The Boy Scholastic is building an [fake] empire.

But don't tell him! He's enjoying himself far too much, and aren't illusions grand? We can learn so much from them. Inside his new world, he isn't the emperor, or even an important fellow. He is a junior scribe, who dutifully and loyally records what is said and by whom what is done. You mustn't think him anything less than a dreamer, though, for this is everything The Boy Scholastic ever wanted -- to have a duty to perform for good men and to fulfill it. He relishes in the servants heart. So why does he study theology? Because he heard whispers of a man in whom all goodness sees itself fulfilled. He would that his small bit of goodness meet this man too.

I should really stop frustrating myself, but that is exactly where I seem to spend my energies, at least when left to my own devices. Every time I meet a person or read the opinion of someone who has for himself no faith to speak of (Atheists and Agnostics, they call them), I think to myself that, if only they could see what it truly means to be a person of faith (by which I invariably mean a Christian), then they would at once end their tirade against... against their illusion of what God is. Because that's exactly what it is, at least, that's what it is to me. Of course, this is all a matter of perspective isn't it -- I mean, who am I to say that God is the way I see Him and not the way the Atheist sees him? And yet, for the sake of belief in God, we must abandon the views of God which are unbelievable and look instead to the views of God which are believed. And no one believes in the God that the Atheist doesn't believe in and that the Agnostic sees no evidence of.

I understand that I stand to step upon more than a few toes with what I have said and what I am about to say. So I will cut things to the quick and give but one example of what bothers me so. And it comes from a favorite of mine.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. - Richard Dawkins

Here we see a common complaint about God -- that He does terrible things. There is an inherent problem with that argument, and by inherent I mean to say that the argument violates the very concept of God. I will explain why this is, beginning with a proper, non-terminal understanding of God, that is, a "lowest common denominator" amongst religions about what a monotheistic God is. I will not discuss polytheism, as I provide no defense for any god(s).

To differentiate God from other "superhuman beings", we will qualify Him in response to the following statement:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? - Epicurus

God is that which is omniscient and omnipotent. If he lacked either, he would fall to the rank of 'god' or 'angel/demon/other-possibly-made-up-thing'. Epicurus is right that an object of worship aught not fall short of these two things. Furthermore, the two go hand-in-hand. They unify body and spirit. He is that which has the fullest command over the temporal and the non-temporal. This, for us, will be God.

Now, to say that God is anything bad or good is to say that there is something apart from God by which he might be judged. This violates the notion of God, that he might be judged. The moment we attempt to take God and judge Him as if he were a human (as Dawkins does), we immediately have become confused about what we're discussing, for we can no longer be speaking of God. "Morality" is a strictly human occurance and is determined by the Will of God for men -- this is a necessity derived from a universe in which God exists. And as God always does what is His Will (necessarily), God must be good. To whit: Goodness is the Will of God. We cannot, therefore, object to God on the basis of His action being evil, as the notion is impossible. It is simply a person anthropomorphizing God, one of the biggest "God-fallacies" present on both sides of any God debate.

This, of course, leaves us with an issue which those long before us discussed and which we will, no doubt, continue to address. C.S. Lewis stated it the best when he deemed it "The Problem with Pain." The question of suffering is a long-standing one. There have been plenty of formal arguments, with which I agree and disagree to varying degrees, but in what compels me the most and what I, therefore, will share, is the more emotional side of the argument (you didn't think there existed one for this side of things, did you?)

Pain is a catalyst, and this is a good thing. It forces us to react, to respond, and even if that response is, "Why me?" it is that reflection that leads us to change. Pain causes us to re-examine our existential selves, to look inwards at what there is and, in that way, alter how we process the outwards. St. Augustine's words speak strongly when he says that fire is used to separate the wheat from the chaff, to remove the impurities from the gold. Through our suffering we face our own limitedness, our own need for humility. Through the suffering of others we learn to love and to serve. Without suffering, where is the saint? We can delve into the origins of pain (I follow a very traditional view of pain as a repercussion of the fall of man), but the fact of the matter is that pain is a means by which we may be humbled through the existential rearrangement of self, and in this way, have our eyes opened to God. Pleasure is used in the same way, but we don't seem to have a problem with that, now do we?

This makes God seem awfully manipulative, but think: Knowing what you know now, do you begrudge your mother from making you take your disgusting medicine? It may have tasted terrible, and you may have been mad at her, but it made you better, and the joy of the end result outshines any pain in the arrival.

