--- title: "Our Taxonomy" category: "other" description: "How studies on this site are organised: the systematic-theology loci it's based on, the plain-English name used for each section, and the academic term behind it." tags: ["taxonomy", "site-structure", "study-method"] draft: false --- # Our taxonomy Studies here are filed by **subject**, using the standard divisions of systematic theology — the same skeleton seminaries and theological libraries have used for centuries — with plain-English names instead of the academic ones. This page explains what each section holds, and gives the technical term behind each name so that anyone coming from a formal theology background can see the mapping immediately. !!! note "Status" This is the live structure as of August 2026. Everything previously under `studies/` and `bible/` was moved here, and the old URLs still resolve — every pre-migration address redirects to its new home, so old links and bookmarks keep working. --- ## What it's based on Three sources, in descending order of how much weight they carry here. **The systematic-theology *loci*.** The traditional division of Christian doctrine into topics — Bibliology, Theology Proper, Christology, Hamartiology, Soteriology, Eschatology, and the rest. This is the skeleton. It has the advantage of being genuinely comprehensive: it was built to cover the whole of Christian doctrine, not to describe a particular collection of essays, so it has a slot ready for subjects this site has not written about yet. **The Dewey Decimal 200s.** A published, concrete encoding of those same loci, used as the tiebreaker when a study could plausibly sit in two places. Dewey has already adjudicated most of the awkward cases — that angels and demons are their own subject (235) rather than a subheading of theology proper, that inter-testamental and apocryphal literature has its own slot (229) rather than being split between "Bible" and "history", that religious calendars and appointed times belong together (263). The numbers appear in the table below for reference. They are not used in URLs or filenames. **Dispensational theology.** Per this site's [statement of faith](https://the-way.lewy.au/about/statement-of-faith/), studies here read Scripture dispensationally, and that changes one thing about the standard scheme: the distinction between Israel and the Church is a major subject in its own right rather than a footnote inside ecclesiology. It gets its own section below. The reference works behind this are Lewis Sperry Chafer's *Systematic Theology* and Charles Ryrie's *Basic Theology*. **The three persons side by side.** The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit each have a section, and the three sit together in the navigation and on the home page's subject wheel, in the order of the creeds. A section called "God" beside one called "Jesus" read as if Jesus were not God, and filing the Spirit under "God" would have made it worse. So the first section is titled *God the Father* and opens with the Trinity, and the other two open by naming the Son and the Spirit as God. Chafer and Ryrie lay out their theologies the same way, with the doctrine of God, of Christ and of the Holy Spirit as peers. --- ## The sections | Our term | Academic term | Dewey | What belongs here | |---|---|---|---| | **Scripture** | Bibliology | 220, 229 | The Bible about itself: canon, manuscripts and textual criticism, translation, how to read it, biblical archaeology, extra-biblical and inter-testamental texts, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha | | **God the Father** | Theology Proper | 231 | One God in three persons: the Trinity, the Father, God's names, nature and character, creation, and how God reveals Himself in creation (general revelation) | | **Jesus** | Christology | 232 | God the Son: who Christ is and what He did: incarnation, ministry, passion, resurrection, His offices as prophet, priest and king, and Old Testament prophecy fulfilled in Him | | **The Holy Spirit** | Pneumatology | 231 | God the Holy Spirit: His person, His names, and His work in Scripture and in believers, including dreams and visions (Joel 2:28) | | **Sin** | Hamartiology | 233, 241.3 | The nature of sin and its particular forms — idolatry, sexual immorality, sorcery — and what Scripture says about temptation and repentance | | **Salvation** | Soteriology | 234 | Grace, redemption, justification, assurance of salvation, and what happens at death | | **Spiritual beings** | Angelology & Demonology | 235 | Angels, demons, Satan, the Nephilim, deliverance, and discernment of spirits | | **Last things** | Eschatology | 236 | The rapture, the tribulation, the millennium, judgment, and the ordering of end-times events | | **Israel and the Church** | Ecclesiology *(+ the dispensational distinction)* | 262 | The covenants, the relationship and distinction between Israel and the Church, and the Hebrew roots of Christian faith and practice | | **Chronology** | *Biblical chronology* | 220.9 | Dating biblical history: the events an outside record fixes, the reigns of the kings, the Exodus, the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, and the one timeline the site works to | | **Christian life** | Practical theology | 248 | Prayer, fasting, and the disciplines of walking with Christ | | **Wisdom** | *Wisdom literature* | 223 | What Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, the Song of Songs and James teach about living skilfully before God, and personal