Chapter 5

Keeping Things Simple, But Not Too Simple

Early one morning, several good-humored theology students were waiting for me at my office door. Feigning genuineness, they told me they had spent several evenings talking together about how to help me improve my teaching. With perfectly straight faces they said that, overall, I was a good teacher but that I had one very distracting habit. Their good news was that my habit is easily broken: I must practice conducting my classes with one arm tied behind my back. With mock seriousness, I asked them why. Their answer: “Well, then you wouldn’t be saying as often as you do, ‘On the one hand . . . but on the other . . . .’” At semester’s end, we enjoyed another laugh together over my underlining in red ink the same phrase wherever it occurred in their final exams. It delighted me that the students came to use it often, and that they so clearly understood why they needed to.

On the one hand . . . and yet, on the other . . . Beyond a certain point, most people become frustrated with phrases like this. As one parishioner expressed it: “Figuring life out gets overwhelming, and I just want things boiled down to the essentials, like when they were this way, period, and that was that.” She said this to me poignantly during a Bible Study, as she gently chastised me for worrying her with complicated questions to which I did not give simple enough answers. The purpose of this chapter is to show how to give appropriate respect to people’s heartfelt cries for simplicity and certitude in matters of faith and at the same time (yes, and on the other hand) to encourage their opening themselves to the deeper realities to which faith witnesses by dwelling patiently in the inescapable paradoxes that accompany understanding faith in its fullness.

This-Or-That/Yes-Or-No, and Get to the Point Right Now

Many Christians fail to appreciate the fullness of faith because they cling tenaciously to a very limited and limiting perspective, that in God’s world things go either this way or that, decisions are either right or wrong, beliefs are either true or false, and only the godless, the profligate, and the academics are confused about any of this. The plain fact is, however, that things, people, situations, and systems often defy all our best efforts at definition in clear and simple terms. Life’s complexity makes its appearance in interestingly different ways, e.g.:

Yes, it’s a nice house in many respects. Beautiful kitchen, large bedrooms, clean and tidy. Small lot, though, no family room, needs some work. But it’s in our price range. Guess we’re going to have to think some more about what we can give up and what we can’t.

I just don’t know what to think about that guy. He can be the most focused person in our meetings, and then drift off into never-never land when we begin to zero in on strategies.

As your therapist, I know you want me to tell you that your ex-husband is nothing but a self-centered, manipulative exploiter whom you can’t count on. Well, what I can tell you is that you’re definitely partially right. The trouble is, he’s also a pretty sensitive guy when it comes to caring for his aging parents, providing for your kids, and staying out of trouble.

And the complexity compounds rapidly, e.g.:

Kinda strange how things work sometimes, isn’t it? A lot of people are out of work, and we’re saying that society is better off when everybody who can work does work. But the experts keep telling us that some unemployment makes for a healthier economy. Here’s an idea: you work, and I’ll make the economy healthier!

Everybody is supposed to obey the law, right? But we let this guy off because he was on drugs and couldn‘t help what he did. Am I missing something here?

So you’re telling me that the basic stuff of the universe is both particle-like and wave-like? What am I supposed to do with that?

Behind all of these statements, mundane and extraordinary, are people’s persisting struggles to hold together features, characteristics, values, and ideas that appear both not to fit together well and yet somehow to be essential parts of a larger whole. A house can be the “right” house for someone, without being right in every respect. An employee or spouse—as well as a friend, neighbor, extended family member, casual acquaintance, and even an enemy—can be reliable in some settings and unreliable in others. Some people’s not doing good old fashioned hard work may be better for the economy than everyone’s fulfilling the work ethic perfectly. Everyone is accountable for his and her actions, but some seem more and some seem less accountable than others. The most solid building blocks of the universe are also like perturbations in a void.

Reality is usually more complex and confusing than it first seems to be and than people always want it to be. Because this is so, the words, phrases, sentences, and symbols that we use in order to describe what we believe to be real often defy categorization in the simple logic of This-And-Not-That, or of Not-That-But-This, or of A-Thing-Is-What-It-Is-And-Nothing Else, e.g.:

What am I going to do? I can’t live with him, and I can’t live without him.

