Goddamn Existentialists

I am caught in an Enlightenment puzzle of predestination.

Charles Taylor, Catholic theologian, sums up the paradox of Christianity and sin nature: it is “why, in spite of knowing we are born to the highest, we sometimes not only inexplicably choose against it, but even feel that we cannot do otherwise. The symmetrical mystery is that God can act to overcome this incapacity – the doctrine of grace.”

“Double-mystery” – we are unable to save ourselves. Only God can save us. And yet some people remain unsaved.

Therefore...

God damns people to hell just because. He can chose to save everyone, and yet some people are not saved, so therefore those people are chosen arbitrarily by God to be damned.

It makes sense.
It also stands in direct opposition to all of our human inclinations and feelings.

Many Christians are okay with that. Armenianism, Calvinism, and Jonathan Edwards sacrificed human inclinations of fellowship to the alter of reason.

“If God says it is right, then it is right. My sympathy for my fellow man is sin, because I am unaligned with God’s Reason. I do not understand it, but it must be right, because it is rational. If God wants to damn anyone to hell, it is right that he should do so, and I will stifle my sympathy for souls damned to hell because reason dictates I must”.

God gave us reason, and Kant says that means that He is reasonable.

But God also gave us sympathy.

So why assume that our sympathy is tainted by sin (and must go) but our reason is untainted?

Why follow our logic at the expense of our sympathies, instead of following our sympathies at the expense of logic? Who says that reason must always win? What if our reason is corrupt, just like our sympathies? Is the decision to choose logic over sympathy simply... arbitrary?

What if there is logic that we cannot understand because it is God’s, and our sympathies are all we have to guide us at this standstill?

Taylor sees that Calvinists and Arminianists and Jonathan Edwards followed the “logic through to the most counter-intuitive.” Logic lead to a place that didn’t even make sense. The conclusion of Logic produced a God that was entirely different from the God of Logic’s premise.

Taylor’s solution – multiculturalism.

“This wasn’t the only way that the double mystery could be articulated. Eastern fathers, like Gregory of Nyssa, put things differently.”

The elevation of logic over sympathy may not be arbitrary – it may be cultural.

Western conceptions of “truth” – enlightenment conceptions of “reason” – vs. Eastern traditions.

Is the fact that “logic leads to truth” a Western bias?

Can something besides logic lead to truth?

Can our sympathy and logic conflict, and sympathy wins?

But... isn’t that a dangerous idea if one has immoral sympathies?

Why does that seem more dangerous than if one has immoral rationality?

If logic can be as corrupted as sympathy, how else can we reach Truth?

Enter existentialism.

Sheftu isn't coming?!?

I always used to ask, "is this it?" in a horrified, unbelieving tone - getting up, going to work, getting paid, buying what you need, going to church, making friends, shopping for clothes and on and on and on. I read Mara, Daughter of the Nile too many times and honestly could not believe that life would ever be anything other than an epic adventure story where not only does the girl save the day, but she gets the guy at the end.

Then I started to wonder - "is this it?" really? Can't we all go and be missionaries and die for Christ and do wild and wonderful things on the edge of a precipice? Can't I escape reality through my religion? Is this really it? Can't there be more?

And God's answer keeps being - until you do this, here, I will never entrust you with that, there. Until you are faithful with few, I will not give you many. Until you can go home graciously to your parents at night, until you can work industriously at writing papers that you hate, until you can keep your room clean, until you can learn what I want you to learn in this little universe that I have given you, I will never let you loose on to the large and grand and wonderful universe that perhaps one day I will let you play in. Be patient.

Is this it? Well... yeah. Today it is.