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.

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.