomination Tags – Reference Guide

Original community post: community.logos.com/forums/t/54491.aspx?PageIndex=1

Faithlife’s easy access to collections: faithlife.com/logos-library-theology-denomination-tags/documents

Help on Collections: wiki.logos.com/Collections

Logos Blog about the project, with instructions: 40,000 Books in 18 Months: A Crowdsourced Tagging Project

Rosie Perera’s posts on using the label Evangelical:

community.logos.com/forums/p/54491/482587.aspx#482587,
community.logos.com/forums/p/54491/482604.aspx#482604 (NB: Evangelicals are only noted from 1730 on)

Questions
What are these rules used for?
How do I use them?
How do I get the Faithlife collections?
Do the Faithlife collections update automatically?
Why are only the major collections available through the Faithlife page?
Why is the spreadsheet only available as a zip file?
What is in the spreadsheet?
How can I see the rule being used for a collection?
What is the Autofilter feature?
Does Logos recognise this project?
Shouldn’t Logos do this for us?
How are the tags decided?
Why not add Title criteria? [e.g. OR Title:(Anabaptis, Mennonite) ]
Why not add additional publishers? [e.g. OR Publisher:(Augsburg, Fortress) under Lutheran]
Why not add more authors?
Why is the Theology I was looking for not there?
What are the problems?
Are there problems with applying Denomination labels to everyone?
Is there an example of using these rules to create new rules?

What are these rules used for?

They can be used to create collections in Logos.  Collections can be used to restrict searches, and filter the
library in Logos 5 so, using these collections, you can filter the library by denomination, theology, etc.
Resources in the library display the collection names, so associated denominations and theologies of resources
will be displayed. If collections have the ‘show in parallel resources’ box ticked, then clicking the ‘parallel
resources’ icon will show the collection names. Once a collection has been created, any new resources that
match the rules are automatically added to the collection. For more on collections, see
wiki.logos.com/Collections.

How do I use them?

Open the Logos Collections tool, paste one of the rules found here into the "Rule" field, name the collection
appropriately, and you've got a new collection. Also, see the Autofilter feature below. Alternatively, the larger
collections are available at faithlife.com/logos-library-theology-denomination-tags/documents.

How do I get the Faithlife collections?

Only the major collections are listed on the Faithlife page (faithlife.com/logos-library-theology-denomination-
tags/documents), but these will update automatically and are the easiest to use. You do not need to take
them all. Choose only those of most use to you, noting that you can change your mind by adding more or
deleting some or all later. If you make a local copy of a collection, you can edit the rule that generates it, but it
will not update automatically. It is best to use the Faithlife collection and create another collection that uses
the collection by adding or removing other resources – see example below.

To get the collections:

Join the group, so that the Documents tab appears.

Click on the Documents tab where you will see the list of shared collections with the group.
Hover your mouse over the collection, press the blue ‘Actions’ drop-down button and select ‘Copy’.

This should add it to your collections list in Logos, available from Tools > Collections. If you don’t see it right
away, wait a few minutes or try to update by pressing the rotating arrows on the top right side in Logos.

Only the administrator can add or edit collections in the group. This is to maintain order and help to prevent
accidental editing.

To delete collections:

Open the collections tool in Logos.

Right click on the collection that you do not want.
You will be asked if you want to Open or Delete it.

Do the Faithlife collections update automatically?

Yes! When they are updated centrally, they should automatically update for everyone.

Why are only the major collections available through the Faithlife page?
All of the Denomination Streams and Theologies are available on the Faithlife page, but there is a large and
growing number of denominations, many of which only have a few authors associated with them. The main
reason that only the largest ones get updated is that it takes so long to update them all and the project is run
on a voluntary basis. If you would like to help by updating the collections each time the spreadsheet is
updated, then please write this on the community forum. Offers to update would be greatly appreciated. 
This would mean more work could be done to add more authors, etc. There is lots more data available on the
spreadsheet for people to create their own denomaination or other collections.

Why is the spreadsheet only available as a zip file?

It became too large to post on the Logos community forum.

What is in the spreadsheet?

The spreadsheet has worksheets for:

Denominations (US) – a printable and clickable family tree

Logos Rules – This contains the rules generated by the data in the other worksheets. You should not need to
press the refresh button, unless you edit the data for yourself.
Authors –name, gender/organisation, main country, dates of birth and death, denomination and stream,
theologies, whether they have contributed to some major commentaries, whether they are listed in a few
major reference works
Publishers – denominations and a few theologies
Sets – denominations only (The growth of authors listed has rendered this almost redundant.)
Colleges and Universities – name, whether ATS accredited, year accredited, years opened and closed, place,
denomination and stream, whether historically black, notes
Links – a selection of useful links
Notes – Authors Who Changed Denomination After Becoming Authors, Authors Who Are Difficult to
Categorise, Authors Left Unclassified to Prevent Duplication, Abbreviations, Other Notes
Categories – An automatically generated list of current categories (Denomination Streams, Denominations,
Theologies and Commentary Series)
Eastern – A listing of different churches in the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Catholic and
Church of the East traditions

How can I see the rule being used for a collection?

