On Christian Paradoxes
September 26, 2021
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
I suppose we all know what a
paradox is. Still, when working with the meaning of a word it is wise to look
the word up in a dictionary to make sure one’s understanding of the word isn’t
entirely off base and to make sure that the author and the reader understand
the word in the same way. The google.com search “define paradox” gives these as
the word’s first definitions:
·
a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory
statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be
well founded or true.
·
a statement or proposition that, despite sound
(or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion
that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory.
·
A situation, person, or thing that combines
contradictory features or qualities.
We can summarize these definitions, I think, by saying that
a paradox is an assertion that two things are both true though to normal
reasoning they can’t both be true at the same time. A paradox says that two
things are both true that to our normal way of thinking cannot possibly both be
true.
There’s a fun if a bit silly
example of an apparent paradox in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The
Pirates of Penzance. In one scene in that farce three characters sing of a
paradox, or at least what they call a paradox. They sing:
How quaint the ways of Paradox!
At common sense she gaily mocks!
The supposed paradox they’re singing about is that one them,
a young man who has lived for twenty-one years, was born on February 29, a date
that comes up only once every four years. He therefore has a true birthday only
once every four years. He’s lived for twenty-one years, but if you count his
age according to the number of his birthdays he’s only five and a little bit
more. He’s both twenty-one and five at the same time. Ha ha ha, they sing. ‘Tis
a most ingenious paradox, or so they think.
Now while this song about a most
ingenious paradox is a lot of fun, the thing they’re singing about isn’t really
a paradox at all. The apparent contradiction that this man is both twenty-one
and five plus a little bit more at the same time arises only if you ignore the
fact that you arrive at the numbers twenty-one and five by counting different
things. If you count the number of years he’s been alive, say count the number
of years from his birth year to the present yer, you get twenty-one. If you
count the number of his actual birthdays in those twenty-one years you get
five. There really is no paradox here at all.
That’s not how it is with the true
paradoxes that are the foundation of the Christian faith. They really are
paradoxes, and there are several of them. Though it only hints at something
that is a foundation of our faith, there’s a paradox in Psalm 8 that is a good
place to start. The psalmist of Psalm 8 first writes: [1]
When I look at your heavens, the
work of your hands,
the
moon and the stars that you have established,
what are human beings that you are
mindful of them,
mortals
that you care for them? Psalm 8:3-4.
When this psalmist looked up into the night sky he felt so
small that he wondered how God could possibly care about him and for him.
Perhaps you’ve had that experience too. I know that I have. What we know of the
nature of the universe that the author of Psalm 8 did not know makes us feel
even smaller. We know in a way that the ancients did not that we inhabit a
wholly insignificant speck of dust orbiting around a perfectly ordinary if
rather small star near the outer end of one of the spirals of an ordinary
spiral galaxy that is just one of billions upon billions of galaxies, each of
which contains billions upon billions of stars. Compared to the vastness of
God’s creation, how can we not feel hopelessly small and totally insignificant?
We can’t, and often we don’t.
The paradox here is that though we
know we are so small as to be seemingly meaningless, we also know that God is,
as the psalmist says, both mindful of us and cares for us. We humans don’t just
feel tiny compared to God’s creation, we also feel God caring for us and loving
us (or at least on occasion some of us do). I have. Have you felt God caring
for you? I hope so. The psalmist of Psalm 8 did. He expressed God’s mindfulness
of him this way:
Yet you have made them a little
lower than God,
and
crowned them with glory and honor.
You
have put all things under their feet....Psalm 8:5-6.
Here two contradictory things are both true. We are so small
as to be meaningless, and God treats us as if we weren’t small at all. A
paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.
And that’s far from the only or
most important paradox in the Christian faith. Here are some others:
·
God is both totally transcendent and present
with us on earth at the same time.
·
God is both totally other than we are and
relates to us as one of us.
·
Jesus Christ was both fully human and fully
divine at the same time.
·
God is Three, and God is One, at the same time.
We can easily explain away Gilbert and Sullivan’s supposed
paradox about the age of someone born on February 29. We can’t explain away any
of these much more profoundly true paradoxes. We just have to accept them as
paradoxes.
Why? Why is our Christian faith
grounded in things that don’t make sense, in realities that can’t both be true
yet are both true? I think God gives us paradoxes on purpose. Contemplating a
true paradox can get us to move beyond our ordinary, worldly ways of thinking
so we can at least to some extent experience the transcendent, totally
different reality that is God. God gives us foundational paradoxes because our
usual, rational, worldly ways of thinking limit us. They lead us to reject what
we think can’t be true though it is profoundly true. God tries through paradox
to get us beyond the limitations of created existence and to open us to the
utterly different realm of God. Or at least God does that to take us to limits
of our creaturely existence from where we can see in new ways.
Let me use the Christian doctrine
of the Trinity as an example. At least since the late fourth century CE the
Christian tradition has taught that God is Trinity, that God is Three in One. That
is, God is both Three and One at the same time. The doctrine of the Trinity so
doesn’t make sense to us that people are forever trying to explain it in a way
that makes it make sense. I’ve heard people assign different functions to the
different Persons of the Trinity. They say that the Father is the Creator, the
Son is the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit is the Sustainer.[2] Or
they’ll say that sometimes God is the Father, at other times God is the Son,
and at still other times God is the Holy Spirit. Every time I hear someone
offer some rationalization of the Trinity I tell them that’s a heresy. I have
told people that anything you say about the Trinity that makes it make sense is
wrong, is indeed a heresy. I always also assure people that it’s OK to be a
heretic. After all, heretics are usually more interesting than orthodox people
anyway. Still, any explanation that makes the paradox of the Trinity not a
paradox is just wrong.
