Exploring Theological Paradoxes (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) 9781032274386, 9781032290584, 9781003299820, 1032274387

Citation preview

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

This book focuses on the question of theological paradox, exploring what it means, and its place in theological method from a Christian perspective. Just as paradoxes are unavoidable in logic and mathematics, paradoxes are inevitable in religious and theological discourses. The chapters in this volume examine a number of cases, including the ‘Red Heifer paradox’, the ‘liar paradox’, and the ‘paradox of omnipotence’, and attention is given to Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the Incarnation. Arguing for a renewed understanding and appreciation of the role of paradox, this study will be of interest to scholars of theology and the philosophy of religion. Cyril Orji is a systematic theologian and Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton, USA.

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. God After the Church Lost Control Sociological Analysis and Critical-Constructive Theology Jan-Olav Henriksen and Pål Repstad Religion and Intersex Perspectives from Science, Law, Culture, and Theology Stephanie A. Budwey Exploring Theological Paradoxes Cyril Orji African Churches Ministering ‘to and with’ Persons with Disabilities Perspectives from Zimbabwe Nomatter Sande The Fathers on the Bible Edited by Nicu Dumitraşcu The Theological Imperative to Authenticity Christy M. Capper For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/religion/series/RCRITREL

Exploring Theological Paradoxes Routledge

Cyril Orji

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Cyril Orji The right of Cyril Orji to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-03227-438-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-03229-058-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-00329-982-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003299820 Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

To Prof. Jude Mbukanma, O.P., an African philosopher, a statesman, and a preacher

Contents

List of tables Preface Acknowledgment

viii ix xii

Introduction

1

1

The Intrigue of Paradox

8

2

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

41

3

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

68

4

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

91

5

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

119

6

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of Non-Contradiction

140

7

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma, Dialogue, and the Search for A Metalanguage of Discourse

168

Index

202

Tables

1.1 1.2 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 7.1 7.2 7.3

Zeno’s Paradox Comparing Moore and Paul’s Paradox Textual Comparison The Red Heifer Ritual Kafka on Parables and Paradoxes Jesus’s Parable of the Ten Virgins Cluster of Christological Titles of Jesus Christopher Smart Gerald Manley Hopkins Gerald Manley Hopkins Sir John Betjeman Anonymous Poem Thomas Aquinas’ Hymn, Adoro Te Devote Rumi’s Paradoxes A Comparison of Daoist-Classical Indian Texts A Comparison of Laozi and Zhuangzi

17 29 77 81 100 100 122 125 125 126 126 128 128 173 178 180

Preface

In 2020 the world was rocked by the Covid-19 (coronavirus) epidemic that led to lockdowns in nearly every country and disrupted normal life as we know it. Worldwide, businesses came to a standstill. To halt educational paralysis, schools turned to remote learning. Government offices were shut down, except for those who became adaptable by going virtual. In the United States, as in many countries with high-powered financial markets, Wall Street struggled to remain open. The stock market struggled and the global financial market was on the brink of meltdown. People stayed at home for weeks on end not knowing where the pandemic was going and when it was going to end. We were made to understand that the lockdown that was put in place was largely to avoid straining an already stretched health care system. Only people in the healthcare sector and those the local government determined to be “essential workers” were allowed to go to work unhindered. Suddenly, the fragility of life became part of our collective consciousness. While religious people hung on to their faith for succor, people with no religion hung on to whatever pull or drive they saw fit to sustain them. This book emerged out of my reflections on the contradictions of life that were brought to light by the Covid-19 state of affairs. The pandemic exposed both the fragility and the absurdities of life. Ordinary necessities of life that were previously taken for granted suddenly began to be valued. Grocery workers and garbage collectors whose valuable services to the community have always gone unappreciated were classified as “essential workers” for the first time, at least in my life time. The lockdown and life-restrictions suddenly began to make people appreciate things they had hitherto taken for granted. Even if temporarily, social attitudes changed for better in many places. In the United States, it forced a few good legislations on social and political matters because of the death of George Floyd that happened at the same time, an unarmed black man that was killed in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020. As I reflected on these issues, I began to appreciate even more the tensions, the pulls, the contrarieties, and the paradoxical in life. I saw analogues of the tensions, pulls, contrarieties, and ordinary-life paradox generating-attitudes in the paradox-generating doctrines of organized religion and theology. It was these reflections that birthed Exploring Theological Paradoxes.

x

Preface

In human cultural matrix, ordinary-life paradoxes, though often taken for granted, are valued and appreciated. Even in ordinary discourse, people do not utter “absurdities” unless they want to make a strong point or intend to shock their hearers. The audience, in turn, knows not to take “absurdities” for granted when they are confronted with one. They intuitively know that the paradoxographer wants their attention because they are trying to say something that must not be allowed to get lost. They audience also reflexively knows that the paradoxographer is trying to make them feel something deep and attune them to something that they might have neglected or not been properly attuned to. Specialists, like philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, psychologists, scientists, and theologians have all been acutely concerned in a special way about paradox in the life we live and have approached it from their various standpoints.1 We learn from them that paradoxy is not limited to any one style and that paradoxy cuts across different critical boundaries.2 We also learn from these specialists that every discipline has its own paradoxical tradition and its own paradoxical modes of perceptions.3 In the history of ideas, some writers might have made conscious use of the paradoxical tradition more than others. No epoch has made use of the paradoxical tradition more than the Renaissance artists and poets. In the spirit of the Renaissance scientific inquiry, they used the work of art to display the intellectual, structural, and literary possibilities of paradox. That way, they gave as much back to the paradoxical tradition as they took from it.4 Christian attitude towards paradox in general has ranged from total rejection to passive reception or antipathy to “near adoration.”5 There are those who think that dependence on paradox “destroys both revelation and theology.”6 They think we should avoid affirming paradoxical doctrines in Scripture because they lead to confusion.7 But there are many others on the opposite end of the spectrum who see paradox as essential to the Christian faith. They admonish us not to think less of paradox or the paradoxographer because “paradox is the source of thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.”8 It is safe to say that the latter view is the impulse behind Exploring Theological Paradoxes. If I have been hesitant to offer only one foundational definition of paradox in this book, it is because defining paradox is itself a self-defeating enterprise.9 My default position is that it is possible to describe the general power of paradox without defining, describing, delimiting, or determining paradox in all its forms. As the reader will discover from my default position, paradox involves a gamut of things, including prosopopeia and mock prosopopeia, irony, hyperbole, etc., which invariably and inextricably impacts not only figures of speech,10 but also how we understand them in religious discourse. There is also the intermingling of mode, tone, genre, and style that is characteristic of the general nature of paradox.11 Thus, Exploring Theological Paradoxes is not just all about the paradoxical in Christian theology, it is also about tensions in philosophical and logical reasoning – a pull between the possible and the impossible – and the comprehensible and the incomprehensible that is in-built into the structure of religious faith and

Preface

xi

theological attitudes. In the human encounter with God, i.e., when finite humans attempt to understand an infinite God, there is always the possibility of encountering “the impenetrable, the inscrutable, the incomprehensible.”12

Notes 1 Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton , NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), xiv. 2 Ibid., xii. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., viii. 5 James Anderson, Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 2. 6 Ibid., 2–3; referencing Ronald Lash, ed., The Philosophy of Gordon H. Clark (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1978), 78. See also Gordon H. Clark, The Trinity (Maryland: The Trinity Foundation, 1985). 7 See David Basinger, “Biblical Paradox: Does Revelation Challenge Logic?”, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Quarterly, 30 (1987), 205–13. 8 Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 2nd edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 46. 9 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 36. 10 Ibid., 22. 11 Ibid., xiii. 12 Basinger, “Biblical Paradox: Does Revelation Challenge Logic?”, 205.

Acknowledgment

As there are paradoxes in life, there are paradoxes in professional writings. One of the paradoxes of academic work is that even though the author claims the sole ownership of the work he or she produces, nobody writes without the help of others, regardless of whether these many others are known or unknown. The labors of the known knowns (people we know that we know), the known unknowns (people we know that we do not know), and the unknown unknowns (people we do not know that we do not know) have helped put this book together and to them all I am indebted. Among the known knowns are the good people of the Lonergan Center at Boston College, MA, especially Pat Byrne, Fred Lawrence, and Mary Elliot. They provided a fertile ground for this research with the 2020 Lonergan fellowship. The Lonergan fellowship helped to nurture some of the ideas in this book. My colleague and friend, John Dadosky of the Regis College of the University of Toronto, read some of the earlier manuscripts, provided some useful tips, and pointed out some valuable information. I would also like to thank Katherine Ong, the editor of Anthropology and Religion research of Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group) for her vision and thoughtfulness throughout the production process. In fact, everything with Routledge has been like the Midas touch from the beginning to the end of the process. I have been privileged to work with Driss Fatih as my copyeditor. His professionalism and eagle eye for what is easy to miss have been invaluable. I must also mention the wonderful services at Routledge of the production editor, Reanna Young, and R. Yuga Harini, the editorial assistant for Religion/Anthropology. Among the known unknowns, I must mention the blind reviewers of this manuscript. There were three different anonymous reviewers from different backgrounds and with shared interests in paradoxy that helped to review the manuscript. (Thanks again to Katherine Ong for the wisdom in locating these anonymous reviewers.) Their recommendation that I engage some literature outside of theology helped my broader vision of paradox. It also helped to add some much-needed nuances and make necessary clarifications. Their suggestions and recommendations proved pivotal to the end product. To the many unknown unknowns I also offer my heartfelt thanks. The manuscript started during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020. Since then, many have lost their lives. At the time of finalizing this manuscript, nearly 1 million

Acknowledgment

xiii

lives had been lost in the United States, and several million others had died all over the world. May they rest in peace. Countless million others who survived the Covid-19 pandemic have life-altering issues. Then there were the brave nurses and doctors and grocery workers and garbage collectors and volunteers of all works of life who risked it all either to take care of Covid-19 victims or to ensure that we all have essential things that we need for our day-to day living. To these people I offer my thanks and prayers. Even though you remain unknown to many of us, the Master of the universe knows you all by name. Finally, I must mention some of the known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns who have been for me an inspiration, consciously and otherwise. I remember in a special way the victims of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield, UK. When I wrote my A Science-Theology Rapprochement (2018), I dedicated it to the 96 innocent souls who died in that tragedy. One more innocent soul has since died from injuries suffered on that unforgettable day for the worldwide Liverpool FC family, bringing the number of victims to 97. To these 97 innocent souls, we number you among our angels. You’ll Never Walk Alone (YNWA). Bibliography Anderson, James. Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007. Basinger, David. “Biblical Paradox: Does Revelation Challenge Logic?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Quarterly, 30 (1987), 205–213. Clark, Gordon H. The Trinity. Maryland: The Trinity Foundation, 1985. Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Kierkegaard, Soren. Philosophical Fragments, 2nd edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. Lash, Ronald, ed. The Philosophy of Gordon H. Clark. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1978. William, Bernard. “Tertullian Paradox.” In New Essays in Philosophical Theology. Edited by Anthony Flew and Alasdair McIntyre, 3–21. London: SCM Press, 1955. Online: http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8156.pdf; accessed November 21, 2021.

Introduction

The term “paradox” came relatively late to great prominence in contemporary theology.1 There is no unanimity as to when this word, which derives from the Greek, made its way into English. But it is widely believed that it made its way into English from Middle French via Latin. Since becoming a staple in the English language, the word has been a mixed bag: a blessing and a challenge. As a challenge, paradox is not easy to decipher or to decode. In academic circles, non-specialists run away from it. Then there is also the day-to-day ordinary life aversion for paradox, which is as old as human life itself. The nonchalance to paradox among non-specialists seems to mirror the aversion for paradox in human practical and theoretical affairs.2 However, the aversion for paradox has not done much to diminish appreciation for it. While non-specialists take great pains to avoid literal paradox, there are also those who go to great lengths to show appreciation for paradox in all its forms, including logical, rhetorical, and theological paradox.3 What specialists mean by the term “paradox” is broad in scope and covers a variety of meanings that are related and even at times contradictory. The matter of religious and theological paradox is an ancient and enduring one. Scholarly interest on the issue continues to be on the rise. There has also been considerable discussion of religious and theological paradoxes among Christian philosophers and theologians in recent decades. The area of discussion that is drawing the most attention lately pertains to specific Christian doctrines, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the human freedom-divine foreknowledge dilemma. Even in analytic philosophy, paradox is increasingly becoming a significant area of discussion. This helps to make the matter of religious and theological paradox a live one and it will remain so for the foreseeable future. Exploring Theological Paradox is concerned with religion as a general locus of paradox and theology as a specific place of encounter of this slippery but important concept. Although my religious context is Christianity – Catholicism in particular – Exploring Theological Paradoxes is less firmly tied to any specific creedal definitions and is not concerned with any particular religious tradition. My method is discursive and less analytical. In all seven chapters, to make the context of the discussion clearer to the reader, my approach has been more explanatory and less descriptive. I am not arguing any religious position and not advancing any theological argument for anyone to embrace. I have no DOI: 10.4324/9781003299820-1

2

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

proselytizing agenda. I have only been motivated by the desire to capture the phenomenon of religious and theological paradox for its intrigue. The phenomenon of paradox is easy to miss and can go undetected. Although I am not arguing any theological position, I am mindful that theological paradox has been used by the master paradoxers to foster apologetics. Some have indeed used it as a defense of religion. This is why I have chosen to balance all narrative discussions with the views of those paradoxers who have also used paradox as an inducement against religion and a denouncement of faith. In the end, I capture how the phenomenon of paradox has been utilized by those who see paradox as an inducement of religion, lending itself to faith, and those who see paradox as an inducement against religion, lending itself to disbelief. That way, the reader can be caught in the intrigue and be free to make their own decision. Since I write from a Catholic-Christian perspective, I expect the reader will see through my Catholic-Christian assumptions, i.e., paradox as a means of explicating faith. Since I am not arguing a particular faith theological position, where I have subliminally used paradox as a means to explicating faith, I do not intend it to be a negation of the position of those who hold a contrary position, no matter how forceful my argument might seem. The limitation of a writer is that the writer often writes from the vantage position he or she knows best. I know the reader is savvy enough not to hold against me that I write from my default position of comfort. Exploring Theological Paradoxes is framed as a teaching tool and is meant to be used for scholarly work. The reader will see both styles intersecting throughout the book. That is to say, there is a pitch to regular religious persons and church ministers and there is also a pitch to students and academicians in religious and theological studies. One writer whose work I have found useful and whom I have cited at length observed how ironic and paradoxical it is that paradox, despite its importance in modern religious discourse, has received so little scholarly attention outside of apologetic contexts.4 Not only do I share this sentiment and motivated to bring scholarly attention to paradox, I also write to bring fresh perspectives as well to our ways of thinking and conceiving paradox in a religious context. The phenomenon that goes under the umbrella term religion is puzzling and paradoxical in many and varied ways. Theologically, there is also a plethora of paradoxical elements in doctrinal expressions. The Gospel of Jesus Christ contains hard sayings that can be stumbling blocks to faith.5 Paradox, then, ought to be a focal issue in theological method. Influenced by Renaissance theology (1300 CE – 1600 CE) and some of the great poets of the 18th century, the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, (1813– 55), known as “the paradoxer per excellence,” re-ignited contemporary concern for paradox, helping to effect a shift in meaning from its ancient understanding to a modern one. After a short period of neglect, the question of theological paradox, i.e., what it means and its place in theological method, began to be reexamined and reinvigorated. This study does just that. It codifies the various logical paradoxes in use in philosophy and the history of thought, clarifies their meanings, and shows how some religious paradoxes can be thought of as analogues to some logical and mathematical paradoxes.

