One argument for the validity of the Christian religion is the number of apparent biblical contradictions and paradoxes it embraces. Why would someone inventing a religion include such paradoxical beliefs as the Trinity, the Deity/Humanity of Christ, and Divine Sovereignty/Human Autonomy? Rather than trying to evade or explain these possible discrepancies, orthodoxy embraces and codifies them. In other words, Jesus needn’t be either God or Man. He was both!
Not only is Christ the central figure of Scripture, He is the epicenter of biblical paradox. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in his book Bad Religion, expounds:
“Christianity is a paradoxical religion because the Jew of Nazareth is a paradoxical character. No figure in history or fiction contains as many multitudes as the New Testament’s Jesus. He’s a celibate ascetic who enjoys dining with publicans and changing water into wine at weddings. He’s an apocalyptic prophet one moment, a wise ethicist the next. He’s a fierce critic of Jewish religious law who insists he’s actually fulfilling rather than subverting it. He preaches a reversal of every social hierarchy while deliberately avoiding explicitly political claims. He promises to set parents against children and then disallows divorce; he consorts with prostitutes while denouncing lustful thoughts. …He can be egalitarian and hierarchical, gentle and impatient, extraordinarily charitable and extraordinarily judgmental. He sets impossible standards and then forgives the worst sinners. He blesses the peacemakers and then promises that he’s brought not peace but the sword. He’s superhuman one moment; the next he’s weeping.”
So did Christ come to bring peace or a sword? Is His kingdom now or then? Is He God or Man, Judge or Forgiver, Lawmaker or Lawbreaker? Whatever your answer, He can’t be all of the above… can He?
This tension is the seedbed for many heresies. The heretic is one who rejects paradox in favor of non-contradiction; he extracts the tensions from the Gospel by crafting a rational, simplified, streamlined Jesus. So to the heretic
- Christ is either God or Man, but He can’t be both.
- Christ is either Loving or Demanding, but He can’t be both.
- Christ is either Egalitarian or Hierarchical, but He can’t be both.
- Christ is either a Peacemaker or a Peace-breaker, but He can’t be both.
Most of the great heresies — Gnosticism, Arianism, Docetism, Manichaeism — involve some attempt at reconciling theological incongruity. What’s interesting is not just that many of these ancient heresies can still be found in today’s beliefs, but how that interpretive method is still used to resolve paradox. In other words, rather than live in unresolved theological tension, we seek resolution through heresy.
Let me give you an example. I recently had a conversation with a friend who happens to believe that God changes, God evolves. This person reached this conclusion based on the Old Testament accounts of God commanding the Amalekites to be slaughtered, compared against the New Testament accounts of Christ telling us to love our neighbors and turn the other cheek. To this individual, these two snapshots of God are contradictory. So they surmised from this that God changes. That the God of the Old Testament has evolved and is no longer a bloodthirsty deity. Jesus was sent by this “more evolved” god.
But this position is not new. The Marcionites of the second century reached a similar conclusion. Marcion was excommunicated by the Catholic Church and branded as a heretic for, among other things, his teaching that the Hebrew God of the Old Testament was a wrathful tyrant or demiurge. As a result, Marcion had a low view of both the Jews and the Old Testament, ultimately compiling his own canon.
During the conversation with my friend, I couldn’t help but feel I was bumping into modern-day Marcionism. Nowadays, It is rather trendy to believe that God is not a God of judgement, but of love, love, love. Some go so far as to downsize (or eliminate) the doctrine of Hell and embrace Universalism. Then we have the so-called “red letter Christians” who highlight and concentrate almost exclusively on the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels, usually to the exclusion of the rest of the Bible. Their canon is not unlike Marcion’s.
Unlike us, however, the early church did something we seem more and more reluctant to do: Call the heretics out.
All that to say, it is rather striking how contemporary religious views that skew away from orthodoxy end up channeling the same old heresies. Even more important is the thinking that causes such skewing. Of course, not all attempts to resolve biblical paradox end up in heterodoxy. Nevertheless, in our desire to portray Christ as loving, we must be careful about discarding clear biblical teachings about judgment and wrath. Sometimes the best way to resolve apparent theological contradiction is not to choose an either/or approach, but a both/and.
I’ve been okay with supposed contradictions and “tension in truth” for a long time. I believe in the balance of these issues because we’re human. We can’t know God fully or understand His ways, so having this tension keeps us from veering off too far to either extreme.
One time a prophetic type in a charismatic church I was attending railed against this idea. “God is what He is! There’s no balance. That’s an Eastern religion ideal.” I have to concede about the Eastern thing, but I still hold that we don’t fully understand God. How can we visualize Three-in-One? We can do analogies, but our mind can’t wrap around it. So – truth in tension.
The whole thing about Eastern religion is rather funny. Christianity isn’t a Western religion, much as the West adopted it. It started in the Middle East, wrapped in Middle Eastern (specifically Jewish) culture. As you study it, you see so many things in common with Eastern ideas, not just the things it has in common with Western ideas and yet it ascribes to neither. When it comes to paradoxes, the East would say that both poles exist equally and separately in the same thing/being (that balance you referred to), and the West would say that they’re contradictory, and cannot exist in the same person/thing. According to the West, there must be two things, one to embody one pole, and the other to embody the other pole.
The Bible takes a third approach: Somewhere right between those two poles, those two ends of the paradox, is where the truth lies. It is whole, complete, and only understandable if you’re willing to look at things through God’s eyes. But, in order to do so, we must give up our own way of looking at things, and that’s a hard thing to do. Well nigh impossible if we like it too much. 😛 🙂
Do you think God smiles to Himself over our constant attempts to put Him in a box by challenging what we don’t, and perhaps can’t understand? Great article, Mike. Thanks for your ongoing challenges to our sometimes stale thinking.
Good analysis.
The paradoxes of God…are the most beautiful thing about Him! Great article.
All good Love Affairs are fueled by mystery.
Bingo. Spot on. Aside from some minor quibbles on the examples of paradoxes, this is exactly on the money. Not much more to say.
I love the Ross Douthat quote you posted. I was reading it thinking, Yep, that’s exactly what Jesus is. That’s why some people have such trouble with accepting Him. He doesn’t fit their expectations. Who wants to worship a God they can fully understand?
Great post. Thanks!
Thank you, Mike. Well said. I found that once I stopped trying to defend Christ’s radical-ness, and embrace it instead, that so much of this made sense to me. I don’t want a cardboard Jesus, or a safe King. I want a God who knows how to behave in any situation, whose heart is consistent, even when His actions don’t seem to be. And if I don’t understand it all, then He becomes all the more wild and fierce to me, something my warrior heart craves! I want a King I can worship, AND a Guy I can hang out with. I don’t want a pale-skinned, sad-faced puppet who only does what makes sense to me… because then I could be God, too. No thank you.
“Then we have the so-called “red letter Christians” who highlight and concentrate almost exclusively on the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels, usually to the exclusion of the rest of the Bible.”
One would think that, if God Himself said it verbally, plainly, and in person, in physical human form, on a subject, it’s kinda important, and becomes a foundation on which to interpret the Bible by, rather than needing it to become something that’s paradoxical.