What speaks, perhaps the loudest, is the following quote. Read it, and then go learn something about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

"When Jesus bids a man, He calls him to come and die." D. Bonhoeffer

The Boy Scholastic Reveres Soup

Armed with a thermos, the library doesn't seem so far away. "Soup," he whispers to himself, "is liquid courage."

I was reading a mildly interesting article, which did the good work of reminding people that there has not been a conclusion to the free-will versus predestination* argument, even though it severely mis-represented the nature of the debate, stating that the notion of predestination became prominent in the 18th century.

"Well," I said to myself, "someone doesn't read Calvin. Or anyone else, for that matter."

Regardless, it did a proper job of explaining the fact that both philosophers and scientists (both from the biological and physical sciences) see merit to the argument of predestination. I normally wouldn't bring something like this up -- after all, I pop-article isn't really my style -- but after a section about how questioning free-will might make people "less moral", it ended with the following paragraph:

"People who explicitly deny free will often continue to hold themselves responsible for their actions and feel guilty for doing wrong. Have such people managed to accommodate the rest of their attitudes to their rejection of free will? Have they adjusted their notion of guilt and responsibility so that it really doesn’t depend on the existence of free will? Or is it that when they are in the thick of things, trying to decide what to do, trying to do the right thing, they just fall back into the belief that they do have free will after all?"

No doubt written as an attempt to soothe any readers who might have been steered too close to an existential crisis (the horror!), there is an interesting talking point here which has always been of Theological interest to me (surprised?). The author notes the same type of phenomenon that Hume notes in his Treatise on Human Understanding. With those unfamiliar with the work, Hume discusses the ways in which humans comprehend the world around them, noting that it is grounded in experiential evidence. However, experiential evidence is illogical -- we have no logical basis whatsoever for believing that, because something happened this way before, under the same circumstances, it will happen again the same way.

His reasoning can be summarized as follows: If I hold a ball in my hand above the floor, and I then assert that letting go of this ball will cause it to fall to the floor, I make that assertion because it has been my experience that, when I hold something in the air and then release it from my grasp, it will drop downwards: I justify my assertion by experiential evidence. When asked to justify my belief in the validity of projecting a result from experiential evidence, I can only maintain that experiential evidence is an indicator because it has been my experience that experiential evidence functions in that way. And here we have a problem, for experiential evidence cannot be the justification for experiential evidence's validity. Circular reasoning or some such nonsense.

Now, at the same time that he points this out, Hume makes an equally important observation that, despite how we may try, we cannot escape the belief that experiential evidence is valid. Even those who claim that they do not believe in experiential evidence will still shield themselves if you throw something at them, when by their own beliefs they have no reason to do so (the ball is just as likely to turn into a duck as it is to continue along a projected course and strike you, if we deny experiential evidence). Hume notes that, though there can be no logical proof of the fact, we are unable to shake the validity of experiential evidence from our existences, as it is the basis for our understanding.

Now, this same situation is, as I see it, present in the free-will v. predestination debate. There is no logical reason to believe in free-will -- it goes against the notion of experiential evidence, the very basis for how we as humans understand. To say that we have free-will, that is, that we are able to make a choice void of influence to the point that there is an introduction of randomness, is to say that we are not rational beings, (i.e. that we act by reason based off of experiential evidence). This goes against the notion of human action and existence, and yet it is impossibly, as the author of the article notes, to find a person who does not feel responsible for their actions, and in that way, somehow the author of their actions, a position which stands against the common notion of predestination.

So how do we reconcile the two? Do we do it in the same way that Hume does? We can't, really, because the only opposition to experiential evidence is the fact that there can be no logical reason that it be trusted, leading him to the conclusion that it is inherently human (Hume, by the way, follows all of this to an argument for predestination). In our case, we have two sides, each supported by two sets of facts. Predestination is supported by logic and experiential evidence, which free-will is supported by our existential realities. To think that a man's understanding and existential reality could be separate from one another so as to lead to different conclusions is altogether mind-boggling (I don't fully understand it myself), but it leads me exactly to where I want to go, that is, to a conclusion.

Theologically, scientifically, and existentially, I am aligned to the proposition to the unification of ideas. A unified theology of the personage of Christ, an grand unified theory, and a union of body/soul -- they all walk together. It's what drew me to Christianity, to Lutheranism, to academic study. The notion of God demands unity and universals, as does science, and I am therefore doubly dedicated to bringing unity to thought.