Introduction 3 Just as paradoxes are unavoidable in logic and mathematics, paradoxes are inevitable in religious and theological discourse. Exploring Theological Paradoxes shows the need for reorienting our understanding of paradox as a form of theological method. In a theological context, paradox helps our grasp, as Henri de Lubac says, of “the provisional expression of a view which remains incomplete, but whose orientation is ever towards fullness.”6 Let me be clear (and I demonstrate this at length in Chapter 1) that there is a variety of scholarly opinions on what constitutes paradox. The American philosopher and logician of the analytic tradition, William Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), for example, speaks of paradox as “any conclusion that at first sounds absurd but that has an argument to sustain it.”7 Quine might have been speaking with reference to logical paradox, but not all paradoxes that take the form of an argument enjoy epistemic support in the way Quine conceives it. Religious discourse is an arena in which certain paradoxes are not necessarily sustained by any argument. Rather, they are sustained by other forms of epistemic authority.8 In Christian theology, for example, a number of terms, such as “mystery,” “contradiction,” “irony” (an untrue statement uttered to generate effect), “antinomy,” “antithesis” (the juxtaposition of two seemingly opposite terms or entities to create effect) “incomprehensible,” “impenetrable,” “puzzles,” and “riddles” (word play), to mention a few, have been used loosely and interchangeably, without adequately distinguishing their meanings. There are also other examples of a number of “verbal puzzles”9 that have been thrown around to capture what seems to the finite mind to be incomprehensible and impenetrable in the realm of the divine. They are sometimes spoken of as if they are all paradoxes. This is because in the history of Christian philosophy, a very broad and elastic definition of “paradox” has always been in play, one that includes not only apparent logical contradictions (the more conventional definition), but also “tensions,” “oppositions,” and “puzzles.” It is widely accepted that paradox necessarily involves a sense of contradiction/opposition, even if it is only apparent. Although I do not work from the analytic tradition, my philosophical inclination has no reason to reject Graham Priest’s definition of a paradox as “an argument with premises which appear to be true and steps which appear to be valid, which nevertheless ends in a conclusion which is false.”10 Priest’s definition in fact aligns with my theological inclination that sees paradox in the Lubac sense as the provisional expression of a view which remains incomplete, but whose orientation is ever towards fulness. While these are my working hypotheses, I admit that they can be vague and could conceivably cover many rhetorical tropes other than paradox, and indeed much more. Still, the vagueness does not undercut the larger goal – to show that paradox is a pre-explanatory notion demanding a higher viewpoint. I add nuances and explanations when context dictates it. Priest, whose dialetheist argument I find intriguing, has cautioned against trying to solve paradoxes. He, like many paradoxers, think it is a wrong thing to do. He warns that trying to resolve paradox is like banging one’s head against a brick wall. He admonishes that we should rather accept paradoxes as brute facts.11 In his dialetheist construct, “some sentences are true (and true

4

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

only), some false (and false only), and some both true and false.”12 He also thinks reductio ad contraditionem does not amount to reductio ad absurdum. Priest contends that his position will require us to give up Aristotle’s dictum in the Metaphysics that has become normative in western philosophy: “The firmest of all principles is that it is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong to the same thing in the same respect.”13 Aristotle was speaking with regard to the Principles of Non-Contradiction (PNC), sometimes referred to the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC). I admit that I do have some reservations about the general thrust of dialetheism that Priest made famous.14 I also admit that I do not find paraconsistent logic, which tolerates the derivation of contradiction, to be fully convincing, granted that not all who work out of paraconsistent logic are dialetheists. Philosophically, the idea that PNC or LNC needs to be jettisoned is still unconvincing, for the reason that there are genuine contradictions, contraries, and negations in logic and mathematics that are yet to be disputed. Dialetheists are yet to offer a convincing argument regarding what gives rise to genuine contradictions in logic and mathematics. Until they do so, many will continue to find their argument to be suspect and unconvincing.15 These reservations notwithstanding, there are still sufficient grounds to explore the essential argument of dialetheism, i.e., that there are no truth-value gaps and that truth and falsity need not be exclusive.16 Exploring this idea and appropriating it in a theological context, as I show in this book, can open up more avenues for a better appreciation of paradoxes of Christian doctrine. Is Christianity, after all, not an arena in which true contradictions exist? Not only do true contradictions exist in Christianity, they are believable and defensible. Kierkegaard stands tall in a long line of Christian thinkers who have parted with the Aristotelian tradition that sees truth and falsity in logic as exclusive, at least with respect to Christian doctrine. In what might seem now like an early anticipation of the dialetheist argument, Kierkegaard mounted a vigorous argument regarding why paradox cannot be understood;17 that when we try to resolve it (assuming it is resolvable), we need to do it against the background of other beliefs or expressions that point to what Christianity believes. This is the kind of idea the reader is to expect in Exploring Theological Paradoxes. Exploring Theological Paradoxes has seven thematic chapters. Apart from the first chapter, which understandably sets the context and is like an anthology, each chapter tries to connect the theme of the chapter to a related logical paradox. Chapter 1 examines the meaning of paradox and exposits the various kinds of paradoxes in logical-mathematical reasoning. The Blackburn Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and Lanham’s A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms are currently the two most common encyclopaedic sources of logical and mathematical paradox. While their importance cannot be diminished, these two authorities at times do not elaborate or provide detailed meaning and context of the logical-mathematical paradoxes in their collections. They at times provide only a skeletal and fragmentary meaning of the terms. Thus, chapter one of Exploring Theological Paradoxes is by design a third force – to be an anthology that goes beyond rudimentary meanings. It is intended to fill a lacuna and be a supplement to the existing collections. It is

Introduction 5 also intended to be a helpful tool for anyone interested in a critical study of logicalmathematical paradoxes, including those who might be interested in how these paradoxes are related to and employed in religion and science. Chapter 2 deals with religion and self-referential paradox. It examines the reality of paradox in human life and how it plays out in various religious systems and traditions—that each of us contributes to this delightful tapestry and that it is in religion that this weaving finds its sublime meaning. Working with the assumption that paradox in general is a search and a provisional expression of what is incomplete but whose meaning can be made more complete, the chapter posits that religion is an instance of those paradoxes that are self-referential and self-negating. Religion brings out the full dimension of these aspects of paradox both by its orientation to a supreme power and by its propensity for “violence,” since it sanctions “violence” as a form of ritual. After a thorough critique of violence, the chapter draws from some paradoxers from different religious systems and uses their ideas to illumine how paradox has been understood and used to further religious and theological imaginations. Chapter 3 weighs in on some of the hotly contested issues of the Hebrew Bible: questions of objectivity/subjectivity, the duality of what is said and what is meant, and transcendence/immanence polarity, etc. Some of the binaries and paradoxes that are associated with the classical Jewish identity, an identity that was paradoxically forged in the diaspora, are also discussed and their implications enumerated. The high point of the chapter is the attention given to the Red Heifer paradox of the Hebrew Bible. After teasing out many of the paradoxes that trail the chosen people whose covenant idea makes them synonymous with the Mosaic Law, the chapter makes a case for why the Red Heifer paradox, a quintessential example of a rule that cannot be understood through logic and reason, should be taken as the culmination of the Jewish idea of identity and otherness. Chapter 4 relates the classical liar paradox to Christianity. This paradox that made its way into the New Testament sets up an antinomy between truth and falsehood, the same way orthodox Christianity as defined by the Ecumenical Councils sets up an antinomy between sound faith (orthodoxy) and denial of faith (heresy/apostasy). The liar paradox reveals a problem of self-reference; its essence is duplicity. Christianity revels in the self-referential meaning of belonging to a community of faith, the “church,” a term whose antecedent is the ancient Israelite idea of “assembly” or “gathering” for the purpose of receiving God’s word. Its essence is faithfulness to the demands of God who is Truth. The rhetoric of faithfulness to God aside, very much like the puzzle of the liar paradox, the church still has to find an answer to a problem William Temple was alluding to with his famous aphorism: “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, and sincerely regret that it does not at present exist.”18 Thus, the chapter exposits what the self-referential term “church” means and using ideas of Christian controversialists, like that of the psychologist Sigmund Freud, attempts to clarify whether the referent is Cretan-like, like Freud thinks it is, or God-like, as Christian apologetic says it is.

6

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Chapter 5 can be regarded as the high point of this work on theological paradoxes. It relates Christology to the Paradox of Omnipotence – that if paradoxes are atoms of philosophy, they are even more so atoms of Christology. The evidence for this is found in several Christological themes. The Fathers of the Church not only captured the paradoxical nature of these themes, they also revelled in them. The chapter further locates more evidence of theological paradox in the poetic imaginations of the 18th-century poets who employed paradox to bring out the truth of Christology. Using these creative imaginations, together with other ideas that were further developed by the Jesuit of the Ressourcement movement, Henri De Lubac, the chapter engages the joint work of Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank on Hegel’s idea of das Ungeheure (the monstrosity of God). The chapter turns Hegel on its head and concludes that paradox, properly understood, leads, not to any kind of death of God theology, but to a “monstrosity of God” that finds expression in the monstrosity of Christ. Chapter 6 (The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of Non-Contradiction) (PNC), puts a laser beam on the dialetheism call to revise PNC. It engages their argument with an eye on what two renowned Christian paradoxers have to say about the absurdity of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation: Tertullian, whose paradox goes by the Tertullian paradox and Kierkegaard, whose paradox goes by Kierkegaard paradox. The Tertullian paradox hinges believability of the Incarnation on its absurdity. The Kierkegaard paradox hinges the believability of the Incarnation on its contradiction. Drawing from the rhetoric tradition, and using William Shakespeare as an example of this rich tradition that accepts absurdities and contradictions to be de facto true, the chapter reasonably concludes that the realm of religion, Christianity in particular, which is replete with condensed paradox, might be a better realm for determining the dialetheist argument that it is possible for truth and falsity to inhere in the same statement and both be true. Chapter 7 is a fitting ending to a book that tries to showcase how the paradoxical is not always self-evident; that it is always hidden and in need of illumination. This very fact makes imperative dialogue as a means of avoiding the Buridan-like dilemma that religions face. Using the work of Martin Buber who thinks of dialogue as a “second-person mode,” an “encounter,” and a means of arriving at a “unity of contraries,” the chapter suggests that paradox be used as an ecumenical tool to bridge the divide between religion and science, in addition to overcoming the problem of brutal violence that is making religion to lose its appeal in contemporary society.

Notes 1 S.R. Hopper, “Paradox,” in A Handbook of Christian Theology, edited by M. Halverson and A. Cohen (New York: Living Age Books, 1958), 261–63. 2 Matthew Bagger, The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), ix.

Introduction 7 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., xi. 5 Roger Hazelton, “The Nature of Christian Paradox,” Theology Today, 6 (1949), 323–35. 6 Henri De Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 9. 7 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 3; quoting W. V. O. Quine, “The Ways of Paradox,” in The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, revised and edited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 1. 8 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 3. 9 David Basinger, “Biblical Paradox: Does Revelation Challenge Logic?”, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Quarterly, 30 (1987), 205–13. 10 Graham Priest, “The Logic of Paradox,” Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8 (1979), 219–41. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 See Graham Priest, “Can Contradictions Be True?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl., 67 (1993), 35–54. 15 For more criticism, see Neil Tennant, “An Anti-Realist Critique of Dialetheism,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 355–84. 16 Littmann and Simmons, “A Critique of Dialetheism,” 315. 17 Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, translated by David Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 196–97. 18 I. T. Ramsey and N. Smart, “Paradox in Religion,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes, 33 (1959), 195–232.

Bibliography Bagger, Matthew. The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Basinger, David. “Biblical Paradox: Does Revelation Challenge Logic?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Quarterly, 30 (1987), 205–213. Hazelton, Roger. “The Nature of Christian Paradox.” Theology Today, 6 (1949), 323–335. Hopper, S.R. “Paradox.” In A Handbook of Christian Theology. Edited by M. Halverson and A. Cohen, 261–263. New York: Living Age Books, 1958. Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Translated by David Swenson and Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941. Lubac, Henri De. Paradoxes of Faith. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987. Priest, Graham. “Can Contradictions Be True?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl., 67 (1993), 35–54. Priest, Graham. “The Logic of Paradox.” Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8 (1979), 219–241. Quine, W.V.O. “The Ways of Paradox.” In The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. Revised and edited. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. Ramsey, I.T. and N. Smart. “Paradox in Religion.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes, 33 (1959), 195–232.

1

The Intrigue of Paradox

If Bernard Lonergan is correct that paradox is an inevitable consequence of finite human nature and finite wisdom,1 then this would explain why paradox, together with ironies and ambiguities, have intrigued philosophers and scientists from time immemorial.2 Like the question of God’s existence, freewill, and objectivity of truth and value, paradox ranks high among “the most devilishly elusive, ideologically divisive, and hotly contested areas of philosophical inquiry.”3 Like in antiquity, interest in the power of paradox has still not diminished today. It is in fact gaining more traction in both the sciences and the humanities. The renowned historian of religion and fiction writer, Mircea Eliade (1907–86), was so fascinated by the power of paradox – the power of conjoined opposites in myth – that he made it an essential component of his work on the history of religions.4 Why are some propositions paradoxical and others are not? Since the time of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) at least, the popular view has been to attribute it to their circularity and their self-reference.5 While there is no universal agreement that self-reference in and of itself suffices for paradox, there is consensus that some form of self-reference, be it direct or mediated, is necessary for paradox to occur.6

Etymology and Meaning The word “paradox” is Greek in origin. It derives from the Greek preposition para (meaning “against” or “beyond” or “contrary”) and the Greek noun doxa (“belief” or “opinion”). In its Greek sense, paradoxa suggests a belief system or opinion that is contrary to common sense or common expectation. In this Greek etymological understanding, paradox connotes a sense of “not what you’d expect to be true.”7 The early Greeks considered a statement paradoxical if it is at one and the same time true for some people and less true for others.8 “Paradox” was also used by the ancient Greek philosophers to denote a new, unusual, and original opinion. In this ancient sense, paradox is a multidimensional term that was used in at least one these senses to denote: 

an opinion or reasoning that at first sight does not match the universally accepted opinion or view;

DOI: 10.4324/9781003299820-2

The Intrigue of Paradox  

9

an unexpected phenomenon or event that does not match the usual idea; a contradiction arising from any digression from the truth in set theory or logic.9

Paradox, therefore, is a “seemingly self-contradictory statement, which yet is shown to be (sometimes in a surprisingly way) true: ‘she makes the black night bright by smiling on it.’”10 Some consider paradoxes to be truths that stand on their head.11 They understand paradox to be subsumed in light of the recognition of higher reality. Classical Indian and Chinese modes of thought, as found in some ancient Hindu and Daoist texts, for example, consider paradoxes to be tools of engagement and paradoxicality to be an occasion to explore solutions. In these texts, paradoxical statements are treated, in some instances, as mystical.12 There is no unanimity as to when the word “paradox” entered the English language. Some think it was about the sixteenth century.13 But it was not until the eighteen century that “paradox” (i.e., in its contrary-to opinion sense) became commonplace. It was in this same century “that the basic meaning of paradox was gradually supplanted by the other meaning of self-contradiction, which prevails today.”14 In our time, paradox is understood to be a statement or sets of belief or opinion “sometimes with unfavorable or discordant connotation to what is held as established truth.”15 There is also an understanding that even those seeming self-contradicting statements or contradictions might contain truth that reconciles the conflicting opposites.16 In this wise, any surprising deviation from qualification of commonly held opinion or belief would be considered a paradox.17 Paradoxes as a Fact of Life Not only is paradox a fact of life, paradoxy has always been at the center of the human condition. Long before paradox became a literary and rhetorical device, people employed paradox in variety of ways in their daily life activities. In ordinary life situations, we at times experience something ugly in the most beautiful, something true in the most false, and something female in the most masculine.18 We even make paradoxical statements without knowing it: “It is raining, but I don’t believe it” or “Hurting animals for fun is wrong, but I don’t care.” In logical reasoning, these two examples will be used as standard examples of Moore’s paradox.19 In the two examples, the first statement or conjunct has an explicit moral content. The second statement or conjunct that follows it expresses a lack of motivation or concern. It is not unusual to see people affirm moral judgments and simultaneously expressing motivational indifference to those same moral judgments.20 When we say paradox is a fact of life, we are not referring to ordinary life dilemmas or predicaments that people face in their daily lives because paradox is not the same as a dilemma or a predicament. Daily life dilemmas are not necessarily the same as what in moral psychology is known as a Buridan’s ass or dilemma. In the Buridan’s ass, a donkey might starve to death because it has no reason to choose between two equidistant and equally tempting piles of

