The prudent thing in theology is never to go looking for paradoxes but wait until you bump into one, as you inevitably will.
—George B. Hall, “D. M. Baillie: A Theology of Paradox”
Cheryl’s letter made my day.
Responding to a journal article I had written about preaching biblical paradox, she quickly moved from words of appreciation to the issues my article raised that were still vexing her. She wrote, “How can God still work his plan in my life when my free will keeps getting in the way and messing things up? How can he ‘restore the years the locusts have eaten’ when I am the one that invited those locusts to come and devour my life? How can he ‘work all things together for good’ when I keep getting in there with my free will and messing with his plans? On a larger scale, how can God work out his plan in the universe when men and women still have a free will to do their own thing apart from God’s will?”
Good questions all! How human free will and God’s sovereignty—two equally valid biblical notions that seem constantly at odds with each other—fit together has plagued the best minds Christianity has produced. Cheryl did what many over the centuries have done: she sought out other opinions. “I emailed several of my friends and asked for their input on this question. Along with some very good answers, I also received an answer of ‘You think too much.’ This answer bothered me a great deal, because in some respects I think the body of believers has been conditioned not to ‘think too much.’ We have been told (or it has been implied), ‘Don’t think too much about things that can’t be explained.’ ‘Just take it by faith.’ ‘Don’t ask too many questions; you’ll make God look bad.’ And so on.”
I regularly encounter the same responses. Having pieces of truth scattered across the table without knowing where they fit in the puzzle can be threatening. It is doubly threatening when others tell us all the pieces should fit together (and that their puzzles have been assembled for years!). When you stop to consider, it is ludicrous to think that the God who gave humans the gift of intelligence could really be worried about looking bad when we ask questions. Yet earnest Christians often consider reason an enemy of faith. And if there is anything that gets reason riled up, it is paradox, defined by philosopher Gordon Graham as “anything which is intellectually objectionable but nevertheless unavoidable.”1
Cheryl’s wrestling with the paradoxical could have led her to conclude, “It’s not worth the effort! Next time, I’ll just swallow my questions.” But she refused. “What I came away with from my struggle was not an attitude that says, ‘Well, I’ll never do that again’ but rather a greater sense of how awesome God is and a strange sort of comfort stemming from the fact that I could not get my arms around this complicated concept.”
It is Cheryl’s “strange sort of comfort” that both intrigues and affirms me, for I have felt it as well. It is the strange comfort of knowing that our earthly journey resembles the switchbacks that climb Pike’s Peak, however much we might wish it to be a straight interstate across Death Valley. A good deal of the perplexity, inconsistency, tension, and wonder of our lives, and the Christian faith itself, stems from paradox. Our very inability to get our arms around it releases us from our need to control it. As Cheryl says, we gain “a greater sense of how awesome God is.”
“If I Had Not Struggled . . .”
Cheryl ended her letter to me with these words: “I finally was able to rest in the fact that ‘there is a God and I am not he.’ What peace I gained from that knowledge! However, if I had not struggled, I never would have come to know that peace and comfort, as well as a deeper knowledge of God.”
Wrestling with Christian paradox, we reengage intellectually, and reexperience emotionally, that “there is a God and I am not he.” We are spelunkers who, having spent many weary hours inching our way along a horizontal tunnel still close to the surface, suddenly happen upon a vertical shaft dropping straight into the dark, unknown depths. It looks foreboding. But if we risk our time and careful attention, climbing down step by cautious step, the deeper glories of the cave may be revealed in all their splendor. It was through her struggle to hang on to the paradoxical tensions of faith that Cheryl was led to the strange comfort that “there is a God and I am not he.”
Living with such tensions is increasingly how I seem to spend my days. As I listen to people, I find I am not alone. While many inside and outside the Christian community yearn for a simple either/or world—the black hats (villains) and white hats (heroes) become easy to pick out as they ride toward us—real life often resides in both/and tensions. Such a nuanced view finds little support in a political culture that dumbs down complex issues to thirty-second sound bites, or in some churches that do the same with fill-in-the-blank sermon outlines.
During the height of the Cold War, Soviet scientist and human rights activist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”2 Our tendency to divide good and evil into mutually exclusive social or political polarities is rampant today. New York Times columnist David Brooks suggests we need leaders like Abraham Lincoln, who was a great president because he made room within himself for self-correcting tensions: a passionate advocate, but able to see his enemy’s point of view; not afraid to wield power, yet aware of how much was beyond his control; extremely self-confident, but at the same time extremely humble.3
Dare we suggest that truth might sometimes reside within the tension created by opposing polarities? Dare we propose that the best policy choices may reside somewhere between Democrats and Republicans, left and right, MSNBC and Fox News? Have we lost our ability to live within (or even recognize) such tensions because we spend most of our time in echo chambers reverberating with the predispositions of people just like us?
