This article is largely a confession of ignorance. I am the most ill-read theologian on this site, and engaged in various theological discussions based upon the oral and cultural tradition passed down to me as well as the conclusions I reached on my own. I have not read the works of the early church fathers, the musings of the high middle ages, or even most of the bible itself. In fact, I’ve only read the entirety of Ruth and Revelations. Why those books? Because that’s where I ended up when opening randomly. So most of my knowledge is secondhand. The common stories picked up through cultural osmosis, and the arguments of the past picked up through others. Why then do I feel entitled to speak on such a topic? Well, I’m a Protestant. More seriously though, most people are not well read on their own religion. They will hear what their parents and neighbors say, sometimes what a priest or preacher tells them, and that’s it. The common faith will deviate from what the seminary academians protest to be the truth. So I put forth the perspective of the layman into this discussion.

Much of my logic or interpretation will come across as literal or simplistic, and I don’t see the problem with that. Overcomplicated esoterica is the domain of the cloister, and not the community. The big question is – can I even speak to the mind of the divine? When I posed this question to myself I came back with a simple answer. If God created Man in his own image, then one can look for the echoes of the divine in the human. These might be wild guesses, or just plain wrong, but no worse than the wild guesses of others. From this I first infer two things – God must be able to think (obviously) and has emotions. Given the instances of people making him angry and incurring the Wrath of God, we can safely conclude that these are a given.

In addition to getting angry, I also argue that God can get bored. This leads to my first big conclusion. It would make more sense for God to have automated the universe. What do I mean? Rather than sitting there manually making sure everything happens every minute of every day, it would be simpler to have set up rules, systems and processes to make sure these things happened without the need for divine intervention. What this means is that science and faith are not in opposition to one another. Discovering the rules by which the world works and using that knowledge to better our circumstance is simply uncovering the divine order. The fact that we’ve uncovered the mechanism by which X or Y happen which appear miraculous doesn’t invalidate faith, it merely deepens our understanding of the complexities of creation.

This ability to understand is one of the biggest gifts we’ve been given. That and free will. The question of free will versus predestination is a big one in theological circles from what I gather. I am firmly and unabashedly on the side of humans having free will. Why? Because evil exists. How does that follow? It comes down to this – when making the decision to create the world, God had the choice to make a world of puppets who would do as told and dance to the celestial tune and follow the order. But they would still be puppets. The alternative, to grant his creations free will, came with the same risk that freedom always does. Some people will misuse it. Freedom of all kind is messy, but the world of puppets is boring, and the puppets would never attain true greatness of their own. So, just as a parent must eventually let their children make their own mistakes, he gave us our mental devices and let us make use or misuse of them.

On the predestination side, I often hear arguments that God knows who is going to be saved and what our future holds. This just doesn’t hold much water for me as an argument against free will. God knows because he is smart enough to have figured it out beforehand. Him being able to predict what choice you will make does not make it less your choice. This may come as an uncomfortable thought to some, because it shifts a lot of responsibility for themselves and their own future onto their own shoulders. But, you were gifted with a great many tools to deal with the circumstances you are in – from your own mental and physical capabilities, to your family and friends, to the empathy of complete strangers in the most dire of times. I find the idea that I cannot influence my circumstances to be the far more distressing proposition. No, we were created with the ability to think and to act, and to deny that is to insult the giver of those gifts.

Up to this point I have addressed abstract fundamentals. This is because these fundamentals are where my conviction is the strongest. As we move into the elements of doctrine and dogma, I am less well-grounded. The entire concept of the Trinity eludes me. I get the Father and the Son, but the Holy Spirit never had a place in the folk traditions I was raised in, except as an entry in the Lord’s Prayer. So you may call me a bad Christian for not getting such a common fundamental element, but no one else in my household and community did either. I only bring this up because I am coming up to the concept of Salvation and Charity.

The idea of sin being bad is easy – sinful acts cause harm to yourself or others. Sinful thoughts do not necessarily lead to sinful acts, and you can deny these impulses through exercise of your free will. But other than not wanting to be hurt or hurt others, what incentives are there to deny these impulses? Well, it goes back to that question of a world of puppets again. While there was a model of behavior God wanted out of his creations, his choice to give free will meant he had opted not to force it. So he set up a series of rules and systems, this time in the form of incentive. If you follow the rules you will receive a reward. If you choose to be awful, you will receive your punishment. While this focuses on deeds and behavior, I pose this question – in what way would a man who struggles with his demons and impulses his entire life but contains them and acts generously and nobly any less worthy than the man who simply had little in the way of impulses to smother? How you behave towards yourself and towards your fellow man, especially in private, reveals your inner character, that is, how you choose to utilize your free will.