With the kids where they are in school, this is the very worst time to pack everybody up and take that assignment in Hong Kong. It really is hard to say whether what they experience over there will be worth the disruption. And then there’s the issue of stalling out on the promotion ladder if I don’t go. That can affect my whole family big time down the road. Wow. Anything you do could be just the right thing or just the wrong thing.

Every time I think we may be making at least some progress, something awful happens somewhere that didn’t have to happen, and I’m back wondering whether we’re really going anywhere, or whether it all comes down to just the “same old, same old.”

There is an important lesson to be learned from listening to people talk in these ways, and it is that, sooner or later, describing how things really are will require using more than just one hand. “On the one hand, and yet, on the other . . . .” It will require using a very different kind of language than that of ordinary description. As the next section shows, it will require using the language of paradox.

Making Friends of Paradoxes

From coffee klatch exchanges of unfiltered gossip all the way to scientific conferences on highly technical research, people share many kinds of feelings, information, and ideas that convey multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings all at once. We say one thing, and then something different, and then something else besides, all the while struggling with the awareness that what we are saying may not be fitting together well. One very effective lay caregiver told me recently that his care receiver was becoming very impatient with his therapist. “All I get from that guy,” the care receiver bemoaned, “is ‘well, maybe, and then again maybe not; yes and no; this, but that too.’ How am I supposed to get better listening to this kind of stuff?” I liked very much the way the caregiver responded: “It’s frustrating not getting simpler answers. But do you suppose things might be at least a little more complicated than you’d like them to be?”

Frequently, things are indeed more complicated than we would like them to be, and so is the language that we must use to express the complexities. One way to describe this state of affairs is in the words of a faculty colleague whom I remember fondly from the first college I served: You know, many things about life are just so, so, paradoxical, aren’t they? My colleague was a highly respected accounting professor, with a carefully cultivated distaste for ambiguity and loose ends both in people’s financial records and in their lives. His choice of words, therefore, came as a surprise, so much so that I lapsed for a moment into the gentle chiding mode we had come to enjoy together: “I thought guys like you lived to get things all tied up in neat boxes, and here you are, all of a sudden talking about paradoxes!” He smiled politely, but immediately went on to elaborate on his remark:

I put this word back into my vocabulary because I began to appreciate how many connections there are between things that either we miss altogether or just perversely keep separate. “Paradox” says this better than any word I know—ideas going together that we don’t normally think about together. Ok, now here’s where I really get weird. I’ve been making a verb out of the word. It’s like, life is always “paradoxing” us.

In my colleague’s newly discovered sense of the word “paradox,” all of the statements cited in the previous section of this chapter become good examples of not only a “both-and logic,” but also of the paradoxical character of what we try to say coherently about our most important experiences of life. The closer we get to bedrock descriptions of how things are and are not, “really,” every statement we put forward suddenly begins to draw to itself feelings and thoughts that look for all the world to be mutually incompatible, forcing us to re-think, again and again, our every effort to get at clear, that’s-the-way-things-are descriptions. But, as frustrating as it may be to confront troubling paradoxes at every step of the way toward a better understanding of reality, the alternative is far worse: a rigid form of either-or thinking that demands simplicity at any cost, e.g.:

Well, if it isn’t the right house, it isn’t the right house. Don’t settle for anything but the right one.

I don’t care how focused the guy is in some meetings. He isn’t focused in others, and that’s that. Let’s get rid of him.

Yeah, I admit that my ex can put on a good show, but behind the big-hearted exterior is nothing but a self-centered rat.

For Christians, acknowledging and appreciating paradoxes should come as easily as reciting the Lord’s Prayer. After all, most of the core beliefs of the Christian faith are rife with paradoxes, which simplistic thinking will never comprehend. The previous section offered several examples of paradoxically stated beliefs about our everyday engagements with ordinary things. To those can now be added several beliefs that Christianity affirms and celebrates as foundations of its faith:

The One True God is the unity of three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Jesus Christ is fully divine, and fully human.

All who have died in Christ will be raised, as he was raised, with a spiritual body, not a body of flesh and blood.

Human beings are wholly responsible for their condition under God and wholly captive to de-humanizing conditions inherited from the past and replicated in the present.

The kingdom of God is here, and it is also yet to come.