In the Christian arena, can we admit tensions within our faith and risk being labeled unfaithful, unbiblical, humanistic, or secular or being told, “You think too much”? Is it possible to affirm right and wrong, moral absolutes, and biblical authority while also suggesting that truth sometimes resides between opposing absolutes? Ability to live within such tensions, polarities, and ambiguities, while not allowing them to paralyze our thinking or acting, is urgently needed today.
Tension in the Bible?
We tend to forget that living within such tensions is a major part of the biblical landscape. Think about some basic truths all Christians say we affirm:
• We see unseen things (2 Cor. 4:18).
• We find rest under a yoke (Matt. 11:28–30).
• We reign by serving (Mark 10:42–44).
• We are made great by becoming least (Luke 9:48).
• We are exalted by being humble (Matt. 23:12).
• We become wise by being fools for Christ’s sake (1 Cor. 1:20–21).
• We gain strength by becoming weak (2 Cor. 12:10).
• We triumph through affliction (2 Cor. 12:7–9).
• We find victory by glorying in our infirmities (2 Cor. 12:5).
• We live by dying (John 12:24–25; 2 Cor. 4:10–11).
A. W. Tozer writes that a real Christian is an “odd number” because a believer “empties himself in order to be full; admits he is wrong so he can be declared right; goes down in order to get up; is strongest when he is weakest; richest when he is poorest; and happiest when he feels the worst. He dies so he can live; forsakes in order to have; gives away so he can keep; sees the invisible, hears the inaudible, and knows that which passeth knowledge.”4
Reflecting on the brutal Serbian fighters who murdered, raped, and pillaged paths of destruction through his native Croatia, theologian Miroslav Volf narrates how he lives in tension: “My thought was pulled in two different directions by the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God’s Lamb offered for the guilty.”5 Volf wonders how he can remain loyal to the demand of the oppressed for justice yet at the same time uphold the forgiveness that God freely offers to the perpetrators of these horrendous crimes. He concludes that he is “divided between the God who delivers the needy and the God who abandons the Crucified, between the demand to bring about justice for the victims and the call to embrace the perpetrator. I knew, of course, of easy ways to resolve this powerful tension. But I also knew that they were easy precisely because they were false.”6 Many of us are familiar with such tensions in the Christian life, although we are not always so honest in naming them or admitting that the easy ways to resolve them are counterfeit.
But beyond our personal experience, our most cherished anchors of Christian doctrine themselves exist within paradoxical tensions that the most astute minds of the past two thousand years have struggled to adequately express, let alone resolve:
• God is three and yet one—the paradox of the Trinity.
• Jesus Christ is completely God and yet completely human—the paradox of the incarnation.
• Salvation is a free gift of God’s grace and yet somehow does not become personal for me until I respond in faith—the paradox of divine election and human free will.
These tensions must not be resolved, for, as any church historian will attest, the major heresies of the past two millennia involve emphasizing one side of these paradoxes to the detriment of the other. Jesus just a little more divine than human, or just a tiny bit more human than divine, is heresy; the true Jesus is the grand paradox, equally and indivisibly God and human. Both practically and doctrinally, Christians must live within such tensions if we are to remain faithful to the biblical revelation, which is far more paradoxical than we sometimes admit.
Solving Problems or Addressing Mystery?
The Western world has been successful at solving problems. Theologian John Leith suggests our “success has been the source of temptation to believe not only that all problems can, in fact as well as in principle, be solved but also that life itself can be understood and handled as a problem.”7 When we think this way, there is no room left for mystery, even God’s mystery.
Unlike problems, mystery is unsolvable both in principle and in practice. Problems can be objectified and scrutinized, broken down into manageable pieces for detailed study. Mystery defies objectification. There is no way to get outside mystery to analyze it from an objective vantage point. I can step outside a chemical reaction; I cannot step outside myself in my experience of mystery.
While the appropriate response to problems is study, hard work, and the application of techniques, the appropriate response to mystery is awe and wonder. Once solved, problems can be handled by anyone who learns the correct formula or technique. No formula can be passed from person to person to “solve” a mystery, however. Mystery confronts each of us uniquely and invites exploration rather than mastery. Mystery is inexhaustible. “The more mystery is recognized, the more mysterious and wondrous it becomes.”8
Life without mystery is sterile. People pound away at computer terminals all day, then gather for Druid worship by the light of the moon. The New Age movement spawned a whole new category of people who are “spiritual but not religious.”9 With half-suppressed smiles, Christians watch their contemporaries seek transcendent reality in the most ludicrous ways. But these efforts are far from comical; they are tragic. British pastor and theologian John Stott asks whether Christian worship today offers “what people are craving—the element of mystery, the ‘sense of the numinous,’ in biblical language ‘the fear of God,’ in modern language ‘transcendence’?”10 In today’s spiritual marketplace, why do we Christians not already have the market cornered on mystery? Should we not be warning people to “accept no substitutes”?
