Theological Thoughts: Paradox in Christianity

Note: This is not intended to be a theological exposition. It’s just some thoughts I’ve had as I learn and grow as a Christian.

Four years at a Bible college taught me a lot about theology. We studied the character of God, his work in people and history, the nature and application of the salvation he offers us. But in all this, one of the major lessons I learned is God is full of mystery and paradox.

And we as humans don’t like that.

In my experience, paradoxes are frustrating, undesired, and regarded either as an interesting philosophical discussion or as an insult and a reason to dismiss an argument.

When we apply the idea of a paradox to the Bible, people immediately believe you are trying to discredit the authority of the it. This is because people assume a paradox is the same as a contradiction. They’re similar, but there is a difference.

First of all, the basic definition of a paradox is a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true. We think of a paradox as impossible, like a real contradiction, but this definition shows that a paradox is the result when you can’t see the whole picture.

This is all very academic, and I could go into biblical examples of paradoxes like the nature of the trinity, but that isn’t my point. What I want to talk about is the seemingly contradictory nature of God and how he interacts with people.

When you read the Bible, there are so many ways that God comes across as two-faced. He claims to love the whole world, and yet says repeatedly that he hates the wicked (and not just wicked actions). He preaches love and mercy in the New Testament and yet decimated entire cities, including children, in the Old Testament. He says he will supply all our needs, and yet there are Christians in the world starving to death. The Bible talks about his unconditional love, and yet he makes Ananias and Sapphira drop dead for lying.

I could go on with examples from the Bible and from lives today, but I think this makes my point.

There are no answers to these problems, though we try to rationalize them. We try to come up with reasons for what God does. I’ve done this myself. For a class in college, I wrote a whole paper trying to explain God’s command to kill all of the Canaanites, including the children. But that was a temporary comfort at best, from a very academic point of view.

There are times that we can look back at our lives and understand what God was doing, but that’s never the big picture. I don’t understand how God could love us enough to die for us, and yet lets horrific things happen to his people, regardless of what the outcome may be.

There’s a line from Batman v Superman that has stuck with me. Lex Luthor says, “…if God is all-powerful, He cannot be all good. And if He is all good, then He cannot be all-powerful.” There’s a lot of answers to this problem, and I’ve heard most of them, but what does a rational answer mean in the moment when you are the one experiencing the pain and suffering?

And yet, I believe God is all-good, and all-powerful, and unconditionally loving.

This is where we find our paradox.

While we can never understand how this paradox works out, there are a couple points that have helped me understand why it exists and what to do with it.

First of all, the world has been broken by sin. When God acts in our lives, the curse of sin is always a factor. There’s a lot of theological reasons for why God can’t just banish the consequences of sin (and it is not because sin is more powerful than God), though that’s a whole different blog. So sin and its consequences are an ever present reality, meaning nothing in life is as it should be, as God originally created it to be. There is no perfect answer or solution in this world. Sin makes life messy.

The second reason why this paradox exists is because we are mentally and physically stuck in one time and space. We are finite beings. In comparison, God is infinite, not bound by time or space. God is unfathomable, never-ending, far beyond anything we could ever hope to comprehend. This is one reason why many people think the idea of God is ridiculous, because from their limited perspective it is. Everything we know about God is what he has chosen to reveal to us. And with a God that big, I doubt the knowledge of the whole world combined can amount to even a fraction of who he is.

So what seems to us like a contradiction, a paradox, is because we can’t know the whole picture, the whole of God.

What do we do with this then? The best answer I have is trust and lean into what God has revealed to us. He isn’t going to contradict himself, even if we don’t understand it. But at the same time, never lose sight of the fact that he is so much more than we can know. Never put him in a box or limit him. But be careful; we can’t give up learning about God just because he’s unfathomable. Everything we can learn about him is valuable.

And how can we know for sure that what he has revealed is true? Well, that’s the nature of faith, isn’t it?

Secondly, learn to live with the paradoxes and be OK with them. If God hasn’t revealed the answer, then we aren’t supposed to know. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he’s doing.