As out-of-the-ordinary as these affirmations are, what makes them paradoxical in character is really no different from what makes any other affirmation about any other kind of reality paradoxical. Christian beliefs are paradoxical because they conjoin in unexpected and novel ways ideas that seem mutually exclusive and at the same time necessary to a mature faith, e.g.: one God, in three persons; one savior, humiliated by those he came to save; one person, two natures; full responsibility, antecedent determination; divine rule all around us but far off, too. Like all paradoxes, these affirmations of faith push us beyond the reductionism of either-or thinking toward a more inclusive understanding of reality that requires for its expression the far more adequate language of “both-and” and “neither-nor.”

The paradoxical nature of many Christian beliefs—as well as the continuing debate about how to interpret them for today’s churches—sometimes leaves people more confused and frustrated than illumined and comforted. The confusion and frustration can be especially disturbing when the need for clarity and solace from faith is intense. Then, even the most open-minded believers can retreat, at least momentarily, into the very kind of either-or thinking that paradoxes otherwise transcend. Generally, the retreat is by way of misconstruing paradoxes as logical contradictions and affirming, in the interest of conceptual tidiness and affective equilibrium, only one side of the paradox in question to the exclusion of the other, e.g.: Jesus was a man with a divine mission, but he was not God. The next section offers a way beyond this less than adequate approach to faith’s intrinsic paradoxes.

Only the Right Choice Counts, Or Does It?

The vital center of the Christian witness of faith is inescapably paradoxical in character, in the sense that it embraces from necessity a number of ideas and affirmations that those who hear it cannot be expected readily to conjoin (one and three, divine and human, free and foreordained, etc.) Many people both within and outside the church have concluded from this fundamental fact about Christian speech that the essential structure of Christian thought is inherently contradictory, and have gone on to treat the paradoxes of Christian belief just as logicians treat mathematical conundrums, not as mysteries for the soul to contemplate, but as problems for the mind to solve. “Solving” faith’s paradoxes almost always has meant that one side of a paradoxical belief is forced to give way to the other side.

The inevitable consequence of this approach is that what begins with a passion for speaking the whole truth about divine things eventually gives way to a smug reassurance that troubling inconsistencies can be made to go away and that God’s truth is always simple and certain. God is either one or three, not both. Jesus is God or a mortal man, not both. Believers either take their bodies with them into heaven, or they do not get there at all. If sin is not punished, God cannot be just; if it is punished, God cannot be merciful. The kingdom is either turning things upside down right now, or is very, very far off. And the Bible is either the Word of God in its entirety or not at all.

This last example of reductionism illustrates especially clearly how Christians can oversimplify the church’s witness of faith to the detriment of presenting that witness in all its fullness, however complicating to people’s lives the whole gospel message both is and always must be. The current widespread and highly vitriolic debates about biblical authority force believers to consider aligning themselves with one or the other of two equally faulty lines of reasoning: (a) Since the Bible is the revealed word of God, it cannot contain error of any kind, or (b) Since the Bible contains error, it cannot be the revealed word of God. As is the case with all of the paradoxes that Christian beliefs contain, the full truth here encompasses both of its oversimplifications. The Bible is both God’s Word and human representations of that Word, and the errors that it does indeed contain are to be discovered and put in context always and only in reference to the very Word that they sometimes distort.

Most controversies in the church about what to believe begin by setting a particular interpretation of a core belief over against an allegedly contrary interpretation of that same belief, and then go on to insist that only one or the other interpretation is the correct one. The key word here is “only.” Only my interpretation is the right one, someone bellows; if another’s differs, his or hers must be wrong. Unless one possesses enough raw power to silence the other completely, the other may bellow back that it is his or her interpretation that is the right one. Or, he or she might decide just to back off, convinced that further discussion would be pointless. Both responses will leave the particular disagreement unresolved, and both participants will come away from their truncated discussion more convinced than ever that the other is either uninformed, closed-minded, or both. This kind of arrogant, indefensible certitude has always been a major threat to the unity of Christian believers, whether it is exhibited by only two people wrangling in an empty church hallway or by hundreds and thousands hurling epithets during deliberations of whole judicatories.