10

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

hay. Some critics find the parody of free-will in the Buridan dilemma to be absurd. They think it absurd to think that in the face of practical judgment the will chooses inaction. In contrast to the Buridan’s ass, paradoxes 1) result because of the complexity of systems; 2) permeate system borders and interact and communicate with their environment; and 3) “logical paradoxes turn into existential dilemmas if they remain confined to the formal system in which they appear.”22 When used in ordinary discourse, we say of paradoxes that they are ”established,” or “generated,” or “proved,” or “demonstrated,” or “shown to arise.” The occurrence or use of these verbs or modifiers, puts one on alert that we are dealing with a paradox. We can also say that human existence is full of paradoxes because they permeate all aspects of human life. Paradoxes not only invigorate the mind of a person and allow their soul to breathe, they also give rise to the immortal works of architecture, literature, music, and “the performing arts in which all truths find their creative dwelling.”23 Paradoxes, therefore, are integral to human life. It is almost impossible to conceive of a fulfilled and meaningful life without a paradox. The Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), might have unknowingly summed up the place of paradox in ordinary human life in his well-calibrated criticism of Communism and Western civilization. He berates both systems as grand illusions, calling them a myth of archetypal dream of a Golden Age or Paradise of a welfare state that think there would be a universal peace, justice, human rights, and equality of persons on earth. The sad truth of the human condition, Jung continues, is that human “life consists of a complex and inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.”24 21

The Uses of Paradox in Science and Religion Science and religion both seek the kind of reflective understanding that answers the question, Is it so? The answers they produce lead to the judgment, It is or It is not. 25 What logicians call the principle of Excluded Middle has equally long been acknowledged in theology: either it is or it is not; there is nothing in between.26 At the same time we know that not every question can be answered simply as a yes or no question. Not every formulation admits of It is so or It is not. To use Lonergan’s own example, how does one answer the question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” A yes or no answer to the question, either way, has awkward implications.27 So sometimes when confronted with the choice between It is so or It is not, we have the right to make a distinction and possibly reformulate the question. The medieval scholastics or Schoolmen did that so well. Because they knew that Excluded Middle was valid, they did not always accept the questions anyone put before them. They always reserved the right to distinguish.28 Aquinas, in particular, employed creatively the Paradox of Omnipotence – a paradox that stems from the assumption that an

The Intrigue of Paradox

11

omnipotent God has no limits and is therefore capable of realizing any outcome, including ideas that might seem to us to be logically contradictory. He, like the other scholastics, held, for example, that God can create a square circle, if God so desires. Both science and theology adhere to the principle of Excluded Middle. Both seek elements of objectivity, provided the question is fairly stated in a way that either It is or It is not; it cannot be both. Both disciplines operate with the principle of sufficient reason – that there can be no reasonable affirmation or negation without evidence. They both adhere to the principle of identity and non-contradiction – that it is not reasonably possible for the same thing under the same aspect to be both affirmed and denied.29 Also, scientists and theologians love paradox, albeit for different reasons and employ paradox in different ways. One thing religion does more effectively is point out some of the contradictions in the things we value in life. Logical paradox speaks of this in terms of the Paradox of Value. This paradox, which goes back to the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–90), points out some apparent contradictions in some things we hold and value dearly in life. Take the two elements water and diamond as examples. Although water is more useful for human survival than diamond, diamond in actual fact commands a higher price in the market than water. There are also as many differences in the paradoxes of the sciences and religion as there are similarities.30 Science states truth as facts and derive expectations from tight logical arguments. Religion recognizes truth in meaningful experience and derive expectations from conventional rational categories that in themselves are not always meaningful.31 In science, an apparent contradiction can lead to a reformulation and reconsideration of categories that were once thought to be grounded in hard facts. By “apparent” here is meant either “real” or “seeming” conflict with common sense. In religion where truth-tests are not as precise as they are in the sciences, paradoxes (by contrast) are understood to reflect truths beyond the categorical intellect of the individual believer. Stated differently, in science, discovery of contradictions often leads to reformulations that in turn lead to new discoveries. In religion, by contrast, paradoxical contradictions “are usually resolved through a shift into experience, either spiritual or aesthetic.”32 Also, in religion, paradox “compresses stark contradictions into a compact form that confounds the finite mind, opening it, perhaps, to a glimpse of existential truths it does not normally encompass.”33 Take the Christian dogma of the Trinitarian Godhead as an example. The doctrine of the Trinity fits within the category of irresolvable paradoxes. The idea of three persons in the Godhead is a conceptual statement that conflicts with another conceptual statement that 1+1+1 cannot be 1. It is as irresolvable as the idea of a married bachelor or a square circle. Scientists and theologians do, however, share a distaste for contradictions – in theory at least. Yet, a paradox is “a statement or a group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation that (if true) defies logic or reason.”34 Take the example of the age-old and even sometimes annoying riddle regarding which came first: the chicken or the egg? Logically, there has to be a chicken for

12

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

there to be an egg and there has to be an egg for a chicken to come to be. If we do not want to end up in an infinite regress regarding the question, perhaps it is best not to be fixated with the two choices presented. This means we have to be open to the possibility of a third that takes into account a much larger worldview. A third possibility, say evolution, might render the best explanation in this instance of chicken-egg dilemma.35 Recall what Aristotle says about metaphors36 and how they work – that metaphor is not only a comparison between two elements but also a creation of third, a new meaning. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle postulates that “We naturally find it agreeable to get hold of new ideas easily: words express ideas, and therefore those ideas are the most agreeable that enable us to get hole or new ideas. Now strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh.”37 The 20th-century American literary theorist and essayist, Kenneth Burke (1897– 1993), furthered the Aristotelian notion of a third new meaning. Burke developed the idea that it is through metaphor that our perspectives or analogical extensions are made, suggesting that a world without metaphor would be a world without purpose.38 The Italian political philosopher and rhetorician, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), had before Burke characterized metaphor as a fable in brief. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35 CE – 100 CE), commonly known as Quintilian, also described metaphor as “the most beautiful of tropes,” suggesting it serves “the supremely difficult task of providing a name for everything”39 We might then say, tentatively at least, that a paradox is akin to a metaphor in the following senses: that it is a fable in brief and an allegory-in-miniature in the same way we might think of a pun as irony-in-miniature.40 Paradox is also the most beautiful of tropes because it serves the supremely difficult task of providing name for everything. In its true meaning, however, paradox does not necessarily imply a real contradiction, granted it might seem like a self-contradictory statement. The puzzle generated in a paradox “can be rectified by demonstrating that one more of the assumptions are not really true, a play on words, or in some way or the other are faulty.”41 This is often the case in fiction, mystery novels, and films. Who does not remember a book or film where the main plot has to do with mysterious paradox? In sum, paradox emerges in both scientific and religious discourses. Science and religion might have their different domains, but paradox embeds scientific and religious truths in a way that not only makes them to contradict each other, but also compels them to collaborate to form a higher realm in which all truths flow and converge.42

Understanding Logical Paradoxes As already stated, a paradox is a statement that might seem self-contradictory but turns out to be true. The German logician and a member of the Berlin Circle, Kurt Grelling (1886–1942), writes that in logical paradox, the contradiction must be contained in the premises in a concealed way. He argues that there would be no paradox if the contradiction in the premises were obvious,

The Intrigue of Paradox

13

“since nobody would find paradoxical a contradictory conclusion following from openly contradictory premises.”43 He suggests that there is no other method of revealing a concealed contradiction “than that of deducing by logical inferences a contradictory conclusion from the suspected propositions.”44 The essence of logical paradox, he surmises, is in the fact that it follows from premises appearing to be evidently true. Hence the name logical paradox. Similarly, the American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), whose work has generally been along the lines of Whitehead-Russell, defines paradox as an argument whose conclusion contradicts a widely shared opinion.45 He sees paradox as “a powerful device to ensnare truth because it concisely tells us somethings that we did not know we knew.”46 As an argument, a paradox is usually formulated in a way that deliberately leaves it incomplete, leaving the formation of the paradox to the reader’s imagination.47 Thus, while a logical paradox might engage the heart and mind of a person, a great deal of them cannot be solved. The way paradoxes are stated at times gives the impression of a quasi-contradiction (not formal contradiction). Since a formal contradiction (e.g., It’s raining and it isn’t raining) is “something that has the explicit form of a contradiction,” not many paradoxes are stated as formal contradictions.48 There is the temptation, as some have suggested, to divide paradoxical statements along two lines: a) Those statements that might not be formally contradictory but entail it. As the example in the opening line of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; and”49 b). Those statements that are not themselves formally contradictory and do not entail it, but might contain terms that normally function as either contraries or contradictories. The aphorism, “In winning the battle he lost the war,” is a good example of this second sort because it juxtaposes two terms (win and lose) that are themselves contraries.50 To be clear, formal contraries are not the same as formal contradictions. To use some standard examples: “All Bavarians are boisterous” is a contrary of “Some Bavarians are quiet and querulous.” It is possible for both sentences to be false (if it is proven that some Bavarians are quiet, but those that are quiet are not also querulous), but both cannot be true. What makes formal contraries different from formal contradictions “is the fact that a pair of contraries (but not a pair of contradictions) can both be false. But surely no conceptual truth can be false.”51 Consider the following three examples: a b c

Some inexpensive cars are not inexpensive All inexpensive cars are inexpensive Everything that is inexpensive is inexpensive

In these three examples, c) is the formal contrary of a), and b) is the formal contradictory of a).52 In logic, therefore, a paradox is a statement (i.e., a background sentence) made with a sentence (i.e., foreground sentence) which is formally incompatible

14

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

with some sentence that can be taken, on a standard reading of its terms, to express a conceptual truth.”53 For example, the statement, “Mr. Smith’s dress is fastidiously casual” is a paradox because nothing is both fastidious and casual, irrespective of the fact that the sentence can be used to express a conceptual truth.54 Medieval logicians, like Albert of Saxony (1320–90), the regent master at the University of Paris (1351–62), thought logical paradoxes were “insolubles.” In response to these “insolubles,” the fourteenth century English theologian and logician, Thomas Bradwardine, proposed a solution to the paradox of truth. He thought one utterance can express many things without being ambiguous. Bradwardine proposed that the paradox of truth can be revised without revising the principles of logic. He, therefore, proposed a pluralist doctrine of meaning or signification.55 Varieties of Paradox There are as many levels as there are different varieties of paradox in semantics and logic. Logical paradoxes are rendered in different forms and are used to accomplish certain objectives or goals. In their generality, logical paradoxes have the following elements: i). Self-referential notions or statements ii). Infinite regress iii). Circular definitions or vicious circularity iv). Confusion between different levels of abstraction56 Some paradoxes are very helpful, such as those used to avoid inconsistencies. Others are problematic, such as those that do not satisfactorily accomplish their intended goals. In general, paradoxes are used for various purposes – to capture the best of possible worlds, to use the phrase of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716) that was parodied in the satire Candide (1759) by François-Marie Arouet, known simply as Voltaire (1694–1778). Voltaire thought that the actual world is the best of all possible words. Anything else, he concluded, will be inconsistent with the benevolence and omnipotence of God.57 Semantics recognizes two main kinds of possible worlds. First, possible worlds refer to way things might have been in this world and/or remote planets. Second, “possible worlds may also be viewed as maximal states of affairs or propositions or maximal sets of states of affairs or propositions.”58 In this respect, possible worlds are either concrete entities or abstract ones. Thus, while some paradoxes are directed to either of these two worlds, some seem to threaten both views of possible worlds.59 1. Antinomies: Antinomies are paradoxes found in formalized systems, like in logic and mathematics. An antinomy produces a self-contradiction. It establishes that some tacit and trusted pattern of reasoning must be made explicit and henceforth be avoided or revised.60 Philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians have for centuries relied on antinomies because they help distinguish

The Intrigue of Paradox

15

sound reasoning from mere postulates or contradictions. Antinomies “consist of contradictions which follow correct deduction from consistent premises.”61 In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that purportedly seeks to determine the limits and scope of metaphysical reasoning, “the antinomies of pure reason show that contradictory conclusions about the world as a whole can be drawn with equal propriety. Each antinomy has a thesis and a contradictory antithesis.”62 Quine thought that the discovery of antimonies ushered in a period of crisis in the evolution of thought for the reason that it strikes at the semantics of truth and denotation.63 2. Buridan’s Ass: The earliest version of what later came to be called the Buridan’s Ass stems from Aristotle. In his cosmological treatise on how the terrestrial world concretely unfolds and in which he unwittingly proposed a geocentric view of the universe, De Caelo [On the Heavens] (294b 32), Aristotle used the example of a dog to illustrate the dilemma of free choice. Without going into details of this work that was written around 350 BCE and with which philosophers down the ages have had, to say the least, a perplexing relationship, what is doubtful is whether Aristotle meant to generate a paradox with the example of a dog he used to illustrate the dilemma of free choice. It was much more later that the Buridan’s Ass came to be associated with the French scholastic philosopher and a student of Ockham’s, Jean Buridan (1295–1358). The French scholastic, Buridan, was a logician who pursued logical issues for their own sake, not for any doctrinal enrichment.64 He held that freewill is always delayed until reason has decided in favor of one course of action against another. Again, it is doubtful whether Buridan’s theory of free choice, in its earliest usage, was intended to generate a paradox. Nonetheless, it was intended to show a reduction – where freedom consists in inaction or deferment of further deliberation.65 What later came to be known as the Buridan’s Ass paradox is stated as a dilemma confronting a donkey facing two equally adequate and attractive alternatives. Say, for example, the donkey is hungry and has to confront two bales of hay that are in all respects equal and relevant to satisfying its hunger. Confronted with the alternative of eating from either of the hays (i.e., the hay on the left or the hay on the right) or going hungry altogether, the donkey will eat from one of the hays rather than go hungry. How does one explain why the donkey chooses to eat from the left bale and not from the right bale? It is not easy to find an operative reason for why the donkey chooses one of these options rather than starve to death.66 3. Pragmatic Paradox: The term “pragmatic paradox” was coined by D.J. O’Connor in 1948.67 It was fleshed out in 1950 by L.J. Cohen as a sentence expressing propositions that are “falsified by their own utterance.”68 The origin of pragmatic paradox, however, predates O’Connor and Cohen. The origin goes as far back as antiquity. In Greek comedy, Strepsiades is cash-strapped. He promises Socrates that he will pay him a handsome fee if he taught him enough sophistry he could use to outwit and escape his creditors.69 The term “pragmatic” in the paradox refers to the act of utterance.70 In logic, a sentence is Pragmatic Paradox (PP) “if it states a contingent proposition which is necessarily false when it- is-believed.”71 For example,