It is therefore no surprise that I would propose the union of free-will and predestination. Crazy, I know, but just hear me out. One thing that we can be certain of is that, as humans, we have a limited perspective, and that things change depending on our perspective (this is a huge part of everything from existential thought to Einstein's Theory of Relativity). Looking at the two sides, it's hard to line them up, because all of the evidence for each comes from a different plane of perspective. The belief in free-will is supported by the existential perspective, while the belief in predestination is supported by a universal perspective. If you've ever read the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott, you may understand what I'm talking about a bit better. From a perspective limited to two dimensions, a sphere will appear to be nothing more than a circle of whatever size the sphere's diameter is at the point at which the sphere intersects the 2D perspective. This sphere is therefore two different things from two different perspectives: the universal perspective is what it is (objectively, if you can believe such a thing), while a limited perspective sees only what it is able to see.

In this way, man possesses a free-will while, at the same time, still living in a deterministic universe. He is culpable for his actions because he cannot at all perceive anything else other than himself as the force behind that which he does. For all intents and purposes, he does control his actions, so real is the perspective to him. Free-will, like the validity of experiential evidence, is hard-wired into human nature, because they are the ways in which we as humans function as a result of our limited perspectives. From a universal perspective, where all influences and factors are observable, it is impossible to separate oneself from the deterministic attitudes of everything, and that the single blip that began everything (if, indeed, we can assert a beginning) necessitated all that was to come.

Theologically, this serves as a perfect reconciliation of God's omniscience and of human moral culpability. We, of course, do not escape the misguided arguments of God being evil as a result of all this, but those can be dealt with on another day (though to many those arguments are far more concerning than the argument I am proposing to settle). There may, of course, be a problem with something, which I am always glad to hear, or there may be someone who beat me to this, in which case, I would not be glad to hear it, but ought be told either way. If this does turn out to be a smart thing I've said, please don't take it from me. I need whatever I can get.

On a side note, I'm being accepted as a member of Augustana Lutheran Church this Sunday (August 24th). If your live where I live, and would like to come be present, I would love you to be around. One step closer to ordination, hurrah!

*NOTE: I'm using predestination VERY loosely here. It's probably closer to determinism, but I'm lazy today and don't want to double the length of this defining terms.

The Boy Scholastic's favorite tree is the Cherry

It makes tasty fruit and sturdy wood, both of which he finds exceptionally beautiful. The Boy Scholastic once figured that, on any given day and varying on his mood (which is determined by the quality of his breakfast and his morning ride), he would be willing to go an extra five minutes out of his way just to sit in a room with cherry paneling. He thought it was rather silly at the time, but now he understands. The same goes double for stained glass.

A question which is of central importance to me is the proper structure and focus of a church, and while people close to me will often hear me touting the ideals of Luther's concept of the priesthood of the laity, there is a dark side to forgetting the role that the priest plays in the church. As a demonstration, I offer a situation which hit quite close to home.

There is an interesting predicament facing a church (UMC) that I used to attend; in fact, it lies at the heart of why I left that church, though I didn't know it at the time. At the time I left because my personal mentor left, along with the other members of the church that I had come to respect over time, and so I respectfully went with the people whose faith had been the most inspirational to me. I now understand why, and I'm glad that I did, though it would have happened soon enough as I went away to university not long after.

The only reason that I still know anything about what is going on at that church is because my mother and sister still maintain affiliations with the pastor of that church, and to a limited extent, the church in general. She and the pastor are quite close, and she presently serves on something called the Servant-Leadership Team (SLT), though she very much dislikes it. Let me explain why. The SLT was formed at this particular church around the time that the UMC instituted a pastoral switch at the church. It is a group of lay peoples in the church who were, at first, appointed by the same vote that was instigated to institute the SLT, after which point appointment is maintained entirely by the SLT -- there is no min/max term length, and the group offers, renews, and terminates persons on the team based by group vote. There is a president, treasurer, secretary, etc. as well as general members, where all positions are (once again) maintained internally. The pastor is, I believe, involved by invitation only; I am sure that the pastor is not a member of the SLT, nor does the pastor have a vote on any of the issues that are brought before the SLT.

The issues that the SLT manages are administrative, but not what a normal person would first think of as administrative. Along with conducting a capital campaign to raise money to help expand the church building, they are currently charging themselves with a drive to place every member of the church into a small group, as well as selecting curriculum for Sunday School teachers and maintaining Bible Studies in the church. This is outlined, of course, in the new church constitution, the same one that formed the SLT.