The essentially paradoxical character of core Christian beliefs, then, constitutes a genuine and irresolvable complexity that must of necessity remain frustrating and confusing to people who need things to be kept simple at all costs, both in life and in faith. There is nothing inherently wrong about questing for simplicity. The problem comes from making things too simple. In the life of faith, part of the gospel may be better than none, but the whole gospel is better than either. I have been richly blessed over the years by students who not only grasped this well, but appreciated how important figuring this out can be to people struggling to get beyond what often seems like endless wrangling in the church over whose opinion is the right one about this matter of faith and that.

Wrestling with Paradoxes While Looking for Angels

My year-long theology course was almost over, and I was frustrated that several students had yet to raise on their own any probing questions about their respective church traditions. One member of the class, Lane, had put forward a particularly unsettling reason for his own obstinacy: all that his church teaches, he proudly announced to the class, is directly revealed by God and, therefore, not subject to human interpretation of any kind. I struggled within myself not to caricature Lane as yet another closed-minded believer, who would never think for himself, for whom my seminary would remain only a hotbed of controversial characters (his words) bent on destroying genuine Christians’ faith.

During one of our last class sessions, though, Lane all of a sudden broke into an animated interchange between three other students and myself with a wholly off-the-point testimonial that quickly shut down our conversation:

I know most of you think that I’m beyond help theologically, and you may be right. But I hope not. It’s taken me a year of listening and rejecting to get me finally to where I am now. You guys have gotten through to me about two things. One is that it really is all right to look at a church teaching from different angles. I think I can handle even the idea that God wants us to do this. But the second thing has me way out there and wondering if I can ever get back. I’m not sure I can handle the idea that whether any of our teachings is really true is an open question. And yet, I’m more and more afraid that this is just how it is.

What captured everyone’s attention was Lane’s making himself vulnerable for the first time, emptying himself of officiousness and sharing honestly what was going on in his personal faith. One of Lane’s strongest antagonists blurted out the first reaction:

Good grief, guy, where did that come from? You’re saying things that I can agree with you about! And all this time I thought I had you figured out.

Lane took the question seriously:

What I said, I guess, has to be coming from the Holy Spirit; I sure didn’t get to a place like this all by myself.

There were two things in particular about that theology course that made life difficult for Lane and some of his peers. The first was my conviction that given what core Christian beliefs are about, they must mean far more than their words can possibly convey in the straightforward manner of everyday assertions about everyday realities. The second was my invitation, in matters of faith, to think less concretely and more symbolically, less sequentially and more allegorically, less literalistically and more paradoxically. The very last part of that invitation is the subject of this exploration. The sections to follow focus on embracing paradoxes as the most adequate language that Christian believers have for paying homage to God’s ultimate mysteriousness and unfathomable grace and love. The major premise is, if we are truly to embrace the essentially paradoxical character of Christian beliefs, we must be prepared to ask more questions, reconsider more assumptions, and re-examine supposedly settled issues. What finally makes it possible to do all these things, as a way of loving God with all of our minds, is the trust that the God, in whom we want to believe unconditionally, will never abandon anyone in his or her search for more adequate ways of expressing faith in him fully and joyfully.

When in doubt, re-define.

When the paradoxes that are inherent in core Christian beliefs threaten to mire thinking in logical contradictions, there are always more options available than those to which the church has all too often turned. In specific, believers do not have to choose between one side or the other of a paradoxical statement of belief, and they do not have to treat people who choose the other side as deviate, heretical, apostate, wrong-headed, faithless, or damned. The most obvious alternative to this approach is to re-examine the definitions that give rise to the apparent contradictions in the first place. A close second is to look more deeply into the beliefs that paradoxes hold in tension with an eye toward discerning their underlying and inalienable connectedness. The first approach is the subject of this present section. The second is the subject of the next.

The first time I introduced Zeno’s paradoxes of motion (to the effect that the propositions, “Things move” and “Nothing moves” both appear to be true) to a group of students just beginning their studies in philosophy, almost every member of the class reacted in the same way. “Professor, I don’t know what a ‘solution’ to these paradoxes is supposed to look like,” one student offered, “but it just has to have something to do with definitions.” Eager to hear more, I asked her to go on. “Well,” she said, “it looks suspicious to me that Zeno would come up with just the definition of motion that he needs to prove what he wants to prove about it. It makes me think that there’s another way to define it that avoids all the contradictions in the first place.” At the end of the discussion, another student summed up the class’s discovery exceptionally well: “You know, if we’re not careful, we can let somebody else’s definition of a problem cause us a whole lot of grief.” Thoughtful people instinctively take this approach toward overcoming contradictions in thinking, whether they are philosophically trained or not.