16

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

The atheism of my mother’s nieceless brother’s only nephew angers God.72 There are of course different restatements of PP. Some see it as “a statement with a sentence that is formally compatible with some sentence, s, such that, if s were used to make an assertion, the mere fact the assertion had been made would itself afford a good reason for thinking that what was asserted was true.”73 Thus, pragmatic paradoxes are “contingent sentences that behave like contradictions or tautologies.”74 4. Condensed Paradox: People sometimes confuse condensed paradox with oxymoron. It is always good to distinguish the two, although this is easier said than done. Even leading authorities do not agree on the difference between condensed paradox and oxymoron. There are two divergent views: one represented by Richard Lanham and the other by Gareth Matthews. Lanham’s A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms takes an oxymoron to be a condensed paradox. An oxymoron is defined here as “a witty, paradoxical saying,” as in the example “pointedly foolish.”75 Matthews, on the other hand, says an oxymoron is not a paradox, He states clearly that a statement one makes with an oxymoron is not a paradox. An oxymoron, Matthews argues, is typically made up of a modifier and a term modified such that the two terms are either contraries or contradictories of each other. He considers an oxymoron to be “a phrase that places opposing terms in close syntactic proximity.”76 Following Matthews definition, the following would be oxymora: “cruelly kind,” “beautifully hideous,” “makes haste slowly,” “unsavory sexual seduction,” and “a true lie.” They are oxymora because in oxymoron, there is typically no real contradiction of a conceptual truth, but only the semblance of a contradiction.77 What then is condensed paradox? As stated earlier, the differences between oxymoron and condensed paradox are not easy to establish. Matthews represents a school of thought that places oxymoron in the pseudo-paradox bin. But if we go by the standard definition of paradox adopted by Quine,78 in which he defines a paradox as “an apparently unacceptable conclusion derived by apparently acceptable reasoning from apparently acceptable premises,”79 it is hard not to see most oxymora as condensed paradox, notwithstanding that what Quine had in mind was logical paradox. Similarly, if paradox is “a naïve theory of truth,”80 as some think, given that they think it makes a certain general claim, then the relationship between condensed paradox and oxymoron cannot easily be dismissed. We must grant, however, that for something to be considered a paradox it will depend on the degree of recognition of its problematic naïve theory.81 Thus, in general terms, an oxymoron is a condensed paradox. Here are some examples and how they are used in popular literature: the English poet John Milton’s (1608–74) “darkness visible” in Paradise Lost; the English playwright William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) “parting is such sweet sorrow” in Romeo and Juliet; the Russian novelist and essayist Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s (1932–2017) “Everything screams in silence here” in the poem “Babi Yar” condemning a 1941 massacre in Kiev perpetrated by Nazis. We also use condensed paradox in everyday discourse, as in when we utter these words: “act natural!” “fast asleep,” “civil war,” “jumbo shrimp,” “pretty ugly,” “a hard water,” and “a dry ice.”82

The Intrigue of Paradox

17

Condensed paradox is used to generate an ironic charge. For example, “Ivy League Football,” “academic administration,” “business ethics,” “airline food,” “apartment living,” and “military intelligence.”83 5. Zeno’s Paradox: Zeno of Ela (c. 490 BCE–430 BCE) was a Greek philosopher and a student of Parmenides. He wrestled with some philosophical problems (contradictions) he couched in form of paradoxes. Zeno’s paradoxes are found, even if in inchoate form, in Plato’s Parmenides where Zeno is also identified as a follower of Parmenides and a favorite of the young teacher Socrates. Plato seems to insinuate that the two (Socrates and Zeno) were lovers. Zeno enunciates paradoxes. His paradoxes come down to arguments of the one against many – that despite all appearances to the contrary, the many are in fact one.84 “In the hands of the Sophists, enemies of monism, the paradox became a standard rhetorical category, an argument contrary to common opinion and expectation, often contrary to truth, designed to display the power of argument.”85 Zeno’s paradoxes actually deal with space, time, motion, and the nature of infinity. Zeno was said to have written a book about paradoxes to defend Parmenides’ monist philosophy – that plurality, change, and motion are all illusion. Unfortunately, Zeno’s book did not survive, but his ideas did. Philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have wrestled with the difficulties of these paradoxes. They raise mathematical questions, such as what precisely it means to sum an infinite series or what precisely it means to allow a variable quantity to become arbitrarily close to zero.86 In the Physics (Book VI), Aristotle reports Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, sets it up as a problem, and proceeds to refute it.87 Aristotle did not present Zeno’s arguments as paradoxes. He was only interested in showing that Zeno’s argument was based on a false assumption and therefore fallacious. It was not until the nineteenth century that the Aristotelian idea, which held sway for centuries, was challenged. Thereafter Zeno’s idea began to be introduced as paradoxes.88 Aristotle says Zeno’s paradoxes are four in number: the Dichotomy, Achilles, the Arrow, and Stadium. Table 1.1 Zeno’s Paradox Zeno’s Four Paradoxes The first is the paradox of the impossibility of traversing a certain distance because to do so requires the traversal of an infinite series of halfway points. The second, a variation of the first, is that of the impossibility of Achilles catching up with the tortoise, which had started to move first, since Achilles would first have to reach the starting point of the tortoise, which has always already departed from it. The third consist of the paradox that if a flying arrow, at any moment of its flight, is at rest where it is, then motion is impossible – a flying arrow is standing still. The fourth paradox begins with three equal, stationary rows of bodies of equal magnitude in a stadium. Two of the arrows B and C move at the same speed but in opposite directions; the third arrow (row A) remains stationary. Once the two moving arrows have passed each other, the first body in row C will have passed the entire row B but only half of row A, hence the conclusion, “half the time in equal to its own double,” given that “the time for each to pass each body is equal.”89

18

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Zeno’s first argument, the Dichotomy argument, asserts the non-existence of motion on the ground that that “which is in locomotion must arrive at the halfway stage before it arrives at the goal.”90 The second, the Achilles argument, suggests that “in a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.”91 The third, the Arrow, suggests that “a) if everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and b), if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, c) the flying arrow is therefore motionless.”92 The fourth, the Stadium is based on the assumption “that a body occupies an equal time in passing with equal velocity a body that is in motion and a body of equal size that is at rest.”93 In his rendition of these paradoxes, Aristotle refutes them all on two main grounds. First, by “asserting the unity and mutual interdependence of the continuity and infinity of time and spatial magnitude.”94 Second, by “clarifying Zeno’s equivocal use of infinity by distinguishing two senses of directions of infinity, namely, infinity of extension and infinity of divisibility, such that an infinitely divisible magnitude, traversable in a likewise infinitely divisible time, can nevertheless be traversed – since it is a finite (a definite) magnitude – in a finite time.”95 What Zeno tried to do by reconfiguring the relation between time and space was bring to light the differences between time and space, as well as their mutuality (the spacing of time and the temporalization of space). But by means of a various argument (which we will not attempt here), Aristotle proves Zeno’s argument to be false. Many scholars are of the opinion that of the four arguments, it is only the Stadium argument that is truly paradoxical. They also assert that Zeno’s arguments against motion should in fact be seen as paradoxes of immobility because “in such a kind of paradox, motion is logically paradoxical because immobility is at first supposed to exist.”96 6. The Paradoxes of Confirmation (POC): Empirical data and scientific hypotheses are usually of great interest to philosophers of science. Negotiating the relationship between experience and hypotheses remains one of the conundrums of empirical science. It was the quest to find a general criterion for establishing empirical evidence and confirming hypothesis that led the German philosopher and a major figure in the philosophy of science movement, Carl Gustav Hempel (1905–97) to study the qualitative confirmatory relationship between experience and hypothesis.97 Hempel discovered the epistemological paradoxes known as the paradoxes of confirmation (POC). The discovery began in 1937 and was concluded with the 1945 publication of “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation” in which he introduced his now famous paradox of the raven.98 Since Hempel’s paradox of the raven, there have been other POC, like the Goodman paradox, the Quine paradox, and the Irrelevant Conjunct paradox (which we will not discuss here). All these paradoxes try to resolve Hempel’s paradox, but have not been successful. Hempel’s paradox of the raven is an inductive confirmation of a hypothesis. In general, POC involves a relation called the confirmation relation. For Hempel (and this is true of Goodman as well), “the confirmation relation was a logical relation, akin to deductive

The Intrigue of Paradox

19

entailment.” POC also reveals “that a presumption of causal realism is required to ground any confirmation; but once we grant causal realism, we have no reason to accept the central principles giving rise to the paradox.”100 What Hempel was trying to do in the paradox of the raven is establish the defining characteristic of an empirical statement, which for him is “its capability of being tested by a confrontation with experimental findings, i.e., with the results of suitable experiments or ‘focused’ observations.”101 When Hempel speaks of testability, he means “testability in principle,” because “there are many empirical statements which, for practical reasons, cannot be actually tested.”102 To show how a hypothesis can be tested, Hempel introduced what he calls the “Nicod criterion,” which takes the form “For all things, if a thing is P, it is Q.” What Hempel calls Nicod criterion “holds of an object a, that it confirms the hypothesis if and only if it is a case of (‘satisfies’) both antecedent and consequent: it disconfirms the hypothesis if and only if it satisfies the antecedent but not the consequent; and is neutral if and only if it does not satisfy the antecedent.”103 The paradox is stated in form of the hypothesis: All Fs are G, so long as no Fs that are not G have been observed: 99

For anything, if that thing is a raven, it is black [All ravens are black] That x is non-black non raven confirms the statement that all ravens are black. There is a second formulation of the hypothesis: For anything, if that thing is non-black, it is a non-raven [If a thing is not black, it is not a raven] The two formulations of the hypothesis of the raven mean, for anything, if that thing is a raven, it is black. A raven, which is both a raven and black, confirms the hypothesis. But a white raven, though it satisfies the antecedent (being a raven), does not satisfy the consequent (being black) disconfirms the hypothesis. If you take a crow, it does not satisfy the antecedent (not being a raven), but might satisfy the consequent (if it is black), then the crow would be considered neutral to the hypothesis.104 The raven hypothesis in essence yields the following results: Any Any Any Any

black raven confirms the raven hypothesis black non-raven confirms the raven hypothesis non-black raven disconfirms the raven hypothesis non-black non-raven is neutral to the raven hypothesis105

Hempel calls a statement testable in principle, if it is possible to describe the kind of data that would confirm or disconfirm it. The concepts of confirmation and of disconfirmation as here understood are clearly more comprehensive than those of conclusive verification and falsification. Thus, e.g., no finite amount of experiential evidence can conclusively

20

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

verify a hypothesis expressing a general law such as the law of gravitation, which covers an infinity of potential instances, many of which belong either to the as yet inaccessible future, or to the irretrievable past; but a finite set of relevant data might well be “in accordance with” the hypothesis and thus constitute confirming evidence for it.106 To return to POC, Ronald Giere has suggested that POC is generated by three plausible conditions: 1

2 3

Instantiation condition (Nicod’s criterion): an instance which is both P and Q provides confirming evidence for the hypothesis (x)(Px > Qx) while an instance which is P and not Q falsifies the hypothesis. Equivalence condition (EQ): an instance which confirms a hypothesis also confirms any logically equivalent hypothesis. Irrelevance condition: for any hypothesis there are some instances which are inductively irrelevant to that hypothesis, i.e., which provide neither confirming nor disconfirming evidence for the hypothesis.107

However, there are six basic concepts in Hempel’s raven hypothesis: the equivalence condition (EC), development of a hypothesis, direct confirmation, confirmation, disconfirmation, and neutrality.108 Hempel criticizes Nicod’s criterion, characterizing it as something that is restricted only to universal conditionals. He thinks Nicod’s criterion is not applicable to existential statements. He also thinks that if you apply Nicod’s criterion, a red book confirms that all ravens are black. Nicod’s criterion must therefore be dropped, for this reason. He argues that there is really no paradox in actual fact. The situation only appears paradoxical because of a psychological illusion. He uses the notion of equivalence condition – an object or instance that confirms a statement or hypothesis confirms a logically equivalent statement (ES) to dismiss Nicod’s criterion.109 The methodology Hempel adopts is this – that the self-contradictory conclusion is acceptable in that it reveals the hidden misunderstanding. Hempel’s solution did not go unchallenged. Many have questioned the “universal conditionalization principle” in the Hempel hypothesis for various reasons, such as that Hempel’s reasons for retaining the equivalence condition are not sufficient and that hypotheses that are logically equivalent might not equally express the information or the empirical content of the given hypothesis.110 Whereas Hempel argues that there is no paradox, Nelson Goodman argues that there really is a paradox, only because of strict insistence on ES. 7. The Paradox of Sovereignty: The paradox of sovereignty is a self-referential paradox that was first articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) in On the Social Contract. 111 The paradox has since gone through different reformulations and now goes by various names, such as “the boundary problem,” “the paradox of constitutional democracy,” “the democratic paradox,” and “the paradox of politics.” Their common thread is to demonstrate that while political theorists agree that in a democracy the people (demos) should be sovereign, there are still no acceptable criteria for defining who the people really

The Intrigue of Paradox

21

are. The paradox of sovereignty “becomes a practical problem when, for example, immigrants and the disenfranchised contest current practices of political membership.”113 Political theorists who prefer the nomenclature democratic paradox contend that the paradox reveals the scope and limits of democracy and also that it shows how and why democratic thought leads to unjustified exclusions, in addition to explaining how in practice, the claims to sovereignty can lead to some disastrous, unintended consequences.114 8. The Paradox of Omnipotence: This paradox calls into question traditional theism’s claim that God is omnipotent. There are some who think that this is in actual fact, not a true paradox.115 They think it is rather a term used to articulate the difficulties regarding God’s omnipotence and human freewill. Since Thomas Aquinas asserted that God cannot do self-contradictory things,116 the so-called paradox of omnipotence has been employed to call into question God’s inability to do self-contradictory things. The argument goes as follows: The claim that God is omnipotent is the claim that God can do anything God wills. Since omnipotence (the property of being all-powerful) is constitutive of the divine essence, any being worthy of the title “God” cannot fail to possess it. Then we are faced with a puzzle regarding compatibility of omnipotence with other attributes, such as omniscience and impeccability, we consider to be constitutive of God. “If God possesses these properties essentially, as he is said to, then it is not possible for him to sin; nor is it possible for him to forget something, once he knows it. But if God is omnipotent, it must be possible for him to do these things; after all, these are things we mere mortals can do!”117 Then there is also the other related puzzle regarding whether God, who is all powerful, can cause into being a stone that even God cannot lift. Even mortal creatures can erect stones that they cannot lift. If God cannot do this, then maybe God is not all powerful. If on the other hand God can create a stone God cannot lift, then God is equally not all powerful.118 There is also the question whether God can create a universe, the potentialities of which God does not know. It is either a) God cannot completely control the development of every universe God creates or b) God cannot create a universe God cannot completely control. The conclusion drawn from this is that the actual God, if such a God exists, must possess either limitation a) or limitation b). God cannot escape both.119 While controversialists use this to show that the Judeo-Christian God, defined inter alia by omnipotence, does not in actual fact exist,120 “the standard resolution allows that God’s omnipotence does not extend to doing what is logically impossible.”121 Lawrence Goldstein who has studied Ludwig Wittgenstein account of the paradox of omnipotence suggests that the conditions are illicit because they contain contradictory specifications no one can satisfy and that Wittgenstein would consider the contradiction to be without content and therefore nothing can be inferred from it. Thus, Goldstein concludes from it that one way of solving the paradox is perhaps to show that the plausibility of one of the premises’ can be undermined.122 “The relevant premise is that the unliftability sentence is either true or false. Hence, if we can convince ourselves that the unliftability sentence is vacuous, and thus neither true nor false, then the paradox is solved.”123 112