How you behave when no one is watching leads me to the topic of Charity. There are degrees of charity, and I generally regard the more selfless manner to be the superior, but accept that good can be had from the lesser charities. Now, degrees of charity all contain the element of cognizance. The benefactor must be aware that they are being charitable for it to matter. While the base principle might be tortured to say that accidental charity is the purest form, if the benefactor doesn’t know he is being charitable, it says nothing about his character. So that leaves the highest possible form of charity the anonymous charity. Helping another without them knowing you are the one doing it, or possibly even knowing that you have done it. You receive no earthly recognition, but do it because that is who you are or because it is the right thing to do. The next highest would be quiet charity where you provide aid, and the recipient knows it came from you, but you ask for nothing and don’t feel the need to crow about what you’ve done. Again, acting because it is right. Beyond that we move into the venal charities where you begin to express the sin of pride, proclaiming to the world what a good person you are for the aid you have given. This continues down a spectrum of making the situation about yourself instead of aiding the other until you reach a level of performative charity where you are signaling your virtues while not actually providing any aid. An example of an act of performative charity would be an activist “raising awareness” of a problem, but reveling in the attention generated. At best, someone else more charitable might act, but most of the time, people are well aware of the problem.

All that said, I will not denigrate sending of thoughts and prayers if these provide emotional balm to the recipient. Sometimes, it is all you have to give, and providing moral support can bolster those in troubling circumstances. You’re not making it about yourself, which is what matters in matters charitable.

This article has come out in a form unlike the mental drafts I had gone through, and there was one more matter I kept wanting to address that doesn’t organically fit – arguing with a dead man. One dead man in particular – Augustine of Hippo.

Now, going back to my confession of ignorance at the start, I have not read his doorstopper ‘City of God’ nor his earlier writings. But the man’s arguments influences how many people approached their faith, and introduced them to a lot of bad ideas. You see, by the time Augustine became the theologian he is famous for, he had been beaten down by life. His mother had forced him to give up his beloved Concubine of many years in order to free him up for a political marriage that failed to come to fruition, then his son died at the age of fifteen, his mother died on the way back to North Africa, and finally, he was seized by the people of Hippo and forced to become their Bishop. That’s right, he didn’t choose to become a Bishop, they locked him up until he agreed. Augustine was a gifted rhetorician, well trained in that art, but he was also a bitter, broken old man whose view on life had gone past “the glass is half empty” to “the water is poisoned.”

I do say this partly to explain why I disregard his conclusions, but also to explain why his views on the divine were of a particularly cynical form of predestinationism. From what I can understand, the crux of his argument’s foundation is “the moral cannot fathom the mind of the divine.” Which he then uses to explain why his construction of God is so cruel. This may be a strawman born of misunderstanding via the secondhand sources I know him by, but I admit I do not have the time or inclination to dig deeper into his rhetoric.

The two specific line items I even bothered to bring up Augustine over were Clerical Celibacy, and the Elect.

I cannot find an earlier account of the idea of the Elect, so I will blame Augustine for now. For those unfamiliar, it is the idea that God has already picked who is going to be saved, they cannot do anything to deprive themselves of this salvation, and no one else can do anything to get into that group. It fits strongly into the predestination box, but to me it is ass-backwards. God knows who is going to be saved because he knows who is going to be a good person, not because he has selected them beforehand. Your fate is still in your own hands.

Augustine did not come up with the idea of clerical celibacy, that was another Roman. But he and his arguments were what gave the idea momentum. The idea, from the moment I heard it just struck me as wrong. After all, the very first instruction given by God was “Be Fruitful and Multiply,” – an admonition against indolence and an exhortation towards procreation. Why should the clergy, theoretically the most faithful of his servants (stop laughing) abstain from marriage and parenthood? I think it boils down to people misinterpreting things to conclude that anything which brings pleasure must be bad. Because denying other impulses which would bring earthy pleasure is also good, so denying all pleasures must be superplusgood. This is a reduction ad absurdum. There are wholesome pleasures in the world and it is not sinful to enjoy them appropriately. Going to excess or losing yourself to these impulses is what is wrong. Moderation and appropriateness are the key.

I don’t have any other dead theologians to strawman, and I’ve covered the basics. So I’m going to wrap this up here.