Soon after I began teaching theology along with philosophy, this same issue came up in the context of Christian belief. I had just finished summarizing the major difficulties the church faced in the fourth and fifth centuries in asserting that Jesus Christ was both fully divine and fully human. The following is an abbreviated version of the lively discussion that followed:

Wendy: So if I’m getting this right, one of the really big issues was that people thought divinity and humanity just didn’t mix and that Christ had to be one or the other but not both.

Sam: Yeah, and they were right. That’s why I have to go with the idea of a wholly divine Christ. Another human being like ourselves can’t save the rest of us from anything.

Harry: He doesn’t save anybody from anything, Sam. God does. Jesus was just the messenger telling people what God wanted to do for them.

Sam: But every religion claims its founder was a messenger of some sort. What would be unique about Christianity, then? I’ll tell you what’s unique. Jesus is God. If he were really man, he couldn’t be God. What could be clearer than that?

Sally: Maybe this, Sam. I just can’t help wondering if things got so contentious because of arbitrary definitions. What if “divine” isn’t the opposite of “human” after all?

Mary: I’m wondering about something else besides, Sally. Isn’t what you just said exactly what those theologians were trying to get across?

Ted: According to the people we’ve been reading, that’s true for at least some of those theologians. Didn’t the Incarnation mean for them that, somehow, human nature can be a vessel for God?

Some of the most satisfying moments for teachers are those in which they can sit back, listen to, and take delight in what their students are teaching one another. This particular discussion became earnest when Wendy first suggested (rightly) that certain aspects of early Christological debate revolved around the notion of two natures or essences (viz., “divinity” and “humanity”) whose mutual exclusivity was simply taken for granted. Sam and Harry immediately used the definitions that Wendy was wondering about in order to shore up their hardened, either-or, and opposed positions that Jesus is either divine or human, and that there is no third alternative. “OK,” Sam then said, preemptively, “Let’s see what the rest of us think. Is Christ divine or human?”

Sadly for me, the majority of the class immediately cast a vote one way or the other. Only Sally, Mary, and Ted abstained. Mary put it well: “That’s exactly what I think is not the way to get through this. We need both-and; not neither-nor.” As I walked back to my office that afternoon, I was struck with how accurately my students had just replicated centuries-old divisions of opinion across Christendom about the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ. I also felt somewhat awed at how difficult it was for so many of them, as for so many in the church as well, to see that difficulties with belief are so often made inevitable by the way the terms of beliefs are defined.

When in doubt, look deeper

The best way to resolve seemingly unavoidable contradictions in thinking is to re-examine the definitions that give rise to them in the first place. Closely related to this approach is to re-formulate their mutually exclusive elements as parts of a larger whole. One Sunday, I had the privilege of preaching in a church about which I had heard many positive things, but which I had never visited. During the Sunday School hour preceding the morning worship service, I visited an adult class whose members were studying various doctrines of biblical authority. Walking as quietly as I could toward the one remaining chair, I heard the teacher ask the group: “Ok, then. Now what does it mean to you personally to say that the Bible is God’s Word?” Part of their discussion went as follows:

Ben: I guess it’s always been pretty simple to me. My Daddy taught me early in life to honor the Bible because God was in every last word of it, even when we don’t understand the words too well.

Jennie: Your Daddy was a man of his word himself, and I can see why he’d look upon the Bible that way. I wish I could, but there’s just too much in it that doesn’t seem very godly to me.

Betty: Sometimes it looks like that to me too, but my faith tells me that if I study and pray more, I’ll eventually see how it really is God’s book and that everything in it comes from Him.

Ward: But Betty, the books are written by people, not God. People can make mistakes, and they can misunderstand things, even when they’re trying to write down the things of God.

Nora: I believe God saw to it that ordinary human failings wouldn’t affect the writing of the Bible. If there were any human failings in it, it just wouldn’t be God’s word to us.

