Theologian-apologist-philosopher Dr. James N. Anderson of Reformed Theological Seminary has posted his new entry for IVP’s New Dictionary of Theology on “Paradox” – that is, on apparent contradictions.
Saith Dr. Anderson,
Various approaches to theological paradoxes have been proposed, including: (1) The paradoxes involve real contradictions, but God is not bound by ‘human logic’. (2) The paradoxes involve real contradictions, and therefore some traditional doctrines need to be revised or (more radically) abandoned. (3) Through creative philosophical reflection the relevant doctrines can be explicated in logically consistent ways without compromising orthodoxy, thus showing that the apparent contradictions are merely apparent. (4) The paradoxes do not ultimately involve real contradictions, but they resist resolution on account of divine incomprehensibility and the limitations of the human mind.
In general, he favors (4). We’re both fairly pessimistic about (3) – perhaps him more than me. I tend to favor (2), because I think (4) doesn’t actually work We agree that (1) is wrongheaded.
Check out his whole entry here.
And how would an ordinary believer, searching through and pondering on his Bible, ever come to understand such scholastic sophistry? Must we have higher qualifications in order to understand
God’s Scriptures?
I tend towards a Cartesian approach, which I suspect would fall under #1. So long has it remains possible God’s nature exceeds the limits of human conceivability then such things as squared circles, a philosophical go-to when discussing logical impossibilities, would not be logically impossible per se, but only impossible according to the absolute limit of our conceivability. In other words, it remains possible that logical impossibilities exist only to us because God has designed them accordingly.
Descartes dissected it similarly:
“It is easy to dispel this difficulty by considering that the power of God cannot have any limits, and that our mind is finite and so created as to be able to conceive as possible things which God has wished to be in fact possible, but not to be able to conceive as possible things which God could have made possible, but which he has in fact wished to make impossible.”
One could also build a substantial and persuasive case by drawing upon the Sentience Quotient concept introduced in the late 1970s by Robert A. Freitas, Jr. Sentience Quotient (SQ) is a way of measuring the efficiency of an individual brain or computing force. One need only provide good reasons for demonstrating the possibility of a significant SQ disparity between an immaterial being not bound by physical limitations and human beings (who have a SQ of +13). If a disparity of such magnitude did exist, then we, earnestly wondering how God could be triune, would not be relatively different than a plant wondering how to square the sum of two numbers.
Sean,
I would also go with #2.
Since the biblical writers were communicating truth in the common languages of the people, it would seem that they would have needed to comprehend what they were hearing and seeing in order to write it down. From our perspective, the challenge is to understand the reasonable things they wrote (even though we don’t have the entire frame of reference).
To Anderson’s four “approaches to theological paradoxes” this should be added:
(5) The paradoxes can be (dis)solved by abandoning (traditional) “orthodoxy”.
So, looking at Anderson’s list:
• Incarnation: the Logos, an eternal, essential attribute of God, was joined with the humanity of a human mother to become a man in space and time.
• Hypostatic union: Jesus of Nazareth was one person with both a divine nature (on the Father’s side) and a human nature (on the mother’s side). There is no evidence that he ever was omniscient, but whatever knowledge he had that went beyond the limitations of his human nature was provided by the inspiration of his Father. We was not “impeccable”, but without sin, although he was “susceptible to temptation”.
• God’s “infallible foreknowledge of human free choices” is incompatible with human freedom, because freedom, ultimately, is choosing to do other than expected by anybody, and therefore, by definition, a genuinely free act cannot be the object of foreknowledge and/or control. The only way for God to have “infallible foreknowledge” of anything is, ultimately, to have total control, which is incompatible with genuine freedom.
And we don’t need to complicate things with Calvinist follies … 😉
From Anderson’s article, let’s consider just the first “example of theological paradoxes within mainstream Christianity”:
“… the Trinity (the three persons of the Godhead are distinct, and each is fully God, yet there is only one God)”.
It has already been shown, here at trinities.org, that there is a prefectly intuitive image of the trinity: three (perfectly functional) conjoined twins.
(William Lane Craig provides the analogy of Cerberus, the three-headed dog in his article, A Formulation and Defense of the Doctrine of the Trinity, see here: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/a-formulation-and-defense-of-the-doctrine-of-the-trinity)
Most people would consider three conjoined twins to be three persons (three “whos”), and it is only a convention to call them three beings or one being (one “what”).
Thre problem with the trinity is not that it is contradictory or just paradoxical, but that it has no scriptural foundation, while the historical process by which it was arrived at can be reconstructed.
I also typically favor #2. I would only resort to #4 in cases where I had no choice, e.g. I accept that God is either timeless, or that he is in time, both of which are ultimately incomprehensible to me.
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