22

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

9. The Standard Semantic Paradoxes: The standard semantic paradoxes cover a host of paradox, such as the Liar Paradox, Grelling’s Paradox, Curry’s Paradox, and Tarski’s Quotational Paradox. These paradoxes are considered self-referential. Bertrand Russell coined the term “reflexiveness.” In 1908 he categorized a list of paradoxes as paradoxes of self-reference or reflexiveness. The Liar paradox, the Grelling paradox, Curry’s paradox, and Tarski’s paradox are still today considered the standard paradoxes of selfreference. The label “self-reference” should be understood broadly in a metaphysical way because what they mean precisely is far from clear.124 In all, what the paradoxes of self-reference have in common is a certain relation to their object. Russell says they all share or are all involved in a notion of vicious circularity, although there is no agreement regarding how to understand the term “circularity.”125 a) The Liar Paradox: An early version of this paradox comes from Plato who reports that Odysseus has a reputation of being an exceptional liar. Apparently, Odysseus mastered the habit of telling tales and might have employed it as a necessary survival skill as he made his way back home from the Trojan War.126 He tried to kick the habit when he reached Ithaca, but was unsuccessful. He did not even reveal his true identity to his second wife, making her believe he was from Crete. Somehow, this habit of lying stuck with the Cretans who also became notorious for being prevaricators. It soon became a popular opinion in Greece that “to play the Cretan” means “to lie.”127 The claim of the Cretans to possess the site of the tomb of Zeus did not help them either. It earned them the reputation of “a race of liars.”128 The negative stereotype that Cretans were liars made its way into the New Testament. The author of the letter to Titus, writes to Titus, the bishop on the island of Crete, to warn him of the local population who were apparently Cretans. They are described as “always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons” (Titus 1:12).129 The author of Titus supports his indictment of the Cretans by claiming his evidence comes from none other than a prominent Cretan referred to in the letter as “one of their own prophets.” Clement of Alexandria (c. 215 CE –150 CE) identified this Cretan “prophet” by name as Epimenides.130 So, if Cretans are always liars, and the one who made this assertion is Epimenides, a Cretan, then Epimenides must be a liar. And if he is a liar, his testimony cannot be true. But if, on the other hand, Cretans are always liars, and Epimenides is correct in asserting this statement, and Epimenides is a Cretan, then this would mean that it is not true that all Cretans are liars because Epimenides is telling the truth. This state of affair is what logicians refer to as the liar paradox. The notion of a false fact is paradoxical.131 The stoics were thought to be specialists in this paradox, as in other paradoxes.132 The Liar paradox does not prove any inconstancy in our language or theoretical beliefs. But in generating a sense of paradox, it makes us pay attention to what ordinarily we would have ignored. For example:

The Intrigue of Paradox

23

This sentence is false In the sentence above, we have an antinomy (a sentence that is true, if and only if it is false).133 A philosophical understanding of truth, negation, and representation is needed to discover the truth about the Liar.134 b) Grelling’s Paradox: This paradox is named after Kurt Grelling who, in 1963, introduced the notion that there are some paradoxes with some properties he considers to be non-self-descriptive adjectives. He calls these properties heterologicality.135 He argues that there are some words that refer to themselves. In so far as they refer to themselves, they are autological or self-descriptive adjectives. For example, the adjective “short” is short, just as the adjective “common” is common, and the adjective English is English. Each of these adjectives, Grelling argues, is autological because each one is true of itself. There are, however, some adjectives that are heterological. The adjective “long” for example, is not a long word, any more than the adjective “German” is German. The noun “potato” is also not potato. These are examples of adjectives or words that do not apply to themselves. They are, therefore, said to be heterological. Paradoxically, this distinction raises the question whether the adjective “heterological” is heterological or autological.136 There is no easy solution. “If we decide that ‘heterological’ is autological, then the adjective is true of itself. But what makes it heterological rather than autological, since whatever the adjective ‘heterological’ is true of is heterological. If we therefore decide that the adjective ‘heterological’ is heterological, then it is true of itself, and that makes it autological.”137 Grelling’s paradox, although not the same as the Liar paradox, is sometimes considered a variant of the Liar paradox or even Russell’s paradox because of their similarities. There is even the suggestion that a version of Grelling’s paradox reappears in type theory, a theory that is inconsistent.138 The tendency in philosophical literature has been to dismiss the Grelling’s paradox as unimportant. Some trivialize it as a mere notional variant of Russell’s paradox.139 But the philosophical importance of the Grelling’s paradox is not “so much on the importance of the notion of the word-properties, heterologicality and autologicality, but that it provides an example of a predicate whose semantics is sensitive to the semantic context; i.e., an indexical predicate.”140 c) Curry’s Paradox: This paradox was first presented in 1942.141 It is one of the set-theoretic paradoxes and is sometimes regarded as a general version of the Russell paradox. It also has some resemblances to the Liar paradox. Curry’s paradox uses plausible logical principles and a conditional to produce unacceptable conclusions: If this sentence is true then everything is true Or If Joe is human then all humans are ten feet fall

24

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

The first statement above is similar to the Liar paradox: This sentence is false. The only difference is that the Curry paradox has the truth conditions “if,” “then.” Curry’s paradox is based on abstraction, more properly known as the principle of naïve comprehension. The principle of naïve comprehension states that every predicate has an extension, i.e., a set consisting of all and only those objects which satisfy that predicate.142 d) Tarski’s Paradox: This paradox is named after the Polish American logician, Alfred Tarski (1901–83). Tarski held that no language can define its own truth-predicate and that the semantic paradoxes prove this theory.143 He suggests that to describe the semantics of a language one must ascend to a higher language, a metalanguage that contains terms that are not expressed in the original language.144 Tarski’s motivation was to show that sentences, like This sentence is not true, are paradoxical and that a definition of truth was needed in order to avoid such paradox. He attempted to provide a materially adequate definition of a truth predicate.145 In sum, what these semantic paradoxes (also called rhetorical paradoxes) reveal is that a paradox can equivocate and self-contradict. The liar paradox, especially, is a good example of such equivocation: it lies, and it doesn’t lie, it tells the truth, and it doesn’t tell the truth; the negative and positive meanings are so balanced that one meaning does not outweigh the other.146 10. The Russell’s Paradox: Russell’s paradox is one of the most famous logical paradoxes. Its origin goes back to the British philosopher-mathematician, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). The British polymath worked out the paradox that takes after his name at the beginning of the 20th century in Principles of Mathematics (1903). As stated in his theory of classes and class concepts, the goal of the paradox is to reveal the paradoxical nature of the set theory which the German mathematician Georg Cantor (1845–1918) had built earlier as mathematics’ foundation theory.147 Cantor thought that mathematics is deducible solely from logical principles and set theory.148 From 1900 to 1903 Russell worked to develop what he would call the principles of mathematics, suggesting that set theory “requires there to be classes among the values of its variables of quantification.”149 On June 16, 1902, Russell wrote a letter to Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), his fellow mathematician and logician, praising Frege’s writings. He ended the letter by pointing out that he had found a point where he had encountered a “difficulty,”150 i.e., an antinomy. Russell insists that it is not true, as Frege held, that every propositional function has a set as its extension. This came as a shock to Frege who thought he had already secured the foundations of mathematics in the self-consistent laws of logic.151 Once he worked out his own ideas, Russell presented the Russell paradox in The Principles of Mathematics (1903). It was his first formulation of type theory.152 To be clear, before Russell, there were many other versions of the type theory. While they differ in some respects, their basic intuition is the same – that “whatever involves all of a collection, must not be one of the collections.”153 Begging to differ, Russell posits the existence of a universal set of entities, which usually goes by the notion, the set of all sets that are not

The Intrigue of Paradox 154

25

members of themselves. Russell held that some sets are members of themselves and others are not.155 If m be a class of propositions, the proposition “every m is true” might or might not be itself an m. But there is a one-one relation of this proposition to m: if n be different from m, “every n is true” is not the same proposition as “every m is true.” Consider now the whole class of propositions of the form “every m is true,” and having the property of not being members of their respective m’s. Let this class be w, and let p be the proposition “every w is true.” If p is a w, it must possess the defining property of w; but this property demands that p should not be a w. On the other hand, if p be not w, then p does possess the defining property of w, and therefore is a w. Thus, the contradiction appears unavoidable.156 The expression used to capture the paradox is: the set of all (and only those) that are not members of themselves. The paradox tells us of a set that appears to belong to itself if and only if it does not belong to itself. Negation is a critical ingredient of the paradox (the set of all sets that are not members of themselves). The negation causes a contradiction (for such a set to be a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself).157 Thus, there is a hint of the paradox of the barber in Russell’s paradox. Some even consider the parallel to be exact.158 In a nutshell, Russell’s paradox can be stated as follows: “It seems that some sets, like the set of abstract objects or the set of infinite sets, are members of themselves. Other sets, like the set of US Senators or the set of bridges over the Thames are not. What about the set of all those sets that are not members of themselves? In the familiar way, we reach a contradiction if we suppose that it is a member of itself, and if we suppose that it isn’t.”159 The contradiction, for Russell, reveals a problem with the nature of classes themselves, for from apparently true premises, one derives, by valid logical deductions, a direct contradiction.160 The salient feature of the paradox, he says later in a 1908 restatement of the theory, is its “vicious circularity.”161 One of Russell’s critics, Ernst Zermelo (1871–1953), another German mathematician and logician, claimed in 1904 to have discovered that there is no universal set, contrary to what Russell posited, and that in discovering that that there is no universal set he had anticipated Russell’s own paradox.162 The American philosopher Josiah Royce (1855–1916) also proposed his own solution to the Russell Paradox. Although it is beyond the scope of this work to investigate any of these solutions,163 it suffices to say here that Lonergan pointed out the difficulty connected with the notion of classes that do not contain themselves, i.e., that “‘the class of classes that does not contain itself’ leads immediately to a contradiction because if you say that it belongs to that class, then it should not, and if it does not, it should. It steps immediately into a contradiction.”164 11. The Paradox of Value: The paradox of value was discovered about 200 years ago. Before it became an economic paradox, it was first treated as a philosophical paradox. The paradox raises questions of value: why are things that are vital to life, e.g., water, cheap, and things that have no practical utility, e.g.,

26

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

diamond, expensive? The puzzle is sometimes referred to as the water-diamond paradox for this reason.165 In its expansive form, the paradox seeks to know why certain essential goods are cheap while exceptionally luxurious goods are expensive. At first, some economists thought they could resolve the paradox by appealing to the law of diminishing marginal utility. But they later realized that the law was not universal and not always applicable to the paradox of value. Economists also realized that “the paradox of value cannot be solved within the framework of classical economic theory because the benefit of goods and their purchase price are influenced by emotional buyer (consumer) behavior rather than objective factors.”166 Some specialists who expound a labor theory of value express doubts about the relevance of water-diamond paradox. They do not see high prices of material goods as paradoxical, but as a natural development, particularly when marketable goods are rare. The paradox of value, in a nutshell, is characteristic of the duality in our economic dealings. “When there is a large number of expensive goods, whether they are indivisible (houses cars, televisions, diamonds, etc.) or divisible (champagne, gold, etc.), the paradox can be explained based on the law of diminishing marginal utility that manifests in free markets. However, when goods are rare (unique), the law of diminishing marginal profitability does not suit them. Then their prices can be explained based on the operation of the phenomenon of saturation that manifests in deficit (closed) markets.”167 12. Semantic Paradox: Semantic paradoxes consist of communications that involve conflicting messages. Take for example the statement, I am lying. If the statement is true, i.e., that the person is indeed lying, then objectively the statement is false, and if, on the other hand, the person is not telling the truth by claiming to be lying, then the statement is false. “The person making the statement can only be lying if he or she is telling the truth and only telling the truth if he or she is lying. This of course is an unresolvable contradiction or paradox.”168 Take another example, this sign which reads, Ignore this sign. The ignore this sign can either be followed or disregarded. To read the sign is to violate the injunction to ignore the sign, so the reader is trapped. The most famous example of semantic paradoxes is this anecdotal story of a barber in a small village: In a small village, there is a barber who shaves all men who do not shave themselves. If the barber shaves himself then he violates the basic intuition of the paradox (since he only shaves those who do not shave themselves). And if he does not shave himself he still violates the basic intuition (since he only shaves those who do not shave themselves). The only conclusion to be drawn is that no such barber exists. “There can be no barber who both shaves himself and does not shave himself. This would be a contradiction and an absurdity.”169 The condition is inconsistent. 13. Yablo’s Paradox: This paradox is a bit complex. It is credited to the Canadian philosopher and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stephen Yablo (1957–). Since the time of Russell, it was widely held that the reason why some statements are paradoxical and others are not is because of their circularity and self-reference. For this reason, some think that the surest

The Intrigue of Paradox

27

way of keeping a language paradox-free is to impose an absolute ban on all selfreference.170 It was this absolute ban on self-reference that Yablo challenged in 1993. He suggests that the idea of imposing an absolute ban on all self-reference is akin to “using a cannon against a fly.” It does not stop the fly, he insists.171 In semantics, there is an assumption that self-reference (e.g., “this sentence is false”) or cross-references (e.g., “the following sentence is true, the previous sentence is false”) is essential in the production of semantic paradoxes. Yablo presented his own paradox in terms of an infinite list of sentences.172 His is a non-self-referential paradox, which has generated much interest in literature, particularly from the perspective of epistemic truth-theory and fixed-point logics.173 Some in fact think that Yablo’s paradox is somewhat related to both the Liar and the Grelling’s paradox, i.e., with respect to their vicious circularity and truth claims. But others dismiss the notion that Yablo’s paradox is involved in circularity. They argue that the fact that we cannot find in language or in our thoughts non-circular ways of representing propositional statements of Yablo’s paradox does not mean that the propositional content of the sentence is circular.174 Since the emergence of Yablo’s paradox, “many philosophers have found paradoxes concerning notions such as ‘truth,’ ‘set’ or ‘denotation’ that do not seem to require any form of self-reference. This led some of them to defend the view that circularity is not essential in formulating semantic or set of theoretic paradoxes.”175 14. Moore’s Paradox: George Edward Moore (1873–1958) was a British philosopher and one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy. He is famous for his book, Principia Ethica (1903) in which “he (somewhat unfairly) pins the famous naturalistic fallacy on preceding moral philosophers, and advocates the view that goodness is a simple, unanalyzable quality, fortunately known by intuition. This intuition enables us to see that the good things of life are certain wholes, consisting of pleasures of aesthetics and love and friendship.”176 Moore devoted a great deal of his time in defense of common sense. He argued “that whenever a substantial philosophical doctrine was in conflict with common sense it was more likely that the argument had gone astray.”177 In his argument against skepticism, Moore insists that we cannot abandon the basic principles of common sense. Moore’s paradox is like a philosophical defense of common sense against skepticism. One of its challenges is with respect to how we might account for the absurdity of a belief expressed by someone who asserts a sentence whose content is true and then goes on to follow it up with an absurd or contradictory statement, as in “there is p but “I do not believe that p.” For example: It is raining, but I don’t believe it. Or Hurting animals for fun is wrong, but I don’t care.

