To be a Christian is to believe in a long list of mysteries. Let me explain. When you think about it, so many of the essential doctrines of the Church are paradoxes. A paradox, by definition, is a contradiction. For many this reality is a problem. For others, this reality is joyously liberating. Let me attempt to set our thinking about Christianity as a faith in contradictions within its proper context.
In an age of reason, the trend is understanding seeking faith. Few contest that even this current post-modern climate is comfortably framed by the age of reason (which historically finds its origins in the Enlightenment). There are more volumes on Christian apologetics for laypeople today than ever before in the history of the Church. People are reading much more today on defending the faith than on biblical studies or biblical languages. In fact, defending the faith in academic context has become the platform for validating Christian faith among thinking people for the past several decades. Its our noble desire to present the Christian faith as a reasonable one.
Undoubtedly, the human desire for our lives to “make sense” is a natural one. It is intuitive to our humanness to seek answers and understanding. Our desire is for our lives to resonate with truth and truth is certainly not contradictory. Truth is logical. Truth has explanatory power over our lives. This is exactly the reason why we wish to discover truth and embrace it. It is an exciting moment when we learn something new and have a sense of illumination regarding the true nature of things. We explore, we discover, we seek illumination. We’re created this way.
What’s intriguing, then, is that one of the central pillars of truth is the existence of mystery. To find ourselves fully in the process of true understanding, we must recognize and embrace the fact that there is something quite mysterious about reality. There are dimensions of life that lose their beauty when explained. There are things that beg not to be groped by human reason but enjoyed and appreciated as mysterious.
These two juxtaposed realities themselves make up a paradox. All of this goes to say that orthodox Christian thinking, orthodox Christian reality, to be all that it’s meant to be, to be balanced and to maintain orthodoxy, must presuppose before all else the very real limits of human reason. Step one in doing theology within the Christian tradition is understanding that we cannot fully understand; understanding that God cannot fit inside of our heads. The moment we have God comfortably situated in our minds is the moment we’ve become heretics by creating a false god who is not large enough to Be beyond human comprehension.
It is for this reason that since before birth of the New Testament church, Christian theologians have understood themselves to be guardians of the Mystery. Heresy largely results from reductionism. That is, reducing the tremendous mystery of the divine into humanly comprehensible concepts. The presupposition of heretics has often been, “In order to believe such I much understand such.” To the contrary, orthodoxy responds with, “I believe it precisely because it’s beyond my comprehension.” To reject the mystery of Christian doctrine is to likely reject the holiness of the Divine. The problem with this is that God cannot forfeit holiness and maintain his divinity. In other words, theological reductionism not only reduces theology, it reduces God into something less than deity. Our humanness that drives us to explain away paradox becomes heresy; the forfeiture of one reality that is in binary opposition to the other. The funny thing is that those two realities in and of themselves are reciprocally determinant! Without one we have not the other. What is hot without cold? How can hot be the absence of cold? Is it not true that the absence of cold leaves us without a means to define hot? It is essential, even to logic itself, to embrace the mystery of paradox. So here we have our context for protecting the mystery of Christian theology and understanding
Right theology, then, will always pivot on paradox. And this is precisely why to be a Christian is to believe in a long list of contradictions.
In following posts will be a treatment of the various paradoxes making up orthodox Christianity.
