On Preterition

[hankhank at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

On Thu, 19 Sep 1996 LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU wrote:
> Andrew comments:
> "The randomness theme is                   
> important but remember that election and preterition are also
> arbitrary - no notion of Karma in Calvinism."

> True enough, strictly speaking, but different places and generations twisted
> the theology in various directions, so that there is at least one strain of
> Calvinism--and a fairly influential one at that-- that stipulates that
> prosperity can be an overt sign of God's grace and the gracee's election.
> Hawthorne plays around with these doctrinal differences in THE SCARLET LETTER.

Yes. Yet nowadays the overt sign may be different, I mean after Wall Street 
1929, at least. Maybe Americans/Puritans do not want to see prosperity as 
the Sign any more, because you may lose your earthly belongings in one night.

My hypothesis:  nowadays it is the fitness of your body that passes for the 
Sign to Americans. It is *the lack of something* - fat - that makes you one 
of the Elect. One can notice here the relatively strict division between fit 
people and those who have given up. So many Americans don't know what to think
of my quite small - but still recognizable, as Mikko Keskinen for one knows - 
beer belly, this jolly supplement.  

Heikki