The Value of Paradox It was Kurt Grelling who, following the British mathematician F.P. Ramsey (1903–30), helped to distinguish between two important types of logical paradoxes. The first type, which he called mathematical (logical) paradox, can be formulated in symbolic logic, e.g., the Russell’s paradox. The second type, which

28

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

he called syntactical paradox, can assume reference to language or symbolism. The latter, however, cannot, be formulated in symbolic logic. For example, it is difficult to formulate the Liar paradox in symbolic logic.178 The point, however, remains that both types of paradox, i.e., logical and syntactical paradox, have their respective values. When we are led from an apparently acceptable premises to an apparently unacceptable conclusion, we realize that we have to check the cogency of our reasoning.179 This is not to say all paradoxes are of equal value. While some paradoxes, like the semantic paradox of the barber, might prove a useful exercise for students of logic, they do not necessarily offer any useful scientific interest.180 In fact, Lonergan calls the paradox of the barber a contradictory enterprise and says of it that it is “the type of thing that may lead one to work for years until one discovers one made a stupid mistake at the beginning.”181 Along this line, we might also find some paradoxes that constitute an abuse of language, particularly when they deal in clandestine nonsense. This class of paradox can lead to a descent into the theatre of the absurd.182 The New Testament pastoral epistles (Timothy I and II and Titus) that admonish and instruct Christian pastoral leaders might have had these class of paradox in mind when warning Christians to “avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge” (I Timothy 6: 20–21). However, some paradoxes are of great interest and do have practical value, particularly those paradoxes whose reasoning seem hard to fault. Even those paradoxes that might seem like ordinary logical puzzles have, in Lonergan’s words, “played a fundamental role in the development of mathematical logic.”183 1

2

3

Some paradoxes capture the imagination and are difficult to resist. Some of these paradoxes, such as Zeno’s paradoxes, have appeared in various forms over the years in popular culture to raise intellectual challenges.184 They have appeared in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers 185 and Scot Adams’ Dilbert. 186 Zeno’s paradoxes have also appeared in interactive fiction, to help people make some hard choices.187 Notable examples are Brian Moriarty’s Beyond Zork, 188 Harry Giles and Joey Jones’ The Chinese Room, 189 and Michael Spivey’s A Beauty Cold and Austere. 190 There are some paradoxes, e.g., the paradox of value, which have practical economic implications. They have bearings on policy making, at times helping to determine financial bubbles. One of the challenges and major issues of sustainable economic development is economic bubbles, a problem that is linked with the paradox of value.191 The paradox shows how financial sustainability can be achieved through regulatory measures that target the management of market saturation processes and through better regulations on financial institutions.192 Several studies have shown the value of paradox to theologians of all stripes and religions. There is, for example, the case of Byzantine scholars and theologians who have utilized logical paradoxes in their thoughts and commentaries on Holy Scripture. These scholars use paradoxes to formulate their thoughts on logic, God, and human knowledge. Prominent

The Intrigue of Paradox

4

29

among them is the renowned Byzantine commentator, John of Damascus (676 CE–749 CE), who used logical paradoxes to refute philosophical skepticism, showing how philosophical skepticism is by nature a selfrefuting phenomenon.193 Paradox offers a lens for understanding a people’s struggles with their religious faith. At times people profess one thing and act counter to what they publicly profess in their religious faith. This is not to question the sincerity of the religious faith they profess. It is just to point out that a vast number of people of faith fall short of the pragmatic demands of the religious faith they profess. Clinical psychologists call it a neurotic struggle. Behavioral psychologists think of it as a pathology of a dishonest behavior. Hypocrisy aside, the paradox of faith is perhaps a neurotic struggle in the attempt to surrender one’s life to the higher power one professes belief in. Each real-life decision thrusts the believer “into an endless discernment as to whether they are truly allowing God to act ‘through’ them or whether they are merely implementing their own human desires and drives.”194 It is a paradox the Apostle Paul expressed beautifully as a tension between desires and wants: “For the good I desire, I do not do. But the evil I do not want, this I practice” (Rom. 7: 19).

This kind of paradox presents a theological challenge. If, as we pointed out earlier, one of the challenges of Moore’s paradox is to account for the absurdity of a belief expressed by someone who asserts a sentence whose content is true and then follows it up with an absurd or contradictory statement, then might Romans 7: 15–19 not be a theological equivalent of the Moore’s paradox? Paul’s paradox might perhaps be the apostle’s own anticipation of Moore’s paradox. 5.

Paradoxes of faith are not always easy to understand. The difficulty at times lead to the charge of hypocrisy. The difficulty and the charge of hypocrisy are as problematic for the faith community as they are for individual members of the faith community. When a person professes one thing and lives a life that contradicts what the faith community to which they belong outwardly professes, we say the individual is a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is a term that is applicable at both the individual and the organizational levels. Hence behavioral psychology speaks of organizational hypocrisy. Organizational hypocrisy is a term for a range of behaviors or practices that does not meet the accepted expectations and previously asserted

Table 1.2 Comparing Moore and Paul’s Paradox Moore’s Paradox

Paul’s Paradox

Hurting animals for fun is wrong, but I don’t care

For I do not do the good I want, but I do the very thing I hate (Rom.7:15)

30

Exploring Theological Paradoxes values. It is also used to denote “inconsistency between the adopted theory of an organization and actualization of that theory and to conflict between its adopted core beliefs, values and principles, and real actions.”195 Hence, we can say of a faith-community that it is hypocritical when the actions of their members do no align with the core beliefs and values they profess. Similarly, an educational institution or a health care facility run by a church or a faith-community is also hypocritical, if the same behavioral inconsistencies or disingenuousness are manifestly clear.

Conclusion Paradoxes are inevitable and difficult to avoid in life. In the history of ideas, the flowering of paradoxes has come in periods with so many competing truths. When they do deceive, paradoxes deceive times, not truth. This is “because shifting opinion depends upon shifting times, while truth does not.”196 To the extent that they force one to find better reasons against them, paradoxes are a gadfly.197 In general, paradoxes are trumpeters of truth; they call truth to battle for itself.198 They are also profoundly self-critical in that they comment on their own method and their own technique.199 Rhetorical paradoxes (the opposite of logical paradoxes) expose the limitations and rigidity of argumentations. The epistemological paradoxes call into question the processes of human thought and the categories we use to express human thought.200 The logical paradoxes critique the limitations and rigidity of logic. To return to the idea of paradoxes as trumpeters of truth, which was assumed for a long time to be the hallmark of the logical paradoxes, not all agree with the view. The dialetheist Graham Priest, for example, thinks of the logical paradoxes as “the site of a fault-line in the whole tectonic of ‘classical’ logic.”201 He thinks that even though modern logicians are “painfully aware of it,” they “have had as little success with it as their geological counterparts have had with the San Andreas fault.”202 This is Priest’s way of drawing attention to the fact that the logical paradoxes are not without problems. Some in fact can be “self-destructive, consenting in their own self-destruction (‘better reasons against them’).”203 Paradox, however, becomes paradoxical when it tries to do two things at once, i.e., two things which contradict or cancel each other out.204 Paradox can also be as tautological as it is paradoxical when it deals with itself as subject and as object.205 The German novelist, Franz Kafka (1883–1924), who was famous for creative fusion of critical realism and fantasy in his poems, alluded to this and wrote: “Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and it’s very self.”206 The most illustrious of philosophers, among whom were Frege, Russell, and David Hilbert, have tried in vain to avoid logical paradoxes without infringing classical logic.207 While paradox has long been a driving engine of logic,208 the logical and mathematical paradoxes are not easy to resolve. They are often “fixed” and pose a challenge to human understanding.209 There are also times

The Intrigue of Paradox

31

that a paradox fails to work as a paradox, i.e., by failing to dazzle by its incongruities.210 In Gorgias’ Praise of Helen, for example, Gorgias tries to praise a woman who was considered unworthy of conventional praise, since (if legend is to be believed) she was the cause of the Trojan War and the cascade of disasters following it. But Gorgias’ “oration was so effective that Helen became, not a paradoxical but a proper subject of encomium, a source for many set-pieces on the most beautiful woman in the world. In this case, paradox became orthodox.”211 At the time of the New Testament writings, paradoxes generally were well known and frequently used in the ancient and Hellenistic worlds of which Israel and the NT writers were a part. Paradox was also used in philosophy, oratory, comedy, and other recreational activities to generate reactions. “Contradiction” or “antithesis” were standard terms that were employed in logic and rhetoric.212 Some of these made their way into the New Testament, Patristic, and Scholastic disputations. In The Confession, Augustine reportedly asked what God was doing before God created the world: “Preparing hell for people who ask such questions,” was the reply. The scholastic Anselm and other medieval writers also found a place for paradox in their disputations, prayers, and meditations. Thus, “Paradox is the philosopher’s enchantment, their fetish. It fascinates them, a light does a moth. Although it can illuminate, it can also consume.”213 When asked for his answer to Augustine’s question regarding what God was doing before he created the world, the philosopher-mathematician J.E. Littlewood replied, “Millions of words must have been written; but he was doing pure mathematics and thought it would be a pleasant change to do some applied.”214 Thus, paradox is always involved in a dialectic, challenging some orthodoxies and serving as “an oblique criticism of absolute judgment or absolute convention.”215

Notes 1 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, Collection, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 87. 2 Daniel Gold, “The Paradox in Writing on Religion,” Harvard Theological Review, 83 (1990), 321–32, 321. 3 Neil Tennant, “A New Unified Account of Truth and Paradox,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 124 (2015), 571–605, 573. 4 Gold, “The Paradox in Writing on Religion,” 321. 5 Stephen Yablo, “Paradox without Self-Reference,” Analysis, 53 (1993), 251–52. 6 Ibid. 7 Richard Lederer, “On Paradox,” The Vocabula Review, 14/2 (2012) [No page numbers]. 8 Narry F. Santos, Slave for All: The Paradox of Authority and Servanthood in the Gospel of Mark (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003), 3. 9 Inna Gryshova, et.al., “The Paradox of Value and Economic Bubbles: New Insights for Sustainable Economic Development,” Sustainability ,11 (2019), 1–17. 10 Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 107.

32

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

11 Nicholas Falletta, Paradoxon (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), 9. 12 Sthaneshwar Timaisina, “Bharthari and the Daoist on Paradoxical Statements,” Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion, 23 (2018), 5–24. 13 Matthew Bagger, The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 2. 14 Santos, Slave for All, 4. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 5. 17 Ibid., 4. 18 Lederer, “On Paradox.” 19 See Michael Cholbi, “Moore’s Paradox and Moral Motivation,” Ethic Theory Moral Practice, 12 (2009), 495–510. 20 Albert W. Musschenga and Robert Heeger, “Editorial,” Ethic Theory Moral Practice, 12 (2009), 445–47, 446. 21 Markus E. Locker, “And who shaves God? Nature and role of paradoxes in ‘science and religion’ communications: ‘A case of foolish virgins,’” Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 1 (2009), 187–201; see footnote 14. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 189. 24 Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968), 75. 25 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 5, Understanding and Being, edited by Elizabeth A. Morelli and Mark D. Morelli (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 116. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 23, Early Works on Theological Method, 2, edited by Robert M. Doran and H. Daniel Monsour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 344 30 Gold, “The Paradox in Writing on Religion,” 322. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 323. 34 Tara F. Hall, “People are more comfortable with paradox than commonly believed: paradox in film and fiction,” Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 25 (2013), 287–90. 35 Ibid. 36 By metaphor I refer to what Roman Jacobson says indicates similarity and Northrop Frye calls “an oral device” as distinct from metonymy which he calls “a literate device.” Frye says in metaphor “words are ‘put for’ thoughts, and are the outward expressions of an inner reality.” As cited in Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 101. See also Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 7–8. 37 As cited in Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 100. 38 Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 194. 39 See Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 100. 40 Ibid., 101. 41 Tennant, “A New Unified Account of Truth and Paradox,” 287. 42 Locker, “And who shaves God?” 189. 43 Kurt Grelling, “Logical Paradoxes,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 45 (1936), 481–86.

The Intrigue of Paradox

33

44 Ibid. 45 See Willard Van Orman Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1966), especially 1–18. 46 Lederer, “On Paradox.” 47 Jiri Raclavsky, “The Barber Paradox: On Its Paradoxicality and Its Relationship to Russell’s Paradox,” Prolegomena, 13 (2014), 269–78. 48 Gareth Matthews, “Paradoxical Statements,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 11 (1974), 133–39. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 134. 52 Ibid., 1. 53 Ibid., 133. 54 Ibid., 135. 55 See Stephen Read, “Field’s Paradox and Its Medieval Solution,” History and Philosophy of Logic, 31 (2010), 161–76. 56 See Oksana Yu Goncharko and Yuriy M. Romanenko, “A Brief History of SelfReference Notion Implementation in Byzantium,” Scrinium, 12 (2016), 244–60. 57 Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy [Oxford Paperback Reference] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 44. 58 Mika Oksansen, “The Russell-Kaplan Paradox and Other Modal Paradoxes: A New Solution,” Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic, 4 (1999), 73–93. 59 Ibid. 60 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 7. 61 Eric J. Cohen, “Induced Christian Neurosis: An Examination of Pragmatic Paradoxes and the Christian Faith,” Journal of Psychology and Theology, 10 (1982), 5–12. 62 See Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 19. 63 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 14. 64 Ibid., 51. 65 See Jonathan L. Kvanvig, “Religious Pluralism and the Buridan’s Paradox,” European Journal of Philosophy of Religion, 1 (2009), 1–26 (see footnote 1). 66 Ibid. 67 See D.J. O’Connor, “Pragmatic Paradox,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 57 (1948), 358–59. 68 See Timothy Chan, “Moore’s Paradox is not Just Another Pragmatic Paradox,” Synthese, 173 (2010), 211–29, 218; quoting L.J. Cohen, “Mr. O’Connor’s ‘Pragmatic Paradoxes,’” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 59 (1950), 85–87. 69 Patrick Gray, “The Liar Paradox and the Letter to Titus,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 69 (2007), 302–14, 307. 70 Chan, “Moore’s Paradox is not Just Another Pragmatic Paradox,” 218. 71 Ibid., 217. 72 See Roy A. Sorensen, Blindspots (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 28. 73 Matthews, “Paradoxical Statements,” 135. 74 Sorensen, A Brief History of the Paradox, 162. 75 Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 106. 76 Matthews, “Paradoxical Statements,” 135. 77 Ibid. 78 See Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 1–18. 79 As quoted and popularized by M. Sainsbury, Paradoxes, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1. 80 See Raclavsky, “The Barber Paradox: On Its Paradoxicality and Its Relationship to Russell’s Paradox,” 270. 81 Ibid., 274.

34

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

82 Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 106. 83 Ibid. 84 Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1966), 398. 85 Ibid. 86 See Michael Z. Spivey, “Engaging the Paradoxical: Zeno’s Paradoxes in Three Works of Interactive Fiction,” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 10 (2020), 39–65. 87 See Joe Sachs, Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 88 See Mael Bathfield, “Why Zeno’s Paradoxes of Motion are Actually about Immobility,” Foundations of Science, 23 (2018), 649–79. 89 See Jean P. Tan, “Time and Paradox: Bertrand Russell and Slavoj Zizek’s on Zeno’s Paradoxes of Motion,” Budhi, 11 (2007), 11–54 (see footnote 3). 90 Bathfield, “Why Zeno’s Paradoxes of Motion are Actually about Immobility,” 659. 91 Ibid., 657. 92 Ibid., 652. 93 Ibid., 651. 94 Tan, “Time and Paradox,” 13. 95 Ibid. 96 Bathfield, “Why Zeno’s Paradoxes of Motion are Actually about Immobility,” 672. 97 Dun Xinguo, “Queries on Hempel’s Solution to the Paradoxes of Confirmation,” Philos China, 2 (2007), 131–39. 98 See Carl G. Hempel, “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 54 (1945), 1–26; 97–121. 99 Branden Fitelson and James Hawthorne, “The Wason Task(s) and the Paradox of Confirmation,” Philosophical Perspectives, 24 (2010), 207–40. 100 See Murall Ramachandran, “A Neglected Response to the Paradoxes of Confirmation,” South African Journal of Philosophy, 36 (2017), 179–85. 101 See Hempel, “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation,” 1. 102 Ibid., 2. 103 Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, “A Comparative Treatment of the Paradox of Confirmation,” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 30 (2002), 339–58. 104 Ibid. 105 See Lin Chao-Tien, “Solutions to the Paradoxes of Confirmation, Goodman’s Paradox, and Two New Theories of Confirmation,” Philosophy of Science, 45 (1978), 415–19. 106 Hempel, “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation,” 2. 107 Ronald N. Giere, “An Orthodox Statistical Resolution of the Paradox of Confirmation,” Philosophy of Science, 37 (1970), 354–62. 108 Chao-Tien, “Solutions to the Paradoxes of Confirmation,” 415. 109 Prasad, “A Comparative Treatment of the Paradox of Confirmation,” 340. 110 Xinguo, “Queries on Hempel’s Solution to the Paradoxes of Confirmation,” 136–37. 111 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. J. Masters and edited by Roger Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978). 112 See Paulina O. Espejo, “Paradoxes of Popular Sovereignty: A View from Spanish America,” The Journal of Politics, 74 (2012), 1053–65. 113 Ibid., 1053. 114 Ibid. 115 Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 268. 116 See ST Part I, Q. 25, article 3. 117 Sarah Adams, “A New Paradox of Omnipotence,” Philosophia, 43 (2015), 759–85. 118 Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 268. 119 J. L. Cowan, “The Paradox of Omnipotence,” Analysis, 25 (1965), 102–08.

