Previous - 174. God's Presence
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p204 ... You may have the feeling that you are on trial in this life, that you have to work and achieve and make your mark to earn a good verdict... But as Tim Keller put it, in Christian thought, the trial is already over. The verdict came in before you even began your presentation. That's because Jesus stood trial for you. He took the condemnation that you deserve.
...A little confused here, since, as I understand it, Calvin and the Puritans wouldn't entirely agree with this. You work hard in this life to show that you are among the Elect. (Though it's true that the outcome is already decided.) The Protestant Work Ethic would seem to demand a bit more effort than the Catholic or Russian Orthodox traditions. Though I can see the Grand Inquisitor selling this concept of "surrender and receptivity to God." This is how we surrender our freedom which is too much for us to bear.
The problem with the willful mindset is, as Jennifer Herdt put it in her book Putting On Virtue, "God wants to give us a gift, and we want to buy it." We continually want to earn salvation and meaning through work and achievement. But salvation and meaning are actually won, in this way of thinking, when you raise the white flag of surrender and allow grace to flood your soul.
... Augustine wants you to adopt this sort of surrendered posture. That posture flows from an awareness of need, of one's insufficiency. Only God has the power to order your inner world, not you. Only God has the power to orient your desires and reshape your emotions, not you.
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p205 ...It's not that worldly achievement and public acclaim are automatically bad, it's just that they are won on a planet that is just a resting place for the soul and not our final destination. Success here, acquired badly, can make ultimate success less likely, and that ultimate success is not achieved through competition with others.
We're about to get to the part where we get Augustine's assessment of human capability, an assessment it is hard to argue with for the most part. And yet... Let's say there was a scientific cult that asked me to surrender my own will to the guidance of Quantum Field Theory. I'm quite fond of QFT (especially QED, but don't bring up QCD or I'll walk out) and it has tons of experimental results to support it that a belief in some particular life after death totally lacks, but it is still just a theory and I'm open to alternatives or refinements of QFT as it is currently understood. So I'm holding on to my will and my reason even in the face of my inability to do the math. My point is that a belief in QFT is relatively low risk compared to Christianity. There are really only two ways Christianity pays off in the end: If they have the whole life-after-death story right and you are among the elect (in either the Calvinist sense or simply in the sense of a person who wins a trip to Heaven); or, if you are such a basket case that the only way you can live this life with any sense of peace is to surrender control of your life and let others direct you.
It's not quite right to say that Augustine had a low view of human nature... It's more accurate to say that he believed human beings are incapable of living well on their own, as autonomous individuals -- incapable of ordering their desires on their own. They can find that order, and that proper love, only by submitting their will to God's. It's not that human beings are pathetic; it's just that they will be restless until they rest in Him.
Sounds pretty pathetic to me, but this is also the lesson of Annie Lamott and Victoria Sweet (in God's Hotel). So I'm not prepared to say he's wrong, I just don't like that he's right and would prefer to keep my own freedom... even, I admit, if it means many others are unhappy having to deal with their own freedom. And there's a political corollary to this as well, which is becoming more and more obvious, that the average citizen is not particularly capable of making reasoned political decisions. And here we come back, again to National Socialism and Communism, forfeiting ones individuality to the nation or class.
Random
SF recently changed vendors for the city wide bike rental program. The sidewalk stations where you pick up or drop off the bikes look about the same, though I suspect there are minor differences, and the new bikes are re-branded with "Ford" prominently displayed. I've read a bit about similar systems in China where the bikes do not have dedicated parking places but can be left anywhere. Most of these bikes include a "GPS" chip so you can use a phone app to locate the nearest available bike and then rent it. I can see advantaged to either of these systems, the one where, like here, you know where the bikes are going to be; and the ones like there where you can leave the bike anyplace. Actually the latter system would be more convenient since you skip the step of going from where you drop off the bike to your actual destination.But I also read recently about yet another Chinese bike rental firm that may be the ultimate startup bad idea. They decided to save a little money by not having the GPS chip to report the location of the bikes. Think about that for a second.
There are no dedicated stands and no way to locate where the last person left the bike. The reason the company went out of business, you will not be surprised to learn, was that a huge percentage of their bikes disappeared. Either stolen or just left in random places.
I'm 100% confident there were enthusiastic marketing meetings and a rosy business plan for this company. And the scary part is that, unlike with a big con (which this could be confused with, since someone must have put up some venture capital for this) it would seem like the people selling this idea must have actually believed that it had some chance of success. I've been part of some pretty far fetched meetings with investors, where we were aware that everything would have to go perfectly for the business plan to generate a profit, but I just don't see how this particular pitch didn't come to a moment of silence where everyone was thinking "But how will anyone know where these bikes are?"
Magical thinking always looks puzzling from outside the magical event horizon, but I would love to know what these geniuses were thinking.
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