You can, perhaps, see a problem forming here. Upon hearing all of this explained to me, my gut response was, "What does the pastor do?" Apparently, this is a valid question, which goes back to the initiating purpose behind SLT. The belief behind the SLT model is the maxim "Every person in ministry." A noble belief -- I myself agree with the idea the priesthood of the laity, as previously stated -- but something is foul in the state of Denmark. But what?

It is best to show what is wrong: This Wednesday, the SLT is to have all of its members sign what they have called "A Covenant Agreement." It is a document with a list of promises that the SLT wants people to sign as members of the SLT (and, still proposed, the members of the church). The signer pledges to attend church regularly, to attend SLT meetings, to be a member of a small group, to donate to the Capital fund, among other things. After several meetings of resistance from three individual members of the SLT, the vote passed that the "covenant" should be signed, this Wednesday, at the meeting. Being one of the three who opposed the "covenant" from the start, and having spoken to me on the issue at length, my mother will refuse to sign, regardless of the consequences.

What then is the problem? Even if you are not a Christian or a religious person at all, I would believe it safe to say that something has felt off to you while you read this. If what exactly that is eludes you, don't feel bad -- it took me a while to be able to put my feelings on the matter into words. My knee-jerk reaction, however, sums it up best, I believe: Who do these people think they are?

That response has two sides, because the SLT has assumed the responsibility of two other roles. The first is evident: the priest. The priest is the leader of a church. It is the priests job. I know there are degrees to which the laity are involved in a church, and I don't believe in leaving everything up to one person, but there is a reason that the priest leads a church -- he is trained to do so. It is not because of an anointment or because of a special ceremony that a higher-up performed; it's because a member of the laity stepped forward and dedicated his life to being a Shepard of a flock. A priest goes to seminary, is educated in the position of leadership in a church. He has studied doctrine under those who have made it their life to study doctrine. This is his role.

There are, however, many churches who choose to function differently, and there is no fault in changing the roles of the priest to suit a particular church. What I object to is the second position that the SLT is usurping. They are attacking the place of God.

It is never clearer than in the use of the word "covenant" to describe the tract that they have put forth. If we examine the Biblical precedent for a "covenant" (or the definition, even), we see that it is a promise between God and man, initiated by God, and always a promise that God will do something for man in response to something that has happened or a man's faith. God promised Abraham that he would be the father of many nations, he promised Noah that He would never again flood the earth, and so gave him the rainbow. A covenant is not a promise that men make to God, as the SLT maintains their covenant is, nor is it something initiated by man.

What is happening at this church is business in the worst sense. There are now capital campaigns, and in an effort to increase attendance and to boost donations, what are they doing? They are leveraging a person's personal, individual relationship with God to get them to do what they want them to do. And what they want them to do is not the work of God but the will of man. As I posed to my mother, "This covenant is vanity, pure and simple. These people are so vain as to think themselves able to discern God's will for the future, both for themselves and for others. I ask you, what if a man signs this "covenant" and then, come Sunday morning, feels the call of God to be with an ailing relative or to visit a person in need? They have promised God that they will go to church, but yet that isn't what God wants them to do. They must either deny God's will or break a promise, and thereby become liars. And a path that can result in nothing but sin must be caused by a prior sinful action -- the making of a promise to God which is against God's will. I will proffer that a Christian should make no promise to God save to follow His Will. Anything else is vanity.

In defense of this, I point to the following verses:

Matthew 5:33-7
33"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' 34But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; 35or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. 36And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. 37Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

Matthew 15:1-9
3Jesus replied, "And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? 4For God said, 'Honor your father and mother' and 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.' 5But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is a gift devoted to God,' 6he is not to 'honor his father' with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. 7You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
8" 'These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
9They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.'[a]

The Word of God for the people of God. You know the rest: take it away!

The Boy Scholastic asks for reading lists in advance, but politely so.

He understands when professors aren't quite ready but is excited when they are. At this moment, he is very pleased, indeed.

So, my professor told me to pick up a copy of "The Ancient Economy" by Sir M.I. Finley to get ready for this class, and I have to say, the first chapter is one fine read. He basically proposes to dismantle the modern notion of cyclical economic development (i.e. that the ancient economy was just like capitalism on a smaller scale) by demonstrating that the ancient peoples had no concept of economy at all. It makes sense, and he attributes it to the structure of the ancient society, which is what really gets me. I'm only on page 30 or so, but it's already shaping up to be ridiculously interesting, especially from a theological standpoint, because so often we have to recognize (and thereby counteract) our subconscious efforts to interpret things as if they were written yesterday and not 2000+ years ago.

