"The Boy Detective Fails" by Joe Meno

In our town—our town of shadows, our town of mystery—it seems our buildings have, without reason, begun to disappear completely. Still full of their loyal inhabitants, the buildings and the people all disintegrate soundlessly. The air has been hard to breathe, full of regret and the glassy voices of the unsurprised dead. Our commuters have begun carrying photographs of their loved ones with them to work. On the bus, we look at each other, pictures of our sad wives and doubtful children huddled close to our chests, quietly imagining the silent elaborations of our own deaths. We are disappointed coming home that evening because the many photos betray our cowardice: We live in a town that is disappearing, and worse, like the buildings, our hope is gone and we are no longer surprised by anything.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

The Boy Scholastic Cries At Inappropriate Times

Well, it’s not so much that the times he cries are inappropriate as it is that he never cries when he feels it’s appropriate and only cries when he can’t understand why. When his grandfather passed away, he shed nary a tear, though he loved him dearly, and yet he went to the funeral of a stranger and could barely sing for all the tears. When his dog died, he accepted it with reverent silence, but he saw a dog tied up to a post outside a store and began to tear up. “Perhaps,” he thought to himself, “I do not mourn what I loved but what I did not love.” But why now does he not cry nor sleep?

I related to a friend the other day that one of my greatest pleasures about starting to make my way in academia is revealing to people that I believe in God. “And an institutional church!” I often add with relish. This is really only a surprise to those who don’t know that I do divinity, but there are enough people I come in contact with that this gets to happen on a pretty frequent basis. Perhaps it’s due to the particular make up of the institution that I’m with at present, as it is known for anti-religious sentiment (Dawkins, Hitchens, and the like come often), but there seems to be a great surprise that there would be someone studying there who believes not only in God, but in a particular religious expression, and an institutional one at that. I try to play the apologist as little as possible, though I am swift to explain the essential intricacies in doctrine, no matter what the subject.

One of my favorite aspects to discuss, the revelation of which turns just as many heads as my admission of religious affiliation, is that I am a pre-destinationalist. No Calvinist, mind you, but decidedly anti-free-will. I explain that I am persuaded to the position for a variety of reasons –the deterministic nature of the physical world, the paradox of free-will and divine foreknowledge, and the emphasis on grace in salvation, just to name a few. However, I do acknowledge that, from those perspectives, the difference in opinion has no bearing whatsoever on any perceivable reality, as the perception of choice (whether illusionary or not) is so real as to be real. The only reason that a person would have a worthwhile opinion on the matter is because it affects their lives in a very real way. It is on those grounds that I say I am a pre-destinationalist, because the notion of free-will is, I feel, inherently vain.

To understand why, it’s important to examine sin and the way we, as humans, process it in terms of faith and salvation. From a free-will perspective, when a person looks back on a sinful thing that he has done, he says to himself, “Oh, I did a bad thing, but now I’ve learned and I’m a better person for it, for I shan’t do that again” (do you like how all my interlogicas speak in the most proper of Englishes?). To hold this position is to be more Buddhist than Christian, for what you are saying is that you have become a better person, and have separated yourself from your sin through a free-will progression: you are able to separate yourself from the person who did that sinful thing. It is what has popularized amongst many Christian groups the idea of being “born again” as having shed your past life and being an entirely new person. Now, I’m not denying that there is a reality to that, because the existential re-arrangement that is connected to salvation is most-powerful and cannot be ignored, but for many groups, it takes up this notion of possessing no connection to that person. Now, at this transition, there is a scriptural basis for such an opinion, and I’m inclined to accept it, but what I see as the problem is that the mindset is carried with the individual perpetually – any sin can be separated in such a way by becoming a better person.

Is it clear where I’m going? It’s not the separation from sin that I object, but the idea that it comes from the free-will choice to become a better person. For the pre-destinationalist, the individual must always look at past sins and recognize that they are still today the same person who made that decision, because that individual is just as much what made them who they are today as their reality today will form them tomorrow. Each individual is what he was and will be, all at once, and the pre-destinationalist must always reconcile himself his being with the fact that he cannot, by his own will and desire, be separated from that sin. He is forced to turn to the cross and look to God for his redemption. He is simul iustus et peccator, for though perpetually a sinner, he is justified by Christ in spite of his sin. You are always the person who sinned, which means you are always a person who needs Christ. It is ultimately humbling in ways that free-will could never be.

The beauty of this is that, for the pre-destinationalist, we see how the good fruit / bad fruit scenario works as I have previously described it. The sinfulness of the good fruit drives him to find Christ, whereas the sinfulness of the bad fruit drives him away from Christ. But I’m not rehashing that.

BTW, expect an update on current news concerning sexuality and the priesthood, with special attention to the ELCA’s statements: “Sexuality: Gift and Trust” and the subsequent recommendation for ministry policies.

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