As we approach the release of my new book next Tuesday, May 3, I am sharing some brief excerpts in these posts. Today we touch on a central issue of the book–how does biblical paradox open us up to the mystery of God? To learn more about the book, visit its Amazon page.
Speaking of the mystery of God, Eugene Peterson maintains, “It is a mystery that we inhabit, not just stand before and ask questions out of curiosity.”
Our natural first response as we stand before the mystery of God is to ask questions. If biblical paradox is doing its work, it will prod us to ask questions, which in turn can stimulate our spiritual imagination and enlarge our worldviews. This is a healthy and essential process.
We remember Daniel Migliore’s advice as we began this section:
“When faith no longer frees people to ask hard questions, it becomes inhuman and dangerous. Unquestioning faith soon slips into ideology, superstition, fanaticism, self-indulgence and idolatry.”
Biblical paradoxes are not museum exhibits for us to stroll around, asking the docent an occasional question. No, we inhabit them, and as we do, they open us up to God’s mystery.
- We inhabit bodies, with minds and emotions simultaneously wallowing as hippos and soaring like eagles.
- We are created a little lower than the angels, yet are also like the grass that soon passes away.
- We exist in a saving relationship with Jesus Christ that is simultaneously God’s choice for us and our choice for God.
- We are shaped by a mandate to extend God’s kingdom on earth, even though this kingdom is God’s work, not ours.
- We inhabit the relational being of the three-in-one Father, Son, and Spirit in whose image we are created.
- We discover a personal God who is incredibly close to us, yet transcends this universe so utterly that our minds cannot begin to comprehend how God’s being is different from our being.
- We are centered in “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” yet this Jesus Christ who is both divine and human remains absurd to us.
As we inhabit these mysteries, Lesslie Newbigin again forcefully states the case for imagination:
“We grow into a knowledge of God by allowing the biblical story to awaken our imagination and to challenge and stimulate our thinking and acting. What we cannot yet understand or accept must nevertheless be allowed to challenge us to more daring thought and commitment. The apophatic tradition in the life of the church is a valid warning to us against supposing that we have all the mystery of the Godhead captured in our theology.”
Since the early centuries, some Eastern Christians attuned to God’s mystery followed the Apophatic Way, a movement that refused to explain God and instead lived in worshipful silence. We are reminded that the word mystery itself is derived from the Greek verb muein, “close the mouth.” A mystery is something before which we close our mouths; we contemplate in wondering silence.
Thus, we reach a point when asking questions—as we have been doing throughout our explorations—invites us into a more profound silence. We begin to inhabit the mystery of God.
George Hall gives us an evocative image of paradox as an antechamber to a throne room. The antechamber is filled with much hustle and bustle and chatter, but…
“after the numbing bewilderment of wrestling with the intractable puzzles which it poses, and after the vertigo of staring into the unfathomableness of its deepest mystery, a gate may open and the chatter become a confused whisper only to give way, by the grace of God, to a silence of a higher order.”
