Centralia, Pennsylvania. Never heard of it? I hadn’t either, until I borrowed a copy of Weird Pennsylvania, a new book which explores the bizarre stuff that happens in our beloved Commonwealth. Recently, Centralia has created quite a buzz. In fact, the recent horror flic, Silent Hill (roughly based on the same-titled video game), was inspired by the town of Centralia.
So what can we learn from this odd, near-ghostlike town in Eastern PA? Well, theologically speaking, Centralia is a picture of what Christians call Original Sin.
When many Christians talk about sin, they are really talking about behavior (cheating, being mean, lusting, taking staplers from work, etc.). Such folks are–in Centralia-speak–concerned with cracked asphalt, dead forests, and emptying houses. And these people think a great deal about how to deal with these persistent problems. The solution is a Remake Centralia Campaign, with proposals to fill up the steaming cracks in the streets, uproot the dead trees and plant new ones, and start flashy advertising campaigns to get people living in Centralia once again. All the while the hidden fires continue to rage.
But when people equate sin with bad behavior, they make a tragic mistake. In the 15th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus talks about the nature of Sin with people that believed that if people could purify their behavior, they would become holy and God would bless them because of it. Here’s what Jesus says about this perspective:
“What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him ‘unclean,’ but the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean.’ For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man ‘unclean’.”
Thus, the real problem does not come from ‘outside’ a person–from bad influences and rap music and body piercings. Original Sin resides in who we (already) are, and the cure must start in that place if we are to be truly helped. But because many people (and many Christians) fail to understand the depth of the problem, they often give us cheap cures that don’t really work. They tell us that we simply need to clean up our acts, be more disciplined, more cautious, make more boundaries, and forgo the stapler stealing. But what happens when we can’t, or don’t, or won’t? What happens when we can’t control our stapler stealing, or our anger, or our resentment, or our self-righteousness, or our lust, or ourselves? What happens when the Remake Centralia Campaign fails? 
COMMENTS
7 responses to “The Theology of Centralia, Pennsylvania”
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Loved this. Thanks you!
I have seen the smoke coming out of the earth. Like a modern rendition of Dante's Inferno, and that same smoky devastating fire resides in each and everyone of us. BUT thanks be to God.
Sweet post
Rock on. This will be a sermon illustration someday.
Thank you for this.
And grace upon the land and former (and the dozen or so current!) inhabitants of Centralia, PA.
Ethanasius, Thanks for the post – a brilliant analogy! No band-aid solutions. Tell me how this works: "If we trust in the radical cure of divine grace, we may find that the surface, along with the soul, becomes well again." Is it just deeper and more radical than if we “clean up our acts, be more disciplined, more cautious, make more boundaries, and forgo the stapler stealing”?
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for the comment!
I think the long-lasting cure and true hope for curing our 'stapler stealing' has to do with the heart, as biblically, the heart is the source of our actions. And the only thing that can begin to soften the heart is being the recipient of the Gospel message over and over and over again. That is the Spirit's means to deal with our core. And the primary way this happens is through the church's ministry of (Christ-centered) Word and Sacrament. Now, finding a church that will regularly give us that is harder than it sounds, but is really necessary for us if our hearts are to be changed (and our actions, following).
Ethanasius,
I'll happily underscore all of that! Was just testing the water a bit: Sometimes "if" – clauses ("If we trust in the radical cure of divine grace, . . .") have a way of stealing the Gospel, laying some sort of necessity back on us, most often in Protestant circles the necessity of our believing or trusting, understanding faith and trust somehow as things we do or that are expected of us. But here you have landed us in the church on the receiving end of sure and certain means, delivered us from reference to ourselves and so have delivered the Gospel as the Gospel. Hats off!
Hi Jonathan, you got it. That's more of what I meant. Didn't mean to put a conditionalism in there, though grammatically, it seems that I did! The offer of Grace needs to be stringless in order to engender real change; otherwise, conditionalism 'kills the love', as it were.