On Predestination

One day in church I had to read the lesson from the First Letter of Peter (2:2-10), which contained some theology I simply don't like.

To you then who believe, he (Jesus) is precious; but for those who do not believe, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner," and "A stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall." They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. -- 1 Peter 2:7-8 (NRSV)

The common interpretation in other Christian circles for this sort of thing is Predestination, the idea that from before the beginning of Time, God had already decided who would go to heaven and who wouldn't. It is a dangerous theological concept because once someone is convinced they are saved no matter what, then they feel they are free to do whatever they want and give in to their vices because ultimately their moral failings do not matter; they will be rewarded in heaven.

I do not like reading this sort of thing in church. I consider my job as a lector to be, for a moment, a teacher. I look for the lesson in the reading and this one bothers me. The stumbling line is a quotation of Isiah 8:14:

He will become a sanctuary, a stone one strikes against; for both houses of Israel he will become a rock one stumbles over—a trap and a snare for the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

I suspect this quotation is a contextectomy, but that's another topic.

Predestination bothers me, and I struggled to understand this passage. However, I remembered Chryssipus and the metaphor of the cylinder. The basic idea runs like this: The soul is like a cylinder. What gives the cylinder a push does not cause it to roll, but the nature of the cylinder causes it, once impressed upon, to roll. Therefore what we assent to does not cause our consequent actions, but our nature determines our consequent actions.

I got to thinking about these cylinders. A rigid cylinder, made of hard plastic, will roll and every little stone along the path will cause it to jump and jitter and get jolted. A rough path could even throw the cylinder off the path entirely with only a few bumps. A more flexible cylinder, say something like a balloon filled with water, will keep its path better because it can roll over the small bumps without pausing. So the inflexible soul will constantly be jostled by life and redirected, and the flexible soul can continue on the path it has chosen to follow.

Then the size of the cylinder came to mind. My flexible balloon-like soul could still be stopped by a large rock on the path, unless the balloon itself was large enough to roll over the larger rocks as well. A larger rigid cylinder would also be stopped by these large rocks, unless it was rigid enough to simply crush them. So the lesson I'm learning is to have a large flexible soul, not a small soul and not a rigid soul.

Flexibility seems easy to understand, but how does one grow the soul so that even the largest impediments do not bother us? Magnanimity, generosity, and kindness are the first things I thought of. We are here for other people, after all.

The rigid soul sees things "clearer than they really are". Some people interpret everyone else's actions through a simplified lens of their own philosophy. Stoics are subject to the same flaw, even though we have instructions not to do so:

Somebody is hasty about bathing; do not say that he bathes badly, but that he is hasty about bathing. Somebody drinks a good deal of wine; do not say that he drinks badly, but that he drinks a good deal. For until you have decided what judgement prompts him, how do you know that what he is doing is bad? And thus the final result will not be that you receive convincing sense-impressions of some things, but give your assent to others. Enchiridion 45 (Oldfather)

We cannot make fair judgements about other people's actions unless we know that person's own judgements that led them to that action. In other words, be magnanimous, be kind, be forgiving.

To feel affection for other people even when they make mistakes is uniquely human. You can do it, if you simply recognize: that they're human too, that they act out of ignorance, against their will, and that you'll both be dead before long. And, above all, that they haven't really hurt you. They haven't diminished your ability to choose. Meditations 7.22 (Hays)

This resolves my initial problem. What does Peter mean when he writes some are destined to stumble? They disobey not because God is making them disobey, but because their natures, their rigid inflexible souls, will not let them hear the Truth as we see it.