So if making the Trinity make sense
is always wrong, why do we have it as a foundational tenet of our faith? Heaven
knows enough people who at least started out as Christians have jettisoned it. That
was what Unitarianism was originally about. The Trinity is irrational, so some
Christians, in the beginning mostly from my own Congregationalist tradition, ditched
it and made God only One, hence Unitarianism. Unitarianism arose
precisely in the so-called Age of Reason in which people reduced truth to the
rational, which is what Unitarianism did with the Trinity. Some Unitarians are
a type of Christian, but to me we have the Trinity as a foundational tenet of
our faith precisely because it doesn’t make sense, and it isn’t really possible
to be truly Christian without it.
Because the Trinity doesn’t make
sense, more than any non-Trinitarian understanding of God can the Trinity
preserves the mystery and the otherness of God. It reminds us that, as we read
in Isaiah, God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and God’s ways are not our ways.
God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts and God’s ways are higher than our
ways. Isaiah 55:8-9. We humans love to reduce God to something we can get our
heads around, something we can easily understand, even something we can
control. The Trinity says no to all that, and that is its great virtue.
Anything our little human minds can truly understand must be something finite.
It must be finite because our minds are finite. They operate on information
they receive from what we take to be a world outside of ourselves. That world
is a world of finite time and space. It had a beginning, and it will have an
end. It is limited physically to the three dimensions we perceive when we
observe it. The Trinity reminds us that God is not so limited.
Our minds can conceive of something
higher than our experienced reality. That’s what faith does. That’s what
theology does. We can strive for connection with the transcendent reality that
we call God, but that connection will always remain something we strive for not
something we will ever have in its fullness. We strive for it, we long for it,
we understand it as best we can from our experience of our limited spatial and
temporal reality. We even experience that transcendent reality reaching out to
us, touching us, caring for us. Yet we unavoidably have that experience within
the limitations of our created existence. If we think we’ve understood or
captured God in some way that transcends our created existence we’re just
wrong. There is a saying from Taoism that applies here. Taoists say “The Tao
you know is not the Tao.” We Christians must never forget that the God we know
is not God. God is and must always remain ultimately unknown. The
incomprehensibility of the Trinity preserves God’s ultimately unknown essence.
It preserves the mystery of God, for that which we cannot reduce to the level
of our human rationality always remains mystery. It’s not mystery of the kind
we find in a murder mystery where all is revealed at the end. Rather God is a
mystery we will never solve and that indeed it is impossible for us ever to
solve. The mystery of God remains always mystery.
God is a mystery we cannot solve,
but God is also a mystery with which we try to connect. God is also a
mysterious reality that experience as trying to connect with us. In that sense
God as Trinity is not static. God isn’t some mass that just sits there never
doing anything. God is dynamic. God is a verb. God is constantly in motion. The
doctrine of the Trinity preserves the dynamism of God in a way a purely monotheistic
conception of God without the Trinity ever can. Trinitarian theology uses the
word perichoresis to describe that dynamism. Perichoresis comes from Greek
roots and means “to dance around.” The Persons of the Trinity, Three and One at
the same time, constantly dance around, in, and through each other all the
while remaining one God. No, it doesn’t make sense. Each Person of the Trinity
is wholly God, and God is whole only when all three Persons are together. No,
it doesn’t make any sense. It is paradox. It’s true, but it’s not supposed to
make sense; and indeed it doesn’t. I hope that you can come to see that that is
its great virtue.
All the paradoxes of the faith are
there for an important purpose. Perhaps we can get at that purpose this way.
Zen Buddhism has a concept called a koan. A koan is a statement on which the
practitioner meditates, but it’s not supposed to make sense. The most famous
Zen koan is “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” We could say of a koan, in
the words of Gilbert and Sullivan, “at common sense she gaily mocks.” The
purpose of meditating on a koan is precisely to get the practitioner beyond
common sense, to break the practitioner free from our worldly constraints and
open her or him to a much greater reality. Think of the Trinity, the
Incarnation, and the other Christian paradoxes as Christian koans. They are of
great value precisely because they make no sense. They stand our usual ways of
thinking on their heads. They are there precisely to make us think differently,
to think much bigger than we usually do.
So let us celebrate our Christian
paradoxes, our Christian koans. Let’s let them do for us what they are there to
do. Let us not defeat their mission by trying to make them make sense. They
aren’t supposed to make sense, and that is why they are so important and so
valuable. They are there not to make sense but to open our minds to the
infinite, transcendent, yet immediately present reality of God. So let’s just
let them do that, OK?
[1]
The text attributes the psalm to David, but scholars tell us that we don’t
really know who wrote any of the psalms. The attribution to David is probably
honorary only.
[2] I
know all the objections to those traditional names of the Persons of the
Trinity. Yes, as some feminist theologian once said, they make God two men and
a bird. Still, I have yet to find truly useful alternatives to these names. So
I use them and hope that you understand that I know full well that God is not
male. Nor is God a bird.
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