Dealing with Apparent Contradictions: Part 15 – Positive vs. Negative Mysterianism

Why that’s positively negative!

If you defend a problematic doctrine as a Mystery, you’re asserting that it to some degree lacks what I call “understandable” content. “Understandable” content is a proposition (thought, claim) that positively seems consistent to you. A claim may fail to be understandable for one of two reasons.

First, it may fail to be understandable because I don’t grasp the meaning of it (or barely grasp the meaning of it). I call this “negative mysterianism“. Concerning the Trinity, it seems to me this is the predominant form of mysterianism from the time of the church Fathers up until the early modern era. To exaggerate a little, classical theologians think that we can barely think about God at all – our concepts can just barely be stretched enough to be put to use when it comes to discourse about the divine. They held the Trinity, etc. to be mysterious because of a lack of content, and this stance was buttressed by an entrenched tradition of Platonist philosophy, which reigned in late classical/early medieval times, and in many ways held its grip on theology through the middle ages.

In contrast, the positive mysterian holds that a doctrine is a mystery because of “too much” content; the content of the doctrine seems to include or imply some pair of claims like this: P and not-P. I emphasize the “seems” because the positive mysterian thinks his mysterious doctrine is true, and assumes (justifiably, in my view) that no contradiction is true. (Believe it or not, a few contemporary philosophers deny this.) Hence, any true set of claims is self-consistent. Hence this doctrine lacks “understandable” (i.e. apparently consistent) content; to the contrary, its content (firmly and not fleetingly) seems inconsistent. It seems to me that an undeveloped positive mysterianism is pretty popular among contemporary theologians. James Anderson is a positive mysterian, and (I think uniquely) has a developed epistemology to go along with and support it.

Why I’ve occasionally found a pre-modern theologian mentioning some sacred Mystery as apparently contradictory, it seems to me that positive mysterianism only became popular in the early modern era. Starting in the sixteenth century, Socinians and other unitarians were wont to claim that (what they held to be unbiblical dogmas like) the Trinity, transubstantiation, and the Incarnation were not only unbiblical, but contradictory as well.

In the face of this onslaught, you, the Defender of Orthodoxy have three options:

1. Try to show that the doctrine is in fact consistent, by offering a philosophically precise rational reconstruction (exposition, interpretation) of it.
2. Accept that it is apparently contradictory, and defend it as a positive mystery. (More on how this works later in the series.)
3. Don’t argue that the doctrine is consistent, but rather urge that the Socinians (or whoever) haven’t proven it to be inconsistent.

Some philosopher-apologists such as Leibniz, do all three. In any case, negative mysterianism helps with the third strategy – you urge that the doctrine is too slippery to get a hold of well enough to prove it inconsistent. Bishop Stillingfleet (d. 1699) pulls this move in a 1691 sermon:

But it is said that…there is [a contradiction] in the Mystery of the Trinity and Incarnation. It is strange Boldness in Men to talk thus of Monstrous Contradictions in things above their Reach. The Atheists may as well say, Infinite Power… and God’s… other unsearchable Perfections are Monstrous Paradoxes and Contradictions. (“The Mysteries of The Christian Faith Asserted and Vindicated”, London, 1696, p. 18, bold added)

The idea is that no human can show this Dogma to be contradictory, because no one can understand it well enough to see it is so. On the face of it, this is a risky move; one is insisting that to a large degree, one doesn’t know what one is talking about. It also risks making an unjustifiable claim: how could we know (or justifiably believe) that no human could (or could in this life) better grasp the content of the Dogma in question, so as to be reasonably sure whether or not it is consistent?

The positive mysterian admits that he doesn’t fully understand the Dogma in question, but he does grasp it well enough, on the basis of divine revelation, to see that it is an apparent – and a merely apparent – contradiction. Positive mysterians generally come off as far less skeptical or pessimistic about the ability of humans to think about God. Positive mysterianism must leap this hurdle: if this Dogma resolutely appears contradictory, doesn’t that give us a strong reason to think it false? How then, this admission be part of a defense of the rationality of believing in this Dogma?