The Intrigue of Paradox

35

120 Lawrence Goldstein, “The Barber, Russell’s Paradox, Catch-22, God and More: A Defence of a Wittgensteinian Conception of Contradiction,” in The Law of NonContradiction: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Graham Priest, JC Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 295–313. 121 Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 268. 122 Goldstein, “The Barber, Russell’s Paradox, Catch-22, God and More,” 303. 123 Ibid. 124 Jose M. Fernandez and Jordi V. Abad, “Eliminating Self-Reference from Grelling’s and Zwicker’s Paradoxes,” Theoria, 79 (2014), 85–97. 125 Ibid., 91. 126 Gray, “The Liar Paradox and the Letter to Titus,” 302. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid., 303–304. 131 Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 236. 132 Gray, “The Liar Paradox and the Letter to Titus,” 304. 133 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 9. 134 Daniel Nolan, “Conditionals and Curry,” Philosophical Studies, 173 (2016), 2629–47. 135 See Grelling, “The Logical Paradoxes,” 481–86. 136 Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 162. 137 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 6. 138 See Jeffrey Ketland, “Jacquette on Grelling’s Paradox,” Analysis, 65 (2005), 258–60. 139 Jay Newhard, “Grelling’s Paradox,” Philosophical Studies, 126 (2005), 1–27 (see footnote 12). 140 Ibid. 141 See H. Curry, “The Inconsistency of Certain Formal Logics,” Journal of Symbolic Logic, 7 (1942), 115–17. 142 See Susan Rogerson, “Natural Deduction and Curry’s Paradox,” Journal of Philosophical Logic, 36 (2007), 155–79. 143 Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 82. 144 Ibid. 145 See Lon Berk, “Why the Liar Does not Matter,” Journal of Philosophical Logic, 32 (2003), 323–41. 146 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 6. 147 Goncharko and Romanenko, “A Brief History of Self-Reference Notion Implementation in Byzantium,” 248. 148 See J. Brent Crouch, “Reflections on Josiah Royce’s Logic: Royce on Russell’s Paradox,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society XL (2004), 607–26. 149 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 103. 150 See Bernard Linsky, “Russell’s Paradox of Predicates,” Frontiers of Philosophy in China, 9 (2014), 149–65. 151 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 13. 152 See Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1903), 527. 153 Crouch, “Reflections on Josiah Royce’s Logic,” 610; quoting Bertrand Russell, “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types,” in Logic and Knowledge, edited by Robert C. Marsh (New York: Capricorn Books, 1971), 59–102. 154 See A. Cantini, “On a Russellian Paradox about Propositions and Truth,” in One Hundred Years of Russell’s Paradox, edited by Godehand Link (New York: 2004), 259–84. 155 See Bertrand Russell, “Mathematics and the Metaphysician,” in Mysticism and Logic and other Essays by Bertrand Russell (London: Longmans, Green, 1921), 74–96; online: https://homepages.uc.edu/~martinj/Philosophy%20and%20Religion/Atheism/ Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20Mysticism%20and%20Logic%20and%20Other%

36

156 157 158 159 160 161 162

163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191

Exploring Theological Paradoxes 20Essays.pdf; accessed December 14, 2021 and The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, edited by Alasdair Urqquhart and Albert Lewis (London: Routledge, 1994). As quoted in Oksansen, “The Russell-Kaplan Paradox and Other Modal Paradoxes,” 75; quoting Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, 527. Goncharko and Romanenko, “A Brief History of Self-Reference Notion Implementation in Byzantium,” 248. Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 13. See K. Simmons, “Sets, Classes and Extensions: A Singularity Approach to Russell’s Paradox,” Philosophical Studies, 100 (2000), 109–49. Crouch, “Reflections on Josiah Royce’s Logic,” 609. See Russell, “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types.” See Gregory Landini, “Zermelo and Russell’s Paradox: Is There a Universal Set?” Philosophia Mathematica, 21 (2013), 180–99 and Ernst Zermelo, “A New Proof of the Possibility of a Well-Ordering,” in From Frege to Gödel, edited by Jean van Heijenoort (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 183–98. For Royce’s solution, see Crouch, “Reflections on Josiah Royce’s Logic.” Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 18, Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism, edited by Philip J. McShane (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 42. Gryshova, “The Paradox of Value and Economic Bubbles,” 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 15. Cohen, “Induced Christian Neurosis,” 7. Ibid., 8. See Yablo, “Paradox without Self-Reference,” 251–52. Ibid. Fernandez and Abad, “Eliminating Self-Reference from Grelling’s and Zwicker’s Paradoxes,” 85. See Can Baskent, “A Yabloesque Paradox in Epistemic Game Theory,” Synthese, 195 (2018), 441–64. Fernandez and Abad, “Eliminating Self-Reference from Grelling’s and Zwicker’s Paradoxes,” 91; paraphrasing R. Sorensen, “Yablo’s Paradox and Kindred Infinite Liars,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 107 (1998), 137–55. Fernandez and Abad, “Eliminating Self-Reference from Grelling’s and Zwicker’s Paradoxes,” 86. Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 250. Ibid. Grelling, “The Logical Paradoxes,” 485. Nolan, “Conditionals and Curry,” 2629. Grelling, “The Logical Paradoxes,” 481. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 15. Gray, “The Liar Paradox and the Letter to Titus,” 310. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 20. See Spivey, “Engaging the Paradoxical,” 39. See Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (New York: Grove Press, 1984). See Scot Adams, Dilbert, online: https://dilbert.com/; accessed March 31, 2020. Spivey, “Engaging the Paradoxical,” 40. See Brian Moriarty, online: www.infocom-if.org/authors/moriarty.html; accessed March 31, 2020. See Harry Giles and Joey Jones, online: https://intfiction.org/t/the-chinese-room -by-joey-jones-harry-giles/344; accessed March 31, 2020. See Michael Spivey, https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=y9y7jozi0l76bb82; accessed March 31, 2020. Gryshova, “The Paradox of Value and Economic Bubbles,” 1.

The Intrigue of Paradox

37

192 Ibid., 15. 193 Goncharko and Romanenko, “A Brief History of Self-Reference Notion Implementation in Byzantium,” 251. 194 Cohen, “Induced Christian Neurosis,” 5. 195 Gokhan Kilicoglu, “Consistency or Discrepancy? Rethinking Schools from Organization Hypocrisy to Integrity,” Management in Education, 31 (2017), 118–24. 196 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 37. 197 Ibid. 198 Ibid. 199 Ibid., 7. 200 Ibid. 201 Graham Priest, In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987), 7. 202 Ibid. 203 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 37. 204 Ibid., 8. 205 Ibid., 7. 206 See Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, online: https://zork.net/~patty/pattyland/ kafka/parables/wallandbabel.htm; accessed April 5, 2020. 207 Grelling, “The Logical Paradoxes,” 482. 208 Nolan, “Conditionals and Curry,” 2629. 209 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 7. 210 Ibid., 8. 211 Ibid. 212 Gray, “The Liar Paradox and the Letter to Titus,” 313. 213 Ibid., 314; quoting Stephen Read, Thinking about Logic: An Introduction to the Philosophic of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 2. 214 As cited in Roy Sorensen, A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and Labyrinths of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 18. 215 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 10.

Bibliography Adam, Scott. Dilbert. Online: https://dilbert.com; accessed March 31, 2020. Adams, Sarah. “A New Paradox of Omnipotence.” Philosophia, 43 (2015), 759–785. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Online: www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/home.html; accessed December 14, 2021. Bagger, Matthew. The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Baskent, Can. “A Yabloesque Paradox in Epistemic Game Theory.” Synthese, 195 (2018), 441–464. Bathfield, Mael. “Why Zeno’s Paradoxes of Motion are Actually about Immobility.” Foundations of Science, 23 (2018), 649–679. Berk, Lon. “Why the Liar Does not Matter.” Journal of Philosophical Logic, 32 (2003), 323– 341. Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. Cantini, A. “On a Russellian Paradox about Propositions and Truth.” in One Hundred Years of Russell’s Paradox. Edited by Godehand Link, 259–284. New York, 2004.

38

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Chan, Timothy. “Moore’s Paradox is not Just Another Pragmatic Paradox,” Synthese, 173 (2010), 211–229. Chao-Tien, Lin. “Solutions to the Paradoxes of Confirmation, Goodman’s Paradox, and Two New Theories of Confirmation.” Philosophy of Science, 45 (1978), 415–419. Cholbi, Michael. “Moore’s Paradox and Moral Motivation.” Ethic Theory Moral Practice, 12 (2009), 495–510. Cohen, Eric J. Cohen. “Induced Christian Neurosis: An Examination of Pragmatic Paradoxes and the Christian Faith.” Journal of Psychology and Theology, 10 (1982), 5–12. Cohen, L.J. “Mr. O’Connor’s ‘Pragmatic Paradoxes.’” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 59 (1950), 85–87. Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Cowan, J. L. “The Paradox of Omnipotence.” Analysis, 25 (1965), 102–108. Crouch, Brent J. “Reflections on Josiah Royce’s Logic: Royce on Russell’s Paradox.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society XL (2004), 607–626. Curry, H. “The Inconsistency of Certain Formal Logics.” Journal of Symbolic Logic, 7 (1942), 115–117. Espejo, Paulina O. “Paradoxes of Popular Sovereignty: A View from Spanish America.” The Journal of Politics, 74 (2012), 1053–1065. Fernandez, José M. and Jordi V. Abad. “Eliminating Self-Reference from Grelling’s and Zwicker’s Paradoxes.” Theoria, 79 (2014), 85–97. Fitelson Brandsen and James Hawthorne. “The Wason Task(s) and the Paradox of Confirmation.” Philosophical Perspectives, 24 (2010), 207–240. Falletta, Nicholas. Paradoxon. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998. Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Giere, Ronald N. “An Orthodox Statistical Resolution of the Paradox of Confirmation.” Philosophy of Science, 37 (1970), 354–362. Giles, Harry and Joey Jones. Online: https://intfiction.org/t/the-chinese-room-by-joey-jo nes-harry-giles/344; accessed March 31, 2020. Gold, Daniel Gold. “The Paradox in Writing on Religion.” Harvard Theological Review, 83 (1990), 321–332. Goldstein, Lawrence. “The Barber, Russell’s Paradox, Catch-22, God and More: A Defence of a Wittgensteinian Conception of Contradiction.” In The Law of NonContradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 295–313. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Goncharko, Oksana Yu. and Yuriy M. Romanenko. “A Brief History of Self-Reference Notion Implementation in Byzantium.” Scrinium, 12 (2016), 244–260. Gray, Patrick. “The Liar Paradox and the Letter to Titus.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 69 (2007), 302–314. Grelling, Kurt. “Logical Paradoxes.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 45 (1936), 481–486. Gryshova, Inna et.al. “The Paradox of Value and Economic Bubbles: New Insights for Sustainable Economic Development.” Sustainability, 11 (2019), 1–17. Hall, Tara F. “People are more comfortable with paradox than commonly believed: paradox in film and fiction.” Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 25 (2013), 287–290. Hempel, Carl G. “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 54 (1945), 1–26, 97–121.

The Intrigue of Paradox

39

Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell Publishing, 1968. Kafka, Franz. Parables and Paradoxes. Online: https://zork.net/~patty/pattyland/kafka/pa rables/wallandbabel.htm; accessed April 5, 2020. Ketland, Jeffrey. “Jacquette on Grelling’s Paradox.” Analysis, 65 (2005), 258–260. Kilicoglu, Gokhan. “Consistency or Discrepancy? Rethinking Schools from Organization Hypocrisy to Integrity.” Management in Education, 31 (2017), 118–124. Kvanvig, Jonathan L. “Religious Pluralism and the Buridan’s Paradox.” European Journal of Philosophy of Religion, 1 (2009), 1–26. Landini, Gregory. “Zermelo and Russell’s Paradox: Is There a Universal Set?” Philosophia Mathematica, 21 (2013), 180–199. Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. Lederer, Richard. “On Paradox.” The Vocabula Review, 14/2 (2012) [No page numbers]. Linsky, Bernard. “Russell’s Paradox of Predicates.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 9 (2014), 149–165. Locker, Markus E. “And who shaves God? Nature and role of paradoxes in ‘science and religion’ communications: ‘A case of foolish virgins.” Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 1 (2009), 187–201. Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, Collection. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 23, Early Works on Theological Method, 2. Edited by Robert M. Doran and H. Daniel Monsour. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 18, Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism. Edited by Philip J. McShane. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 5, Understanding and Being. Edited by Elizabeth A. Morelli and Mark D. Morelli. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Matthews, Gareth. “Paradoxical Statements.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 11 (1974), 133–139. Moriarty, Brian. online: http://www.infocom-if.org/authors/moriarty.html; accessed March 31, 2020. Musschenga, Albert W. and Robert Heeger. “Editorial.” Ethic Theory Moral Practice, 12 (2009), 445–447. Newhard, Jay. “Grelling’s Paradox.” Philosophical Studies, 126 (2005), 1–27. Nolan, Daniel. “Conditionals and Curry.” Philosophical Studies, 173 (2016), 2629–2647. O’Connor, D.J. “Pragmatic Paradox.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 57 (1948), 358–359. Oksansen, Mika. “The Russell-Kaplan Paradox and Other Modal Paradoxes: A New Solution.” Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic, 4 (1999), 73–93. Priest, Graham. In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987. Quine, Willard Van Orman. The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1966. Raclavsky, Jiri. “The Barber Paradox: On Its Paradoxicality and Its Relationship to Russell’s Paradox.” Prolegomena, 13 (2014), 269–278. Ramachandran, Murall. “A Neglected Response to the Paradoxes of Confirmation.” South African Journal of Philosophy, 36 (2017), 179–185.

