The Boy Scholastic's Bike De-Chained

He knew that he had left in one too many links, and now he's paying the price. Well, he's also paying the price becaues his bike is a fixed gear with no brakes, which means that, at present, he can neither speed up or slow down. All he can do is not fall of, and things were going fast before he lost control. As he wizzes through stop sign after stop sign, going towards the lake, he is suprisingly calm. And as he and his bike (miraculously?) make it to the water's edge, he says as loudly as he can, "I am everything and nothing!" And at that moment his bike stopped. He would like to believe that it was the sand dune he had just crashed into which brought about his sudden stop, but as he flies effortlessly over the handlebars and into the water, he accepts that fact that there are things in this world far too mysterious and beautiful to understand, the least of which is horizontal motion on a bike or his own existence, let alone the relationship of the one to the other.

"I am everything and nothing." I did say that once, on a roller-coaster, which may seem silly, but those things are like existential joy-rides for me. I'm deathly afraid of them, but yet I ride them at every possible oppertunity, because they cause in me such an interesting dread. I really, trully feel like I'm going to die, but not in a real way, but only semi-real. I can tell myself all I want that it's safe, and deep down I know it is, and yet I get filled up with such an anxiety that, well, the experience is something wholly other. I never know how I'm going to react. Once, at a very unexpected turn in the roller coaster, I yelled, "Why? Why would you do that?" I don't even know why -- it just seemed like the right thing, I guess. I'm not about to question what silly things the mind decides to do under stress, let alone weird, roller-coaster stress. All I will say is that, if you enjoy being entertained, ride a roller-coaster with me sometime. It's mildly rediculous and definitely hilarious.

A few days ago, I had the great fortune to have lunch with Mark Hanson, the Presiding Bishop of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America for those of you who aren't as interested in churches and stuff as I am). It was an amazing oppertunity to hear from him about his job as Presiding Bishop as well as president of the Lutheran World Federation. It was a small group of us present, and we were asked for questions. I immediately asked him about his stance on the ELCA Sexuality Task-Force's statement: Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust[PDF]. I asked in no uncertain terms whether he felt that this issue was a primary or secondary concern for the church at present, and what he saw his role and the role of my generation (represented heavily at this meeting) in this debate. What followed was the most brilliant and profound response that I have ever received regarding the statement on sexuality. I've transcribed the heart of it here -- my quotations are not direct quotes, but the paraphrasing of ideas in direct discouse. Forgive me any errors I may have had in writing them down:

His main point was that this discussion is not about gay or straight, hetero-normative or varied gender-identities or sexual orientations, because looking at the issue in that way divided up the church into those categories: this is a gay pastor, that is a straight paster, this is a transgendered cantor, that is a stay-at-home wife VBS leader. If we treat the debate in those terms, we risk dividing the church. "And as a sixty-year straight, white male, it's tempting to talk about sexuality in terms of GLBT," he said, "because it takes the focus off of me." We are only going to come to a right and just solution if we talk about human sexuality and human intimacy as universal experiences, as a gift and a trust. We as the church have had a long history of making people feel ashamed of their need for intimacy and their desire for sexual relations. We've forced people to bottle them up, to make them unspoken, and that's unhealthy. That's what gives us scandals in the priest hood like in the Catholic church -- they refuse their priests any intimacy, and that hurts people.

At this point, the Bishop told us that he had a therapist with whom he met regularly. "And I look at my therapist exactly as I look at my dentist and my general physician -- they are all people who help keep me healthy. We need to stop being ashamed of needing to talk about these things, because that causes so much hurt to people, and the church is guilty most of all of propegating that. We as the church used to be the instruments of social change and right-thinking, but we've wrongly given that up in American to secular society and the talking-heads on TV, and that's caused a whole different set of problems. It's time we take that banner back."

He said much more than this, most of which added to those points, but the central issue which was what was so beautiful. For the first time, I could truly say that I was proud--damn proud--of being a member of the ELCA. Never before had I met someone with so much earthly power and authority who was so humble. It was remarkable.

What added to this was that, yesterday, I was the assisting minister at chapel services at the ELCA church-wide office, and I was the one who communed the presiding bishop, who was in attendence that day (rare since he travels so much). The humility I felt as the steward of such a cup, especially giving it to someone for whom I have so much respect, nearly brought me to tears. I have meant more the words which I said that day: "Take and drink: cup of life, cup of salvation." And my sending had never been so powerfully spoken: "Go in peace, Christ is with you!"

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 Refuses To Sleep

It's like admitting that this is all that today was, that it's over and that there's nothing more left to make it something. It's the death of the sky, the end of being. It is a realization of his struggle with the anxiety of death; for him, staying up all night is to say, "I decide when this day ends, and that's not tomorrow." Staying awake means that you never really lose anything. Going to sleep means putting faith in the belief that, when your eyes open, everything you love will still be there. Some days it isn't. And some days it isn't. As of late, he can't stand to lose anything more.

I was going to write something nice, something about the fallen beauty of pre-destination. But sometimes, writing these little intros gets to me.

I'm going to have a smoke.

The Boy Scholastic Wants to be Awake When It Happens

His death, that is. He wants to be awake, to be there. He figures that the anxiety about death is a fundamental part of the human experience, and that it would be far better to experience the possible horror and to know for certain than to slip away into something or nothing...

At chapel this week, a sermon was delivered on Luke 6:43-45 -- until I have time to do my own translation, here is the NIV (you can't get NRSV on-line, sigh):

43"No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. 44Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. 45The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.

The sermon which was given was, in my opinion, meaningless as a sermon. This is not to say that the sermon didn't have a point, but that the preacher decided instead to use the scripture as a segue into discussing a social justice issue rather than using a social justice issue to segue into discussing the scripture. The pulpit is not where we proclaim our social justice-- we do that with our hands. The pulpit is for elevating the truth of God with our words, hopefully inspired by the Spirit.

