Dear Posterity,
Over time you will undoubtedly encounter a common criticism of the Cristian faith: the Bible contradicts itself. How can someone believe the Bible’s claims if it’s riddled with contradictions? It’s a good question, and if it’s based on truth, then it’s also based on merit. However, what if these seeming contradictions were something much deeper than what appears at face value? What if they weren’t contradictions at all, but rather something impossibly glorious? While the common, uninformed glance may observe contradictions, the Christian sees the dazzling, astonishing truth in awestruck wonder: paradox.
Paradox: it is the sworn enemy of “balance,” and the central theme that distinguishes Christianity from every other world religion. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam…they all = yin-yang, trying to balance being good enough to outweigh bad, etc. In contrast, “Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy). In short, Christianity combines furious opposites by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.
Balance = muddled compromise, confusion, and disappointment.
Paradox = two things which simply should not go together existing in theatrical tandem; it is adventure, patriotism….in short, LIFE well-lived “coram Deo” (in the presence of God).
Think:
- In the world but not of it
- Jesus = very God and very man…both things at once, love and wrath both burning.
- Love your enemies
- Strength perfected in weakness
- Foolishness confounding the wise
- Saul (“The Christian Killer!”) writing the bulk of the New Testament
- Virgin birth
- Jesus = the lion and the lamb
- The last shall be first…and the list goes on
The idea of this combination is central in orthodox theology. We can all agree that balance in all things is necessary, but the real question is how to keep that balance. This is the problem Christianity solved, and solved in a very strange way: with paradox. Chesterton states, “By defining its main doctrine, the church not only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible only to anarchists.”
Let’s use an illustration of how this paradoxical approach is played out in real life by considering the example of courage. Courage is a strong desire to live taking on the form of a readiness to die. Chesterton beautifully captures the idea in Orthodoxy when he writes:
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever ex pressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life. And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian key to ethics everywhere.
Arming yourself with a healthy appreciation for paradox will equip you to apply diplomacy/political savvy to your world while also preserving your moral compass…an essential resource if you are to engage your sphere of influence in any meaningful way.
I will not steal Chesterton’s thunder by listing the ULTIMATE example of paradox imaginable; you can find it in the pages of Orthodoxy, which just so happens to be the Book of the Month.
With every esteem and respect,