reflections from reading them | | **Feasts** | *Appointed times* | 263 | The biblical feasts and calendars: their Old Testament instruction, their observance, and their fulfilment | | **Biblical figures** | *(Biography)* | — | Studies of particular people in Scripture — the twelve disciples, the patriarchs, the prophets, the kings | | **Teaching** | Homiletics | 251, 252 | Teaching the Bible to others: guidance on preparing to teach, teaching material, and sermon notes | | **Blog** | — | — | The author's personal notes and testimony, kept apart from the studies: dream accounts first | | **Learn Hebrew** | — | 492.4 | A course in reading the Hebrew Bible, taken in order: the alphabet and vowels, pronunciation, printable writing sheets and word cards | | **Learn Greek** | — | 487 | The Greek alphabet of the New Testament, its pronunciation and uncial script, and printable word cards | | **Resources** | — | — | Guides to external material: source catalogues, study aids, and reference tools | | **Study Series** | — | — | No studies of its own: series pages that take studies filed elsewhere in an order, one a week, for a group (see below) | The last five sit alongside the studies rather than inside them, because they describe *how* material is delivered or *where* it comes from rather than what subject it treats. ### These sections are top-level Each section is a directory at the root of the site — `/jesus/`, `/last-things/`, `/sin/` — not nested under a `studies/` wrapper. A container holding nearly every page on the site conveys nearly nothing, and the extra path segment appears in every URL forever. ``` about/ biblical-figures/ blog/ christian-life/ chronology/ commentaries/ feasts/ god/ holy-spirit/ israel-and-church/ jesus/ last-things/ resources/ salvation/ scripture/ series/ sin/ spiritual-beings/ teaching/ wisdom/ ``` Twenty top-level entries sounds like a lot, so the sidebar groups most of them under three captions: **Topics** (the doctrinal sections, Teaching and the Commentaries), **Explore** (Scripture Links and the Prophetic Timeline), and **Learn** (Hebrew, Greek, the Glossary and Resources). **Study Series**, the **Blog**, the **FAQ** and **About** stand at the top level on their own. On a phone, `navigation.sections` does not apply and each caption is a level to tap into, so these four are one tap from the menu; under a single "About this site" caption they were two, and the statement of faith three. `navigation.sections` in `mkdocs.yml` draws the captions, and `navigation.prune` keeps the sidebar to the branch you are actually in. A caption is a title in the root `.pages` file and adds no directory, so no URL carries it. ### A series cuts across the sections A study has one home, its subject. A **series** is a page whose frontmatter lists studies from anywhere on the site in the order a group would take them, one a week, so the same study can sit in a topic series, a series through a book and a foundations series at once without moving. `hooks/series.py` writes each series' weeks, the hub at `/series/` grouped by cut (foundations, by topic, through a book, through a passage, for a season, one session), and a "Week 2 of 7" line under the title of every study in one. A series page usually lives in `series/`; one that is also the index of its own studies, such as [The Heavenly Pattern](https://the-way.lewy.au/jesus/the-heavenly-pattern/), stays with them. ### Navigation order is deliberate Left alone, `awesome-pages` sorts alphabetically, which would open the site on *biblical figures* and scatter the doctrinal sequence. The loci have a teaching order — how we know (Scripture), who God is, who Christ is, what is wrong, how it is fixed, how it ends — and a root `.pages` file preserves it: ```yaml nav: - index.md - Topics: - scripture - god - jesus - holy-spirit - biblical-figures - spiritual-beings - sin - salvation - israel-and-church - chronology - last-things - feasts - christian-life - wisdom - teaching - commentaries - series - Explore: [references.md, timeline.md] - Learn: [hebrew, greek, glossary.md, resources] - blog - faq.md - about ``` ### Reserved, not yet created **Humanity** (Anthropology, Dewey 233) — the image of God, the constitution of the human person, free will. The section is defined but not created, because there is not yet enough written to fill it. Studies that touch on it are currently filed under **Salvation** or **Sin**. It will be split out once two or more studies genuinely belong there rather than being placed there by default. The same rule applies generally: a section exists when it has content, not in anticipation of it. An empty section is worse than a slightly overloaded one, because it advertises something the site doesn't have. --- ## The four content shapes Subject says *where* a page is filed. Shape says *what kind of thing* it is. There are four. ### Single study One passage or one question, worked through the [develop-bible-study](https://github.com/ding0t/bible_studies) process: hook, Key Takeaways, historical and literary context, word studies, theological principle, discussion questions, references. One file, filed under its subject. The bulk of the site. ### Series A subject small enough to be one topic and large enough to need several pages: a **directory containing an `index.md`**, with the parts as sibling pages. The index carries the introduction and links the parts in reading order. `holy-spirit/dreams-and-visions/` is the working example. This needs no special handling — `references/build/section_index.py` generates a card grid for any directory that lacks an index page, and the navigation builds itself from the directory tree. ### Book study A study of a whole biblical book, filed **by book rather than by subject**, living at `commentaries/-/index.md`. Dewey subdivides the 220s by book for the same reason: a reader who wants to know what is in Proverbs navigates to Proverbs, not to a topic. Genesis, Daniel and Proverbs already share a template, and it is close kin to [Key Takeaways](https://the-way.lewy.au/about/key-takeaways/): | Section | Holds | |---|---| | About | Author, date, occasion | | Memory verses | Verses worth committing, in the site's standard quote-block format | | Attitudes | What the book teaches us to value, and what it warns against | | Key Topics | The book's major themes | | Types | Persons, objects, or events that pattern Christ, the gospel, or God's dealings with His people | | Prophecies | Direct predictions the book makes or fulfils | | References | Sources drawn on | | *Chapters with linked studies* | **Generated** by `commentary_index.py` | The generated chapter list sits between `` and ``. Everything above those markers is hand-written and survives regeneration. A book study that outgrows one page splits into sibling pages inside the same book folder. A page that leaves the book folder altogether is a different move, and the test is what the page *is* rather than what it is about. The Proverbs daily reflections were devotional notes filed as commentary, so they moved to `wisdom/proverbs-reflections.md` and the book study links out to them; the old address redirects. Subject still decides the folder — theirs was Wisdom, not Proverbs. ### Chapter note A short, verse-anchored note at `commentaries/-/chapter-.md`. Mostly generated, mostly stubs, and the surface the cross-reference index links into. --- ## What is deliberately *not* a directory A study has more than one dimension, and only one of them can be a folder. Subject is the folder. Everything else is a tag: | Facet | Values | |---|---| | `method/` | `word-study`, `typology`, `archaeology`, `textual-criticism` | | `lang/` | `hebrew`, `greek` | | `status/` | `investigation` — open inquiry, conclusions not settled | | `audience/` | `teaching` | | `person/` | a named individual the study is *about* — `peter`, `melchizedek`, `judas-iscariot` | The slash isn't decoration: mkdocs-material's tags plugin is configured with `tags_hierarchy: true`, so `method/word-study` renders as a real parent-and-child grouping on the [Tags](https://the-way.lewy.au/tags/) page rather than as a flat string. Add a value to a facet by using it; the hierarchy builds itself. `status: investigation` is the exception. Some material here is honest inquiry rather than settled conclusion, and that distinction matters more to a reader than which folder it sits in. It is a property of a study, not a place to put one. `person/` exists to solve a collision that appeared as soon as [Biblical figures](https://the-way.lewy.au/biblical-figures/) did. Most Bible people share a name with a book, so a flat `matthew` cannot tell you whether a page is about the tax collector or the Gospel. The rule is simple: **the bare tag belongs to the book, the `person/` tag to the human being.** A page about Matthew that also quotes Matthew carries both. Where two figures share a name they are separated the way Scripture separates them, by father — `person/james-son-of-zebedee` and `person/james-son-of-alphaeus`. Tags do **not** repeat what the directory already says. A study in **Last things** is not tagged `prophecy`; a study under `studies/` is not tagged `studies`. --- ## Passage-based access Subject is not the only way in. Every study declares the passage it is about (`primary_passage`) and the passages it cites (`bible_references`), and `references/build/commentary_index.py` uses those to generate cross-links from every affected chapter under [Commentaries](https://the-way.lewy.au/commentaries/). A reader who arrives at Deuteronomy 18 will find the studies treating it, regardless of which subject folder they were filed in. This is the most reliable part of the system, because it is *derived* rather than hand-maintained. Metadata that nothing renders drifts, quietly, until it is wrong everywhere. Metadata that generates something visible stays correct because breaking it is immediately obvious. --- ## Known awkward cases One existing study does not have an obviously right home, and it is more honest to name it than to pretend the scheme is seamless: - **Biblical Numerology** — it is about a pattern *in* the text, which argues for Scripture, but it is not about the text's transmission or canon like everything else there. It is filed by primary subject and tagged for the secondary one. Any taxonomy applied to real material produces a few of these, and for a single page the fix is a good tag, not a new folder. **When the awkward cases become a body of work, they get a section.** Genealogy and Times used to sit here, filed under Last things because it feeds the prophetic timeline. By October 2026 it had five companions dating biblical history (Chronology Anchors, the 480 years from the Exodus to the temple, Ussher's 4004 BC, the Flood and the king lists, and the Combined Timeline), split across Last things and God, and most of them were about dating history, a subject neither section covers. They moved into **Chronology** on 2026-10-08, with redirects from the old addresses.