It was good, however, that the sermon was a failure in my mind, because it gave my mind the excuse to ignore what was being said by the preacher and focus instead on what was being said by the Spirit. And the Spirit is certainly needed with this piece of scripture, because it is not easy to understand. The passages leave us in a difficult place, for we recognize as Christ ians that we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We therefore could not be the good tree, could we? Yet this morning we had come together to worship Christ, and to call that an act of evil would be to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, and so we cannot in any way call this act bad. This is simply a conundrum, for Jesus did not give us a third tree -- the tree which is simul iustus et peccator does not exist in this narrative.

Are we then to say that Christ is wrong? an equally unacceptable option, for it would be an act of vanity and blasphemy to say that we could judge Christ with fallen reason. As with all interactions with the Spirit, we must reconcile ourselves with the Word. How, then, do we understand ourselves in regards to this interaction with the Spirit?

The Psalmist tells us that the Lord delights in a broken and contrite heart. Indeed, if God loved us for our blamelessness, we would not be loved, nor would God delight. Rather, God loves us despite our sin, and delights in our genuine repentance, for it is in that act that our love of God (given through grace), repulsed by our sin, turns us towards God. And how then can we call that result bad, for we have returned to God? Certainly each day we play the Prodigal Son, forsaking God only to realize that we are naught without Him. We are Christians not because we do not sin or even because we do not sin more or less than others, but because our sin turns us to the Cross. This is not to say that sin is good, but that even though our sin exists, Christ's light shines through and illuminates our lives despite our sin. we are the good tree and we bear the good fruit: that is what it is to worship Christ. But what we cannot, cannot forget is that the fruit is good not because of he who bears it, but because of He who causes it to grow. All goodness belongs to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Boy Scholastic Watched A Tree Bloom

Thursday it was bare, but Friday was warm and sunny, and today it poured. He woke up this morning early to a smell of rain and saw buds outside his window. The Boy Scholastic wasted the day away with his texts and pipe, and as the smoke and histories unfurled around him, so did the buds bloom and grow. Now he lies in bed, a smile on his face, wondering if tomorrow will hold more. He's already prepared for it, though. One way or another, he and a friend (!!!) are making a pie.

The next two months promise to be exciting -- I've got several ideas for papers that I am eager to explore, no matter whether or not they materialize (although something has to, eventually). Right now, I'm occupied with exploratory research for a paper about the competing views of history at play in Early Medieval Spanish histories (specifically those of Augustine and Eusebius). I'm focusing mostly on Isadore's History of the Goths, though I'm sure other works will materialize in time. I'm proposing it as a way the Spanish at the time of Muslim conquest comprehended their social situation in terms of religion. I'm hoping that it materializes into a BA in the near future, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

After that there is a paper for my class on The Gospel According to Mark. While working on the pericope of the Syrophoenician woman, I noticed how the exchange between said woman and Jesus appeared to be similar to the dialogs from Sayings of Spartan Women in that it had a woman with significantly less authority successfully challenging a man of greater authority with witty report. As we've floated the idea of Mark as the "Pauline" Gospel, I thought it interesting propose an exploration of how well this pericope conformed/deviated from that narrative style. My professor agreed (or gave me the impression of agreeing.) I'm in the process of working up a formal proposal.

There's an idea or two which is still floating around, but they need more time to stew. I think this is enough to legitimize posting, though. Time will tell.

The Boy Scholastic Misses the Stars

Whose idea was it to put universities inside cities? The Boy Scholastic wishes they were like old monasteries -- out in the middle of the wilderness. But this is just because he wishes to hear the voice of one crying out, ειπεν ησαιας ο προφητης.

²⁴Jesus rose up and went out into the land around Tyre. And he went into a house not wanting to be discovered, but he was unable to be hidden; ²⁵but immediately a woman heard of him, whose daughter had an unclean spirit [πνευμα ακαθαρτον], she came and fell down at his feet; ²⁶this woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth; and she prayed [ηρωτα] that he would cast out the demon [δαιμονιον] in her daughter. ²⁷And he said to her: Let [αφες] first [πρωτον] the children be fed, for it would not be just to snatch the children's bread to throw to the dogs. ²⁸But she replied and said to him: Lord, but the dogs eat the children's crumbs from under the table. ²⁹and he said to her: on account of what was said, get up! the demon [δαιμονιον] has gone out of your daughter. ³⁰And going out of his house she found her child thrown out of bed but the demon had left her.

Things of interest: the switch from 'πνευμα ακαθαρτον' to 'διαμονιον' (represented by switching from "unclean spirit" to "demon"), the use of αφιημι to signify an imperative/command (it usually translates as "let go" or "release", but I can see "permit"), and, of course, the dialog itself (which is a delightful mystery to me).

The Boy Scholastic Got Lost in a Book

He was all to happy to be there; however, all good things... and look how hackneyed he's become! But some good may have come of it all along.

I don't like writing unless I have something to say. It's a self-indulgence that is all-too-common of people who want to make a living publishing their thoughts.---They begin to think that people care!---And I've been so tired... But I've ceased to be tired, thanks in no small part to Tati Cycles carrying Metropolis coffee now, and I've decided to get kicking once again. And expect some new read enough that I believe there could be things in my head which are worth writing. My Greek improved, my Latin atrophied, and Wittgenstein placed Bultmann in a new light which has me at once excited and afraid. The latter alread shook my world apart in ways which have made me unrecognizable to my former self.---Will this be the same?

I haven't formed these thoughts yet, so no more on them. This serves as an instrument of fear and shame so as to compell me to take the time later. Right now, I have two particularly interesting Syrophoenician women calling me. Think about it for a moment.