{"id":45271,"date":"2023-07-29T08:51:30","date_gmt":"2023-07-29T15:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=45271"},"modified":"2023-07-29T08:51:30","modified_gmt":"2023-07-29T15:51:30","slug":"the-angel-and-the-hermit-and-church-governance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2023\/07\/the-angel-and-the-hermit-and-church-governance\/","title":{"rendered":"The Angel and the Hermit, and church governance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Gesta Romanorum<\/em>, a medieval collection of moralizing stories, includes the tale of a hermit who despaired at the world\u2019s injustice<\/a> and resolved to abandon his calling. An angel appears to the hermit and brings him along on his divine errands: the angel smothers a soldier\u2019s infant child, steals a precious goblet from a kind host, casts a pilgrim from a bridge to his death, and gives the precious goblet to a stingy, unwilling host. The hermit, horrified, is certain that the angel is of the devil. The angel, however, explains: the soldier had grown miserly and covetous since the birth of his child, but now would better his ways; the kind host had taken to drinking from the precious goblet, but now would become sober; the pilgrim died a good Christian, but if he had walked farther would have committed grievous sin; and the miserly host will go to hell.<\/p>\n

The point of the story isn\u2019t that we should commit random acts of assault and larceny, or that the scales of justice will be balanced in the afterlife. Instead, the tale expresses (in a particularly medieval way) a basic insight about decision-making. Strictly speaking, it\u2019s impossible in most real-world situations to judge the soundness of a decision by its outcome. Did you pick the right major? Marry the right person? Accept the right job offer? Sorry, there\u2019s no way to rewind history and try each option to find out where they would have led. Even worse, soon after every major or minor decision we make, further decisions made by us and others and impersonal events make it impossible to simply attribute cause and affect (at least without the help of an angel). To know if a decision was right or wrong, you would have to observe every possible outcome of every decision made by every person who might potentially impact your life. And even if we could do that, there\u2019s no guarantee that a God\u2019s-eye view of success would correspond to our own criteria.<\/p>\n

Think about it in terms of buying a lottery ticket. You might win, and the money might solve all your financial problems and let you develop to your full potential. Or the money might enable you to develop truly self-destructive habits that will harm everyone you know. You probably won\u2019t win, but maybe the thrill of contemplating possibility and hope will help you learn to embrace risk and try new things. Or one losing lottery ticket will send you down a path of debt, deceit and addiction. Or your boss will see the lottery ticket on your desk and take it as a sign that you\u2019re ready for a high-risk, high-reward role in the organization. Or your boss will take it as a sign that you\u2019re a compulsive gambler and an intolerable risk.<\/p>\n

Did you make the right decision? You can\u2019t know for certain just by observing the outcome at the current moment in time. Even the best plans fail, and that failure doesn\u2019t mean that another plan would have been better. Or your success might have had nothing to do with your foolhardy, slapdash plan. You might have hit that half-court shot when your team was up by 2 with 20 seconds remaining, but it was still a dumb thing to do.<\/p>\n

What you can do, however, is ask yourself: how good or bad is my decision-making process? Am I taking into account important information? (The odds of winning the lottery are astronomically low, and I have bills to pay.) Do I re-evaluate my decision-making process to improve it? (Since I have bills to pay, I should lower the amount I\u2019m spending on spontaneous purchases like lottery tickets.)<\/p>\n

Which brings us to church governance. It\u2019s tempting to look at history or current events and say: The Church was mistaken when it did X, or the Church\u2019s plan for Y was successful. But the awkward truth is that no (mortal) person knows what catastrophe was averted by an uncomfortable solution, or what blessings were forfeited by some seeming success. I\u2019m particularly skeptical about criticism of what the Church should have done in response to historical fascism, or should do today when dealing with Russia or China; the ugly truth is that every option is bad, with horrible potential consequences lurking around every corner. The same is true of the Church\u2019s response to the Covid-19 pandemic: every nation on earth, with access to the best medical experts known to man, failed in some way, and if the Church at least managed an outcome where most of us don\u2019t hate the rest of us, we\u2019re probably doing okay<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The point of the story from the Gesta Romanorum<\/em> is that we should use our best judgment while maintaining intellectual humility about the outcomes, think carefully about our decision-making processes \u2013 and seek divine aid in decision-making. If there is any way possible to get input from an omniscient source even a small fraction of the time, our decisions will be much better than they would be otherwise (I feel like this is a point Frank made about 10 years ago).<\/p>\n

You can look at the history of Church organization as a gradual but consistent effort to shift somewhat more toward informed, deliberate decision-making (through councils and consultation structures or better access to historical sources and archives) and away from individual decree, and this is overall a good thing. At the same time, and consistent with its origins, the Church has consciously retained seeking and obtaining divine knowledge as the central goal of its decision-making processes.<\/p>\n

Does it happen? I\u2019ve been the guy submitting the name of what seemed like the only available person for a calling, and the guy getting called because I was available and willing (I was not exactly an inspired or inspiring choice for a Cub Scout leader; the best that can be said is that pack meetings started and ended on time). But I\u2019ve also been in the room when everything clicks into place and a seemingly intractable problem is solved, and I\u2019ve personally seen decisions made and confirmed by inspiration in ways that seem too blunt and obvious for a God who supposedly works in mysterious ways; sometimes, it seems, He is happy to club us over the head until we believe. I accept the Church\u2019s claim to be led by inspiration because I\u2019ve seen it happen. The cynical take, that it\u2019s all for show to shut down arguments, is simply false. How often does inspiration play a role in decisions? At least often enough that even a nobody like me has seen it multiple times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Gesta Romanorum, a medieval collection of moralizing stories, includes the tale of a hermit who despaired at the world\u2019s injustice and resolved to abandon his calling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45272,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45271\/revisions\/45272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}