I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The epigraph to this chapter has stimulated my imagination since my university days. In the Christian life, paradox exemplifies such complexity. Settling for easy answers, trite slogans, and simplistic formulas is often our default position. Even so, I have been arguing that exploring these paradoxical complexities offers rich rewards. These final chapters offer hints or suggestions of the simplicity we might discover on the other side of such complexity. In this chapter, I want to ask, How does pressing into this paradoxical complexity renew our hope?
Hope already has a whiff of the paradoxical about it. Hope combines something tangible and concrete with an uncertain pathway or timeline in arriving. (If we unequivocally knew how to get there or exactly when we would arrive, hope would be superfluous, as Chicago Cubs baseball fans know only too well!) As we saw earlier, biblical faith combines knowledge and trust; so does hope. To see how exploring the mystery of God through paradox might stimulate and deepen our Christian hope, a small detour is first required.
How Do We Know?
There are three basic approaches to how we know. One approach, often called realism, assumes that reality exists “out there” (not just in my mind) and I can know it by interacting with the world around me. For example, scientists discover truth about the world by gathering observable evidence and following the scientific method in analyzing it. For much of the modern era, science has been the premier method of producing what has been called “objective” truth. Ever since René Descartes kicked off the Enlightenment era by proclaiming, “I think, therefore I am,” this view has had supreme confidence in human reason to get to the truth of anything.
But what if reason is not the impartial and reliable guide to truth the modern world has assumed? In the last third of the twentieth century, this supreme trust in reason came under great scrutiny by a second approach known as postmodernism. (It is named for what it wants to replace: Enlightenment-inspired modernism.)1 Here truth has no reality beyond the mind that believes it. Language becomes a key issue, for language is the means by which we construct (a key postmodern term) our own realities.
In the late twentieth century, Michael Polyani, Hungarian physicist and philosopher of science, demonstrated that human subjectivity plays a critical role even in science. All of us, scientists included, are not simply reasoning brains (as Descartes imagined) but complex beings including emotion and intuition. Thomas Kuhn, in his seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showed that scientific breakthroughs often happen through subjective leaps of human intuition called paradigm shifts.2 In other words, the scientist’s own paradigm (or worldview) determines how he or she approaches the data. For example, a social scientist spent years recording observational data about Navajo Indian life before realizing he had imported alien (Caucasian) concepts into his data. To properly understand what he observed, he needed to look at the data through concepts intrinsic to Navajo culture.3 In the history of science, examples abound of an accepted worldview trumping data pointing in other directions (for example, clinging to an earth-centered solar system when the data clearly indicated otherwise).
Objective and subjective, observation and theory, thus bleed together. Michael Polyani’s important conclusion is that knowledge does not exist independent of a knower.4 In other words, there is no vantage point of pure and neutral objectivity where a scientist (or anyone else) can stand to evaluate anything, whether a different culture, the shape of the universe, or the claims of the Bible. We all bring our subjective predispositions into the process of knowing.
If we agree with Polyani that human subjectivity conditions how we know, the postmodern critique of modernism’s claim to pure, impartial reason is correct. The modernist assumption to know reality with 100 percent clarity is now often labeled naive realism: there is still genuine reality “out there” (hence realism), but because of human subjectivity it is naive to assume that I (or anyone) conceptualize reality exactly as it really exists.
If we place naive realism and postmodernism on opposite ends of the “how we know” spectrum, we can now mention a third approach midway between them. It is called critical realism. Veteran missiologist Paul Hiebert describes its essence: “It is a form of realism, for it assumes a real world exists independently from human perceptions or opinions of it. It is critical, for it examines the process by which humans acquire knowledge and finds that this knowledge does not have a literal one-to-one correspondence with reality.”5 In this third approach, one can still believe “absolute” truth is out there; however, no one can claim to know this truth “absolutely”—that is, in a one-to-one correspondence with reality.
In his excellent study Worldview: The History of a Concept, David K. Naugle offers a simple baseball analogy to help us better understand these three ways of knowing.6 A baseball umpire practicing naive realism might say, “There’s balls and strikes, and I call them the way they are.” In other words, every pitch really is either a ball or a strike, and this umpire can see that reality without error and with 100 percent clarity.
A postmodern umpire replies, “There’s balls and strikes, and they ain’t nothing until I call them.” In other words, a pitch could be in the dirt, but if he wants to call it a strike, it’s a strike! This umpire’s personal perception of each pitch (what he calls it) determines its reality.
Last of all is the critical realist umpire, who proclaims, “There’s balls and strikes, and I call them as I see them.” In other words, every pitch is in reality either a ball or a strike, but he cannot call each one with 100 percent accuracy; he does the best he can (calls them as he sees them) while maintaining humility regarding his limitations.
A Way into Complexity . . . and Hope
With apologies for this philosophical detour, these three views of how we know allow us to make some observations about paradox and Christian hope.
A naive realism position has little incentive to explore the complexity of paradox. Here one’s understanding of Scripture is in one-to-one correspondence with the reality Scripture describes (“I call them the way they are”). With such 100 percent clarity, there’s not much complexity to worry about (and also nothing much to hope for).