It's why I find myself moving much more towards a centrist position than the conservative position I began with. For me, there is no especial draw to liberalism (or rather, the draw to liberalism is counter-balanced by my understanding of a persistent yet improper desire to alter my interpretation so as to save Christianity from persecution from social progressives and, in the same fashion, to earn acceptance), but instead a desire to fully understand the mindset of the faith that is documented in the text, and in that way, understand the message of the text.

This is important to me for two reasons. First and foremost is my own faith, which must be my first priority, for how can the faithless and those who persist in error hope to lead others towards faith and truth? But that is also the second, that I might properly teach and instruct. For I have found so much apparent conflict (or, rather, duality) in theology, juxtaposing justice and mercy, faith and works, free will and divine fore-knowledge, man and God, that my desire is to unify all of it, and to put to rest questions of disjointed theology.

It's not so much for the Christian, although many theologians preoccupy themselves with these questions (though they normally pick a side) and many lay Christians accept these things through faith (as they should), but rather for those for whom these concepts stand as obstacles is seeing the special dignity of Christ. It was a conversation on the Megabus that I overheard which really set my heart a flame with this desire (not that the groundwork was not already present). Two men sitting in front of me where chatting idly about things, and stumbled onto the subject of religion. Partially out of a desire to be unoffensive (although it was, to me, extraordinarily offensive) and partially out a desire to sound educated (though it was the most uneducated statement imaginable), one man said that there will always be religious extremists and separatists, but that every religion is just The Golden Rule when you looked at it intelligently. I wanted to say something, then I wanted to cry, then I became overwhelmingly upset. "If you only understood!" I wanted to say. "If you could only truly understand the special dignity of Christ and what separated him from work-based "faiths", you'd never say such a thing! If you only truly understood what it meant to be both in grace and yet a sinner, to be powerless over your own sanctification and redemption, to be truly indebted to God, and to really understand, and thereby experience, the full width, depth, and length of love in its purest form!" You see how I get, sometimes? It broke my heart.

And then, at the same time, there was a conversation going on behind me between two college students at Loyola (a Jesuit college, in case you were unaware), about how one had become an Atheist and could simply "no longer believe in God." When asked to give reasons, she explained all of her problems with the Catholic church -- how a priest refused to baptize the child of a woman, who having left her husband because of spousal abuse, had remarried outside the church (the church refused to remarry her on the basis of a divorce not brought on by adultery), and how the child died soon after of illness. For a Catholic, the infant baptism covers original sin (excuse me if this is something you already know), and for that mother to have her child die having been denied a baptism would be the most devastating thing imaginable. The one comfort that mother had, the salvation of her dead child, the church "stripped" from her, and the minds of this college student, God had done it. She cited multiple examples of the failings of the catholic priesthood, though none quite so heartbreaking as the mother and child.

With this girl, my heart was in so many pieces that I had to say something, though I'm not much of a public speaker. I quietly introduced myself as a student studying religion and divinity at the University of Chicago, and politely suggested that her problems were less with God and more with the Catholic church, and asked whether or not she had ever considered Protestantism. She said that she was just unable to believe, and though there was so much to say, I couldn't muster any of it. My lips said that I understood and told her to e-mail me if she ever doubted her doubt as my hand gave her my e-mail address, but my heart cried out as I turned back to my own thoughts. I wanted to ask what it meant for her to believe in God, and who was God to her that she found Him so unbelievable? Why didn't I ask? I worry that it was out of a lack of courage or trust in God, but it was because I knew the answer without asking -- the church had tainted her ability to truly see God. This is my problem with the church, most of all the Roman Catholic church, that for so many it puts men in the place of God so that, when those men fail, people see it as God's failing, that the imperfections of the priest are the imperfections of God. I wanted so much to tell this girl that the failure that she felt separated her from the church were not the failings of God but the failing of the faith of men. But how could she have heard?

If ever I were to become a priest, it would be to correct these errors. But how could I succeed? My faith too will falter, it has in many occasions. I run out of fingers when attempting to count my failures in the last week, in the last day, since breakfast this morning. We need the church, but we lack the understanding of its relationship to God. We require justice but we long for mercy. We are men, yet are apart from our God who completes us. God is not understanding, but he provides it. His grace should impart the peace of unity and clarification. I by no means intend to study that I might be the dispenser of grace, but rather that I could elucidate the grace that comes from God. To lift high the cross. To be the mirror reflecting the light.