Ed: So either God inspired it all and everything about it is divine, or human beings made their own mark on it and it’s only a human document.

The Teacher: That’s a heck of a choice to have to make, isn’t it?

Nora: Not really. Either you believe or you don’t.

Betty: When you put it that way, it sounds harsh, but I guess that’s pretty much where I am, too.

Ward: I just can’t go that route. There has to be a way to say that the Bible is both God’s word to us and human words about Him. Maybe in the way that Jesus was both a man and God. If he was both, couldn’t our words about him be both, too?

Jennie: Maybe what God’s asking me to do is believe just what you said, Ward, even though it seems so contradictory. Faith above logic, and all that.

Ward: It’s hard for me to see how God could give us the power to think and reason, and then tell us to turn off the switch when it comes to faith. There has to be truth to both things I want to say about the Bible, and it just can’t be illogical to think this way.

It was hard leaving this class early, even though I had to in order to be ready for the worship service. Jennie, Ward, and Ed were struggling with questions that Ben, Betty, and Nora—in different measures, to be sure—regarded as settled. Jennie was looking for a way to read all of her Bible more respectfully, but had no clear idea about where to begin her search. Ward knew where he wanted to end up on the question of biblical authority, but did not know how to get there. And Ed was more certain about what he did not believe than about what he did believe. I left their discussion with a strong desire to learn about how others in the class would take up the issues raised. And so, I was pleased when the teacher of the class greeted me after my sermon that morning, and accepted my invitation to write me at the end of this series about how it all came out. Several weeks later, his letter came. Its concluding paragraph is especially pertinent to the present discussion:

I wasn’t at all sure for a while whether we were going to get a handle on the inspiration question as a class, and I worried that we’d end the series on a really low note, discovering how very far apart we were on an issue that Christians need to be more united about. After all, isn’t the Bible the whole church’s book? But a really wonderful thing began to happen. Ben got it started by sharing how much he had been thinking about Ward’s stance. He (Ben) questioned whether what he called his own “all or nothing” approach really was helping him appreciate how much courageous human effort had gone into putting the Bible together, and how much more complicated most things are about faith than he usually wants them to be. Well, by the end of the series, I think most of us were feeling the need to be more humble about our inability to respect complexity enough and our tendency to smother important parts of faith just because we can’t easily get them together with other parts that we’re more comfortable with.

I especially cherish the few minutes I spent with this class because its members brought home so clearly how intertwined are the two approaches to avoiding contradictions in core beliefs that are the focus of this and the previous section. Ward had put himself in some jeopardy, at least before Ben and Nora, by proposing an understanding of the Bible as both God’s Word and as human words. When Nora immediately challenged Ward’s both-and approach, Ed mildly caricatured Nora’s statement, perhaps in the hope that she could better appreciate how one-sided it sounded. However, all that Ed accomplished by taking this approach was to push Betty into Nora’s camp before she was really ready to join. Jennie seemed to be moving in the other direction, toward Ward’s way of looking at things, but was genuinely at a loss as to how to take the next steps by herself.

Although Jennie seemed somewhat confused about what Ward was saying to her, her response to him nevertheless had just enough clarity to help him advance the class discussion a major step forward. Ward did not have available to him at the moment any new definition of inspiration which might have made room for both God and human beings in the words of the scriptures. But what he did draw upon was something just as important: a firm conviction, poignantly expressed, that faith should make room for reason, no matter how difficult it may be at times to do so. Reason was telling him that in matters of faith there has to be a way of affirming the underlying unity of ideas and things that appear incompatible, even when the nature of that unity eludes people’s best efforts to describe it. Hopefully, Ward will continue to search for some new definition of what looks initially like irreconcilable opposites (God’s perfect Word/Human beings’ imperfect ones) that makes it possible to affirm their co-existence in all experience of and testimony about God.

To this day, I treasure the letter quoted above, especially its reference to respecting complexity and to resisting smothering those aspects of faith which cannot easily be reconciled with others. Re-defining terms, and gathering what is re-defined into more encompassing unities of thought represent the two best ways of preserving the essentially paradoxical character of core beliefs. They offer powerful correctives to overly simplistic expressions of Christian belief that can only undermine the credibility of the church’s message to the world and make personal struggles with that message all the more difficult to resolve.