The Logos Rules worksheet contains all of the rules available through the Faithlife page. Simply click on the
cell you want (e.g. A9 for Anabaptists), and the rule is in the spreadsheet’s formula bar. Copy and paste it into
a word processor to read it more easily.

What is the Autofilter feature?

If using the spreadsheet is slow, you may want to turn the Autofilter off by clicking the Filter button on the
Data menu on the Authors worksheet. Otherwise, this is potentially one of the most useful features of the
project. It takes a list of all the authors on show and creates a Logos rule based on this. For example, you
could create a collection rule to find all of the authors who are Female and Lutheran, or Dispensational and
Reformed, or Baptist and born in the 1800s. Currently, the rule is displayed in cell BL1. It can be copied from
there into a new collection in Logos.
Does Logos recognise this project?
Yes! A number of their staff use the collections and they have written a blog post about it (40,000 Books in 18
Months: A Crowdsourced Tagging Project). They recognise the difficulties in undertaking a project like this. In
an unofficial post, a member of staff wrote:

Hi, everybody! I thought I'd jump in momentarily to introduce myself. I'm a new hire at Logos and one of my
current "hats" is to develop a product for our Pentecostal/Charismatic readers. A co-worker of mine who
started on the same day is doing the same for the Orthodox market and there are others who will be — or
already are — doing the same for Seventh Day Adventists, Catholics, Anglicans, and so on.

As the earlier discussion already indicated, it is a huge squishy problem to create a tagging taxonomy that
accurately and usefully exposes theological or denominational persuasion. The chief problem is the
"squishiness" of the subject matter: Neither the authors, the books, nor the denominations enjoy clearly
delineated lines and boundaries leading to a nice, hierarchical classification scheme. For example, what do you
do with an author whose early work is non-Pentecostal, but whose later work is Pro-Pentecostal? Or what
about an author who's clearly self-identified as Pentecostal, but their literary work stands apart from any
denominational theological bias? Further, once we start getting way from the overarching, generic, labels,
distinctions break down. It's pretty straightforward to identify a "continuationist," or "renewalist" author or
resource (as opposed to "Cessationist" or "other"—everything else), but then we start asking, "What kind of
continuationist?" Pentecostal? Charismatic? Third Wave? Vineyard? Neocharismatic? Reformed Pentecostal?
Finally, there are resources of  interest to a theological persuasion, but not of that denomination — leading to
plenty of category confusion. And publishers? Let's not even get started there…

All that to say this, it's a difficult problem and one that is certainly on the minds of many here, from marketing
all the way over to text development and software development. If I could accurately predict what solution
will be put into place I'd share it with you, but I don't know yet.

Shouldn’t Logos do this for us?

Yes! Logos are willing to label resources for marketing purposes, so my request was, and is, that they simply
add these tags to the actual resources within Logos and create collections based on them, thus saving us from
creating these collections for ourselves. If Logos did this, then the collections would be automatically updated
as they release new resources, and as they change the metadata, such as the way they write an author’s
name. Suggestions for new tags and corrections could be added to a new webpage on the wiki, or to
http://wiki.logos.com/Metadata_correction_proposals. The suggestion is not that all resources should
necessarily be labelled.  Some resources do not naturally fall into a category.

How are the tags decided?

The spreadsheet (e.g. http://community.logos.com/forums/p/54491/590003.aspx#590003) best illustrates
this. The Categories worksheet lists the Denomination Streams, Denominations, Theologies and Commentary
Sets included. Ideally each author has a unique denomination, which is listed within a denomination stream.
A rough guide to the streams can be seen on the Denominations (US) worksheet, which lists major US
denominations and the streams which have given rise to them. The separate Eastern worksheet lists the
major Eastern denominations with latest membership estimates. An author can have multiple theologies, but
may not have any. Ideally, the label given is for the denomination that the author or publisher uses of
themselves. This is often through being ordained within a particular denomination or holding a teaching post
at a particular university or seminary.
Why not add Title criteria? [e.g. OR Title:(Anabaptis, Mennonite) ]
This would often add resources about the subject. The purpose is to create collections written from a
particular perspective. The suggestion above would add resources about Anabaptism that are not necessarily
from an Anabaptist perspective.