What about the opposite position? In postmodernism, we become the authors of our own truth; we can sand off all the rough edges of the paradoxical complexities of Scripture until they smoothly fit together however seems best to us (“They ain’t nothing until I call them”). Here again, there seems to be less need for hope. I judge naive realism and postmodernism both to settle for the simplicity on this side of complexity.
Readers have by now guessed that I believe critical realism best handles the complexity of biblical paradox. Because it is realism, it assumes the absolute truth of God behind the complexity. But because it is critical (“I call them as I see them”), it acknowledges that we now see “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12 KJV). The critical realist makes an enduring pursuit of the simplicity on the other side of complexity, tempered with great humility about the torturous path he or she must travel through complexity to get there.
I have found that the crucible in which a “living hope” (1 Peter 1:3) is forged is often the tension between a “sure and certain” outcome and an uncertain pathway toward it. Think of the tuning-fork and two-handled paradoxes already discussed; such a living hope is created when neither side of the tension—outcome nor pathway—is muffled or diluted.
Let me risk an example of one of the most divisive issues of our time: the church’s response to homosexuality. Much of the energy surrounding this issue seems to have coalesced around the opposite poles of total rejection and total acceptance. Negativity, even hatred, expressed by people coming from a total rejection position has been deeply harmful to homosexuals. Would the Jesus who welcomed tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners into his intimate fellowship (Matt. 21:31–32) not welcome homosexuals into his fellowship today? I am sure he would. And if so, how can we in the church not offer the same care and human dignity to people Jesus would welcome? On the other hand, I cannot go the way of total acceptance, for I believe that Scripture does not support same-gender sexual relations. I am somewhere in the middle. From conversations with those promoting total acceptance or total rejection positions, however, it is clear they assume that no middle position can (or should) exist.
I definitely find myself on a journey into complexity, along the way pleasing few and finding even fewer allies. Can I look forward to any simplicity on the other side of this complexity? I see it only in Jesus himself, who compassionately welcomed the woman caught in adultery and defended her to her morally superior accusers, but then privately directed her to go and sin no more (John 8:3–11).
How winsome is the simplicity of Jesus’ blend of compassion and conviction! Living within this tension is beyond me, like a balance beam I can walk on for only a step or two before falling off one side or the other. How do individuals, congregations, even denominations walk this fine line that came so effortlessly and naturally to Jesus? I have no idea. But seeing it in Jesus gives me hope. I am certain there is simplicity on the other side of this complexity; I am utterly uncertain how to get there. Perhaps Jesus’ Spirit can create the simplicity of his compassionate conviction and his convicting compassion in a few human beings, and they will help the rest of us imagine a third way between what are for me two inadequate options. This is my hope.
What about other, less emotionally fraught issues where Christians might find hope in wrestling with complexity rather than choosing between polar opposites? One is certainly the tired debate of evangelism versus the promotion of social justice. We might also include supernatural healing versus modern medicine, spiritual counseling versus psychological counseling, allegiance to country versus allegiance to God, and so on. Once we open our imagination to the many tensions that exist within our normal Christian experience, every reader might easily generate his or her own list. I expect our lists might be longer than we anticipate.
Parker Palmer, one of my backcountry guides into paradox, writes in his introduction to The Promise of Paradox, “Contradictions, paradox, the tension of opposites: these have always been the heart of my experience, and I think I am not alone. I am tugged one way and then the other. My beliefs and my actions often seem at odds. My strengths are sometimes cancelled by my weaknesses. My self, and the world around me, seem more a study in dissonance than harmony of the integrated whole.”7
We might not all claim Palmer’s words for ourselves, although they certainly sound familiar to me. But I am more interested in his next two sentences: “Perhaps contradictions are not impediments to the spiritual life but an integral part of it. Through them we may learn that the power for life comes from God, not from us.”8
As we consciously journey into the paradoxical complexity of life with God, whence comes our hope? Perhaps it begins with conscious ignorance, the byproduct of any engagement with mystery. Before we took biblical paradox seriously, we could rest in the simplicity on this side of complexity, perhaps confident that our views had a one-to-one correspondence with reality. But as we step into complexities that paradox reveals (whether by choice or by life events), we, who once thought we saw God’s plans and purposes with absolute clarity, now realize we do not.
It is this move from naive realism to critical realism that stimulates our hope. We need to hope more than we did before. There is a certain end (the simplicity on the other side), but an extremely uncertain pathway toward it. As Parker Palmer says of his own wrestling with paradox, we learn that the power for life comes from God, not from us. Our hope now can rest only in God.
Reflection Questions
1. What is your reaction to the quotation, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity”?
2. Which position best represents you on the “how we know” spectrum—naive realism, critical realism, or postmodernism? What, if any, difference do you think this makes?
3. Do you agree with the author that the critical realist position is the best one from which to understand Christian hope? Why?
4. How do you react to Parker Palmer’s contention that contradictions in life show us that the power for life comes from God and not from us?