An Open Door into God’s Mystery
We have arrived at the purpose of this book, which is to reclaim and embrace biblical paradox as a means by which we can more fully experience the mystery of God. The essence of paradox is the tension created by bringing seemingly opposite ideas into relationship with each other, and such tensions are prominent throughout Scripture. What I hope to offer are ways we can recognize these paradoxical tensions, reflect on them, and ultimately harness them to open up new horizons in knowing God. Embracing such mystery, I maintain, offers us a strange sort of comfort. In this first section, we will continue to explore the concept of mystery and how it is endemic in Christian life and, particularly, in God.
Part 2, “Serious Playfulness,” looks at how Jesus often addressed a serious theme with a playful paradoxical saying, such as, “Whoever wants to save his life must lose it.” Jesus is a master at using paradoxical tension to reframe important issues and prod our spiritual imagination. This first-order paradox can ultimately be resolved as we learn to see in new ways.
Part 3, “The Tuning Fork,” suggests that some biblical paradoxes exist in harmonic tension, just as the twin tines of a tuning fork vibrate in unison to create one pure note neither can produce by itself. Such second-order paradoxes often express the mystery of our relationship with God.
Part 4, “The Two Handles,” begins with my grandfather digging postholes in the hard Nebraska soil only when his hands were on the ends of the opposing handles of his auger. This genre of paradox creates its characteristic tension by keeping two contrasting ideas (like my grandfather’s hands) as far apart as possible. This third-order paradox often expresses the mystery of being. Table 1 summarizes these three orders of paradox.
THREE ORDERS OF PARADOX
| Serious Playfulness | Tuning Fork | Two Handles | |
| Key Image | Picture Frame: reframes reality as we look through it | Tuning Fork: both tines must vibrate together to create a new note | Auger: performs best when hands are far apart on opposite handles |
| Characteristic Tension | Startles us but ultimately dissolves | Keeps polarities in vibration together | Keeps polarities separate and distinct |
| Representative Examples | • Sayings of Jesus • Kingdom parablesa • Great reversalsb • Faith versus works |
• Justice/love • Transcendent/personal • Election/free will • God’s kingdom |
• Humanity • Scripture • Trinity • Jesus Christ |
| What do we see as we look through it? | Mystery of life in God’s kingdom | Mystery of relationships, God’s relationship with us and ours with God | Mystery of being, God’s being and our being |
a Parables of the kingdom (e.g., Matt. 13:24–30, 31–32, 33, 44–46, 47–50).
b Great reversals (e.g., Mark 9:35; 12:10; Matt. 20:1–16; Mark 9:40; Matt. 12:30; 25:29).
TABLE 1
These three orders (or perhaps genres) of biblical paradox are each distinguished by a characteristic tension. My goal in these sections is not to look at biblical paradox (and especially not to try to solve, justify, or rationalize it) but rather to look through it to better see what it reveals—a holy, mysterious, awesome God. The strategy is inductive—slowly letting the paradoxes do their work in us. Finally, part 5, “The Shell,” offers a deductive counterpoint on why we must engage biblical paradox in our spiritual lives and how to do that.
As we begin, I admit that paradox can be unnerving. While our reason usually first detects paradox, our reason cannot solve it. Some fear that paradox in the Bible equals irrationality. They want clear answers with no waffling or wavering, details spelled out to the last subpoint. Others prefer to approach God’s mystery through other avenues: the emotional, the ineffable, the mystic, the charismatic—too much thinking leaves them cold.
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spent his life analyzing the use and meaning of language. When faced with mystery, he concludes, “My whole tendency . . . was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. . . . But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind.”11 This is true. As we try to express our paradoxical existence—and especially God’s mystery—we do indeed “run against the boundaries of language,” and that can easily put us off. Yet Oswald Chambers superbly articulates the other side: “The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.”12
Yes, most of us have moments when it would be far easier if someone (pastor, guru, talk radio host) spelled out for us exactly what to believe. Yes, the Christian faith can deteriorate into getting from point A to point B, mindlessly following the robotic instructions of a GPS. And yet . . . there is a strange sort of comfort in encountering a mysterious God who is far bigger, grander, and more awesome than we imagined. This is our goal.
Reflection Questions
1. When was the last time you experienced thoughts or feelings similar to those expressed by Cheryl? How did they arise? What, if anything, did you do about them?
2. Have you found peace, as Cheryl finally did, in the fact that “there is a God and I am not he”? If so, how?
3. Does the prospect of exploring biblical paradox sound enticing or scary? Why?
4. “Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great” (1 Tim. 3:16). Does this verse present a red light or a green light to you in exploring the mystery of God? Explain.