God is too big to fit inside our heads. Jesus called the Holy Spirit the “Helper” (John 14:26) because the reality is that we can’t understand God without the Holy Spirit’s help. We need the Holy Spirit to help illuminate our minds and calibrate our hearts to understand Him, to relate to Him, to know Him. That God is so big that He can’t fit in our heads is a part of the wonder and mystery of God. This is why doing theology properly requires childlike faith. We have to be willing to come to a place where we can be perfectly comfortable saying, “I don’t know how it’s true, but I know that it’s true.” We have to come to grips with the simple, but world-shaping reality that we are not God. As Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3–4).
That God cannot be contained by the limitations of human logic is why there is mystery, or paradox at the heart of so many of the essential Christian doctrines (i.e., official teachings of Christianity). At the heart of the cross itself is paradox. The death of Jesus was the greatest injustice known to history, and yet through it, God justified the world. Likewise, it is in the death of Jesus that a world that is dead to sin finds life (Matt. 10:39; Eph. 2:1–10). It was also through submission, obedience, and utter weakness that the matchless, saving power of God invaded the world.
Strength in weakness, life in death, and justice through injustice? How can this be? These ideas are contradictory. They don’t compute. They don’t compute because, as the prophet Isaiah says, God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are our ways God’s ways (Is. 55:8–9).
These are not the only examples of paradox at the heart of the Christian message. Jesus himself is a paradox. Orthodox Christology (i.e., understanding of Jesus as the Messiah) teaches that Jesus is simultaneously fully man, and fully God. By definition this cannot be. Humanity, by definition, is not divine; and deity, by definition is not human.
Further still, the Trinity is a paradox. For the Trinity, One, plus One, plus One, equals One. “One,” by definition, is the absence of plurality, yet the Trinity is One God, Three Persons.
Nineteenth century writer G.K. Chesterton argued that the paradox of Christian theology attests to the truth of the Christian message. Chesterton contended that the fact that Christian teachings fall outside of the human reason reveals that, if anything, Christianity cannot be human invention. And, if it is not human invention, then it must be divine revelation.
Paradox underscores the point that because all truth is from an eternal God, there is always a point in which we reach the limits of human reason when doing Christian theology. To the point, Job 11:7 says, “Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?” Once again, God is simply too big to fit into our heads. Chesterton wrote, “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
