Biblical Paradoxes (and Why I’m Sticking to Them)

Biblical Paradoxes (and Why I’m Sticking to Them)
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The Bible tells us in several places that the Lord takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked and that He also calls the wicked to repentance. This seems to make perfect sense…that is until we read somewhere else verses that  imply the Lord’s total sovereignty in determining the fate of every human being for all eternity. From these latter verses comes the entire doctrine of Predestination, a view held by many millions of Christians today. But how can a God who” takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked” choose to make them wicked, as the pure “Predestinationalist” teaches?

I bring up this seeming conundrum not to prove that Arminianism trumps Calvinism (I’ll leave an exhaustive debate on that subject to someone else) but to point out that the Bible sometimes appears to teach things that are contradictory to each other. I think most thoughtful believers try to hold these things in tension, and view them as paradoxes, because they believe that the Bible cannot contradict itself and that some aspects of meaning in the Scriptures are beyond human comprehension. I would count myself among those who think along these lines. It seems to me that mysteries we cannot completely grasp are inherent to a book that was ultimately authored by a God we cannot completely grasp either.

That said, I understand why some Christians cannot and will not believe in paradoxes that to them appear more like contradictions. But it seems to me that such individuals really have only one choice left to them if this is what they believe about the Bible as a whole. They must choose to go with all the verses on one side of the question and effectively disregard those on the other. At the very least they must try to make those other verses somehow back up what the ones they primarily want to believe.

Ultimately I think this approach to biblical interpretation is less than fully honest, but that doesn’t mean I do not sympathize with the motives that bring people to it. To be truthful, at times, trying to hold paradoxes in tension is a wearying thing. At such moments the temptation to go all one way or the other can be quite strong. Many if not most human beings greatly prefer certainty over mystery, especially when they are talking about subjects with eternal ramifications and, of course, the Bible is full of verses that address these subjects.

In the case of the most important issue of all I must admit to having occasionally tried to make a set of complimentary verses about the “mechanics” of eternal destiny absolutely authoritative in my mind. It has yet to work because immediately other verses come to my remembrance that, at minimum, appear to very strongly contradict the ones I’m trying to use to create some kind of airtight systematic theology on this crucial question.

What is interesting is that when this happens I tend to feel more relieved than frustrated. I’m not completely sure why this is but I think it may come down to the fears that an extreme position on either side of the Calvinist/Arminian divide often have left me to deal with. If everything is utterly predestined by God what if I’m not one of the elect? If everything is a matter of free will what if I get so angry with God that I choose to forfeit my salvation? You see, neither theological extreme gives me any peace. You may chalk that up to my somewhat obsessive-compulsive nature, but the fact remains that I somehow feel better about God, and thus more secure in His love, when I admit to not knowing exactly how all this works. It gives me the opportunity to simply leave it all to the One Who went to the cross and trust Him with my destiny, and exactly how it comes about. Because He is God I think I can count on Him to know what He is doing when it comes to the eternal future of the Human Race, including me.

So, yes, I’m sympathetic to those who crave certainty and choose one or the other side to get some felt measure of it. It is just that I cannot quite bring myself to give up clinging to those annoying paradoxes when two sets of inerrant Scripture passages that seem to contradict each other (even in context) come before me.

This may sound overly simplistic, and even a bit superior, but maybe I’d rather just have Jesus than a “theological certainty” which may suddenly become not so certain on the day we stand before God and know Him even as we are fully known. At this point in time, anyway, I’m willing to wait until that day for the definitive answer to all of my questions.