Why not add additional publishers? [e.g. OR Publisher:(Augsburg, Fortress) under Lutheran]
Augsburg-Fortress is the publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but it does not just
publish Lutheran works, and so would provide many false positives, such as Systematic Theology: Roman
Catholic Perspectives by Galvin and Schuessler-Fiorenza, and books by Moltmann and Brueggemann, which are
not written from a Lutheran perspective.

Why not add more authors?

The list is limited to authors who have created Logos resources. The only other limit is to those that have been
categorised so far. If there is an author missing that you would like to be on there, suggest them on the
community forum (http://community.logos.com/forums/t/54491.aspx), preferably with the denomination,
any relevant theologies, main country of work, dates of birth and death, and a link to the evidence so this can
be checked easily.

Why is the Theology I was looking for not there?

This is usually because it has not been suggested or the information is not easily available. If reliable lists of
Molinists are found, for example, then this could easily be added. It is probably only worth adding collections
where there is a sizeable list of authors. Suggestions should be made on the community forum with links to
the evidence for the list.
As of August 2014, “Believers’ Baptism”, “Infant Baptism” and “Mainline” are no longer based on columns in
the Author worksheet, but are based on the Authors’ denomination – see the “Theology by Denom”
worksheet for details.

What are the problems?

Some authors change denominations. The denomination listed is the denomination an author was in when
they wrote most of their books. Few authors continually change denominations. A few authors who are
difficult to categorise are listed on the Notes worksheet on the spreadsheet. Assuming too much based on the
denomination and theology categories could cause problems, but this is not a problem with the data itself.
The people doing the tagging are not infallible. Do not rely on them. The categories are a fairly reliable quick
guide. If you note a problem, feel free to suggest a correction on the community forum, preferably with a link
to evidence (http://community.logos.com/forums/t/54491.aspx).
Are there problems with applying Denomination labels to everyone?
Yes! Some authors are almost impossible to categorise. Some are listed on the spreadsheet’s Notes
worksheet. Some groups do not like the label denomination. The spreadsheet uses the label ‘category’ to
recognise this, but ‘category’ means little as a collection label, so the labels Denomination and Denomination
Stream are used to try to add meaning.

The categorisation is far from perfect. Different people use terms differently, but the following labels have
been used, while attempting to maintain consistency. Suggested changes are welcome.

Non-denominational - no denominational ties

Interdenominational - ties with a number of denominations
Ecumenical - encourages denominations to work together
Uniting - encourages denominations to join together

This was illustrated in the forum using some suggested examples, as follows.

Hope College:  It seems from their website that they are still clinging to their Reformed Church in
America heritage, though welcoming all, so I've categorised it with the denomination "Reformed Church in
America" while adding the note "Ecumenically diverse".  I could just about as easily have categorised it as non-
denominational with the note "Formerly Reformed Church in America" but the denominational tie seemed
strong enough to suggest the former.

Seattle Pacific University still proudly proclaims itself as Orthodox, Evangelical, Wesleyan, Ecumenical, so it
suggests that the denomination is still important and influences the university today, so I've categorised it with
the denomination, but added the note Orthodox, Evangelical, Wesleyan, Ecumenical.

I'm sure you know Regent College much better than I do.  I think it should be Evangelical, Non-denominational
given the definitions above, as I can't see denominational ties mentioned on the website, though their
students are from a range of denominations.

Is there an example of using these rules to create new rules?

Here is an example of how the current rules could be used to create a new rule. It creates a new collection
called “Theology: Reformed Baptist”, based on the rules “Denomination Stream: Baptist” and “Theology:
Reformed”. Note that this example is available as a collection from the Faithlife page. For it to work, the
collections “Full Library”, “Theology: Not Reformed”, and “Theology: Not Baptist” are also needed.

I guess we could add a computed field, based on Baptist AND Reformed.  In the meantime, there is an
alternative solution.  It's not pretty, but it should work, and it only needs to be created once.  After that, all of
the data should change automatically.  This is the solution:
Create a new collection called 'Full Library', using the rule Rating:>=0
Create a collection called Theology: Not Baptist
Drag Full Library to the 'plus these resources' section of Theology: Not Baptist
Drag Denom. Stream: Baptist to the 'minus these resources' section of Theology: Not Baptist
Create a collection called Theology: Not Reformed
Drag Full Library to the 'plus these resources' section of Theology: Not Reformed
Drag Theology: Reformed (Calvinist) to the 'minus these resources' section of Theology: Not Reformed
Create a collection called Theology: Reformed Baptist
Drag Full Library to the 'plus these resources' section of Theology: Reformed Baptist
Drag Theology: Not Reformed and Theology: Not Baptist to the 'minus these resources' section
of Theology: Reformed Baptist
This should give all the resources currently marked as Baptist and Reformed.
Hope that's clear.  It's quicker to do than to explain.