40

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. “A Comparative Treatment of the Paradox of Confirmation.” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 30 (2002), 339–358. Read, Stephen. “Field’s Paradox and Its Medieval Solution.” History and Philosophy of Logic, 31 (2010), 161–176. Read, Stephen. Thinking about Logic: An Introduction to the Philosophic of Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Rogerson, Susan. “Natural Deduction and Curry’s Paradox.” Journal of Philosophical Logic, 36 (2007), 155–179. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. On the Social Contract. Translated by J. Masters and edited by Roger Masters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978. Russell, Bertrand. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell. Edited by Alasdair Urqquhart and Albert Lewis. London: Routledge, 1994. Russell, Bertrand. The Principles of Mathematics. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1903. Russell, Bertrand. “Mathematics and the Metaphysician.” In Mysticism and Logic and other Essays by Bertrand Russell, 74–96. London: Longmans, Green, 1921. Online: https://homepages.uc.edu/~martinj/Philosophy%20and%20Religion/Atheism/Bertrand %20Russell%20-%20Mysticism%20and%20Logic%20and%20Other%20Essays.pdf; accessed December 14, 2021. Russell, Bertrand. “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types.” In Logic and Knowledge. Edited by Robert C. Marsh, 59–102. New York: Capricorn Books, 1971. Sachs, Joe. Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Sainsbury, M. Paradoxes2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Santos, Narry F. Slave for All: The Paradox of Authority and Servanthood in the Gospel of Mark. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003. Simmons, K. “Sets, Classes and Extensions: A Singularity Approach to Russell’s Paradox.” Philosophical Studies, 100 (2000), 109–149. Sorensen, Roy A. Blindspots. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Sorensen, R. Roy A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and Labyrinths of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Sorensen, R. Roy “Yablo’s Paradox and Kindred Infinite Liars.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 107 (1998), 137–155. Spivey, Michael Z. “Engaging the Paradoxical: Zeno’s Paradoxes in Three Works of Interactive Fiction.” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 10 (2020), 39–65. Spivey, Michael Z.https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=y9y7jozi0l76bb82; accessed March 31, 2020. Stoppard, Tom. Jumpers. New York: Grove Press, 1984. Tan, Jean P. “Time and Paradox: Bertrand Russell and Slavoj Zizek’s on Zeno’s Paradoxes of Motion.” Budhi, 11 (2007), 11–54. Tennant, Neil. “A New Unified Account of Truth and Paradox.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 124 (2015), 571–605. Timaisina, Sthaneshwar. “Bharthari and the Daoist on Paradoxical Statements.” Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion, 23 (2018), 5–24. Xinguo, Dun. “Queries on Hempel’s Solution to the Paradoxes of Confirmation.” Philos China, 2 (2007), 131–139. Yablo, Stephen. “Paradox without Self-Reference.” Analysis, 53 (1993), 251–252. Zermelo, Ernst. “A New Proof of the Possibility of a Well-Ordering.” In From Frege to Gödel. Edited by Jean van Heijenoort, 183–198. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.

2

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

Paradox is inherently part of the human condition.1 The human person is a polarity of self-assertion and self-negation; a being who finds fulfillment in “the tension between anonymity and fulfillment.”2 Before it exists in thought paradox exists in reality.3 Religion employs paradoxical thought and uses paradoxical thoughts to affirm, establish, and go beyond what already exists in human reality. Because religion is an idea, an act of insight, paradox is generally inevitably involved in this act of insight.4 “As a fundamental aspect of that which is human, paradox is found universally in the religious quest.”5 Since religion is a search for truth, as each truth becomes better known, it opens further a fresh area of paradox.6 For, religion is an arena in which paradoxes tend to constellate, especially because of the many different ideas and systems that compete with each other. It is a field which is “constantly and inextricably involved in the coincidence of opposites.”7 Even the language it employs is also characteristically paradoxical.8 Not to mention that it is an arena of “an audience of men and women in the know, who could be expected to understand the paradoxists’ learned wit and to admire the rhetorical skills demonstrated in the paradoxes themselves.”9 Some religious believers think that it is the prestige that religion accords to paradox that is responsible for most of the modern polemics against religion.10 They cite as evidence the Enlightenment critique of Christianity that targeted Christianity’s alleged self-contradictory and unintelligible doctrines.11 Denouncing what he thought was the absurdity of Christianity, the English-born American political theorist and Enlightenment thinker, Thomas Paine (1737– 1809), for example, ranked Christianity as the foremost of all the religions that were invented and that are contradictory and repugnant to reason.12 A great deal of Paine’s writings, especially The Age of Reason (1793–94), were devoted to attacking institutional religion and Christianity’s alleged contradictory teachings. But while Paine and other critics of religion cite the paradoxicality of religion as a potent objection to belief,13 believers cite the paradoxicality of religion as a reason to achieve “-the unity of the contraries,” to use Martin Buber’s famous expression. The axiom, Quandiu vivmus necesse habemus semper quaerere [as long as we live, we deem it essential ever to seek] is as true in ordinary life as it is true DOI: 10.4324/9781003299820-3

42

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

in religious faith, especially in the eyes of religious believers who think of paradox as both a search and a provisional expression of what remains incomplete, but whose orientation is ever towards fullness.14 Orientation towards fullness is, for Lonergan, an orientation towards God. For him, the full act of understanding is God. There arises, for this reason, “the apparent antinomy that every created intelligence naturally desires to know God by his essence, yet none can attain such a fulfillment by its natural powers.”15 With respect to this natural desire to know things and understand God and things pertaining to God, the difference between the philosopher and the theologian is that while the theologian can affirm a natural desire to see God, the philosopher has only to be content with paradox of not knowing God,16 unbeknown to the philosopher that “paradox, in the best sense, is objectivity.”17 The English polymath and scholar, Sir Thomas Browne (1905–82), says of this paradoxical way of knowing God and things of God objectively, i.e., mystery in religious language, that it is the only possible “proof” of divinity. Ordinary events might command common sense credulity, far more than ordinary event, religious faith demands more.18

Is There An Antinomy in Religious Belief? The American philosopher and logician of the analytic tradition, Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) tells the story of a man who was sentenced to death on Sunday and scheduled to be hanged on one of the following seven noons. The idea was to keep the man in ignorance until the morning of the fatal day and leave him guessing which noon it will be. But for some reason the man persuaded himself by a faulty argument that the sentence could not be executed. He only discovered his error when the hangmen arrived at 11:55 am on the following Thursday. Quine ends the story with a cautious remark that the puzzle is to find the fallacy.19 The convicted man’s “belief” or conviction that his sentence could not be executed leads us to question whether religious belief works with such faulty logic. Or is it more properly that there is an antinomy in religious belief? Traditionally religion belongs to a realm that uses a hallowed language that is designed to mystify, to intimidate, to overwhelm, and to induce a mood of guilt and moral peril,20 inducing one to self-surrender. In a hint of irony, the African scholar of religion, Lamin Sanneh suggested that a recognized trait of religious belief is that it encourages a superstitious tendency in their adherents to like best what they understood least. He thought it was this tendency that makes “sincerity in the religious life an elusive commodity.”21 Sanneh might have overstated his case, but what he is hinting at is the paradox that comes from trying to emulate pristine qualities one might not be able to live up to. Let me illustrate this with the story of Socrates as found in Plato’s Symposium. The choice of Socrates here is intentional because most paradoxists invoke Socrates, directly or indirectly, as their patron.22 In the Symposium, 23 we are introduced to one of Plato’s many riddles, this time the riddle is a mix of tragedy and comedy. We get a hint of what the conclusion of the Symposium

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

43

has to do with its central argument, i.e., the praise of Eros. Many aspects of the riddle that goes back and forth throughout the dialogue. In Symposium, Agathon chides Socrates for building up the audience’s expectation. Although both Agathon and Socrates later agree that there are different kinds of audience a person can have, they agree that an undifferentiated multitude (the crowd) is different from an intelligent few (individuals). “An intelligent speaker is more alarmed at a few men of wit than a host of fools.”24 At the end of the Symposium, we are introduced to another riddle, this time Alcibiades is said to have been corrupted by his physical beauty and the worldly advantages that come from it. He fails to ascend to the form of beauty Socrates preached as attainable through philosophy. We are also introduced to Apollodorus and Aristodemus, two disciples of Socrates’, who demonstrate their love for the master they idolize and whom they try to imitate. Unfortunately, their love, like that of Alcibiades, is an erotic love, not the love that is based on the practice of the virtue of philosophy that Socrates preached and wanted all to emulate. Ironically, the same two disciples tell stories about Socrates to preserve the image of their master as one who strove to attain the pure form of beauty. But ironically their stories do not lead to genuine philosophical commitment on their part. Aristodemus recalls that Socrates was persuading them to agree that it is possible for one and the same person to know how to write comedy and tragedy, and that anyone who has the skill of a tragic poet also has the skill of a comic poet. (Symposium).25 At the time Plato wrote the symposium (c. 416 BCE), no Greek or Athenian dramatist wrote both tragedies and comedies. This was before Hellenistic times and about twenty centuries before William Shakespeare.26 What the Symposium captures are a selfreferential paradox and an antinomy: the invocation of Socrates’ virtue versus the inability of his disciples to live up to the virtues they so much adore in their master. It is the kind of self-referential paradox and antinomy that religion is inevitably caught in. The Symposium can also be considered the topos of some of Christian teaching against the vainglory developed brilliantly by St. Paul and from him to St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas and a host of other Christian thinkers down to our time. “Be imitators of me as I also am of Christ” I Cor. 11:1). It deals with amiable virtues disciples see in their masters, prize highly, talk about, but still unable to practice them.

The Four Points of the Religious Compass In a brilliant essay on the philosophy compass, James Alexander posits the four points of the philosophy compass as follows: wonder, faith, doubt, and skepticism.27 He assumes that thaumazein (wonder), which Socrates says is the beginning of philosophy, is the first and the simplest point of the compass.28 Interestingly, the second point of the Philosophy compass, at least in Alexander’s reckoning, is faith. The third point, doubt, which he says is a consequence of our hearing differing contradictory truths, is logically subsequent to faith.29 Although doubt submits everything to a human method of rational interrogation, ironically it also postulates the existence of a certainty known

44

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

through demonstration that is more certain than the certainty of faith.30 The fourth point of the philosophy compass is skepticism. Skepticism, in a sense, is formally the same as doubt. But where skepticism differs from doubt, it complements and completes doubt.31 If there is any difference between skepticism and doubt, Alexander reasons, it is in the fact that doubt seeks the end of argument and in so doing postulates certainty. But skepticism seeks the end beyond argument but does not postulate certainty.32 Drawing inspiration from Alexander’s four points of the philosophy compass, I wish to situate the four points of the religious compass as follows: mystery, faith, sacrifice, and violence, in that order. All four points are saturated with paradoxy. Mystery Mystery is the first point of the religious compass. It is the most complicated of the four points of the compass, but as paradoxical in the same measure as the other three points of the compass. In Mystery and Promise (1993), John Haught attempts to explain the difficult nature of the term “mystery.” He suggests that the modern tendency to associate mystery with “the unexplored and not-yet understood aspects of our physical universe” is to blame because it tends to equate mystery only with the incomprehensible. Haught argues that the modern mind that understands mystery this way often takes mystery to be a catch-phrase for a range of unanswered questions that science has yet to solve.33 Those who equate mystery only with the incomprehensible or the not-yet explored think that the realm of mystery will shrink with time and that it will eventually disappear as human knowledge advances. Haught cites the example of the American physicist, Heinz Pagels (1939–88), who taught that before the advance of human knowledge, people worshipped the sun-god simply because they were awed by the power and beauty of the sun. Pagels reasoned that now that the astrophysicists understand the physics of the sun and stars and the source of their power that these galaxies and solar systems no longer command the mysteries they once commanded. He then concluded that, “The size, splendor and glory of the universe still provoke the sense of transcendent eternal being,”34 but that as science continues to understand the basic laws of nature, the universe will cease to hold mystery for those who choose to understand it that way. Haught took time to refute Pagels’ reduction of mystery to “gaps in our human knowledge” and Pagels reduction of mystery to a name or term for our temporary ignorance. Haught argues that rather than be a cover for our scientific ignorance, experience of mystery will intensify as scientific knowledge advances. Albert Einstein also taught so, even though he did not embrace religious revelation. Haught supports his assertion with Einstein’s statement that “the most experience we can have is of the mysterious;” that “whoever does not know it can no longer marvel.”35 Thus, Haught concludes that mystery must mean something more precisely because divine revelation is a meaningful possibility.36 Mystery is ultimately tied to divine revelation – the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (the mystery that is awe-inspiring and fascinating) Following the idea

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

45

of the American Protestant theologian Schubert Ogden (1928–2019), Haught accepts that the reflective grasp of how mystery is related to original revelation through concept and symbols is what separates religions from one another.37 Paradoxically, religious meaning comes out of the experience of mystery – experience of the unknown. It is this paradox that Lonergan tries to capture when he describes mystery as the dynamic falling in love with God. “Because it is being in love, the mystery is not merely attractive but fascinating; to it one belongs; by it one is possessed.”38 Paradoxically the mystery is conscious without being known.39 Paradoxically, it is an unmeasured love that at the same time evokes awe.40 In the Christian understanding, mystery includes both doctrines of truth and intelligibility one must take on faith.41 The same idea is found in Mahayana Buddhism’s concept of anupalabdhidharmaksanti – that one should exercise intuitive tolerance to those ultimate truths about reality that are incomprehensible.42 Mystery creates the expectation that some truths resist rational articulation.43 In general, mystery is a term that is often used to designate those concepts that are not and might never be fully open to human explanations, such as how God can become incarnate or how God could have created the world ex nihilo. 44 “Because one expects not to understand these paradoxical truths, one’s failure to understand them arouses less dissonance. The mystics of Christianity, such as St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila, as well as mystics of other religions, like Hinduism, show how a religious response to paradox tends towards the ascetical or the mystical.45 Asceticism aside, religious responses to paradox are a great deal of what informs religious practices.46 Mystery provides assurance against absurdity.47 Mystery is the realm of faith. Faith must be distinguished from doubt and skepticism to better understand how mystery is the driving force of faith. Doubt is logically subsequent to faith in that it makes us ask the kind of questions Bertrand Russell posed at the beginning of his Problems of Philosophy: Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable person could doubt it?48 Doubt, as we noted earlier, at times is a consequence of hearing differing, contradictory truths, like the truths of the Torah, the New Testament, the Quran, Buddhism, and Daoism, and the truths of Platonism, Stoicism, Aristotelianism, Darwinism, Hegelianism, and Freudism, many of which lead to confusion of truth.49 Philosophical irrationalists use doubt to submit everything to rational investigation and even use doubt to postulate “the existence of a certainty more certain than the certainty of faith.”50 Doubt is also the stock in trade of skeptics who reduce reason, truth, validity, and objectivity to myths and internally incoherent concepts.51 But that is not to say there are no positives that come from doubt. John Henry Newman sees some positives in doubt – that as a habit of the mind, it involves “a system of principles and doctrines”52 that to some extent are believable. In this sense, doubt corroborates Wittgenstein principle, “You will not get as far as doubting everything – the game of doubting itself presupposes certainty,”53 Skepticism, for its part, is a variant of philosophical irrationalism that has been part of the history of philosophy from ancient Greece down to our time. It

46

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

is common now to distinguish the ancient or classical forms of skepticism from the modern or contemporary forms of skepticism.54 The Greek skeptikos in its literal sense means an inquirer, though not so for the Pyrrhonian skeptics. The origin of Pyrrhonian skepticism goes back to Pyrrho of Elis (360 BCE–270 BCE) who advocated inquiry to perpetuate doubt.55 Pyrrhonian skepticism was formidably defended by Sextus Empiricus (160 CE–210 CE) who in turn influenced many western philosophers, including Rene Descartes, David Hume, and Michel de Montaigne.56 Ancient modes of skepticism, i.e., skeptikos as a means of sustaining inquiry, accept paradoxes that come at the limits of thought – Zeno’s argument for the unreality of movement, Anselm’s Ontological argument for the existence of God, Berkeley’s argument for idealism, and Descartes’ Meditations – are all masterpieces of classical skeptical thought.57 Even those Pyrrhonian skeptics who direct rational argument against belief, highlight contradictory evidences that further their case for the suspension of judgment on all questions of fact and value. Their contradictory evidence, in ways similar to how paradox is sometimes used, disrupt normal doxastic practice.58 In a nutshell, skepticism is not as simple as it appears. It is also not easy to classify because skeptical patterns of thought and practice appear in diverse contexts. For example, skepticism figures prominently in a number of Eastern texts, like the Indian philosopher Jayarasi Bhatta’s (c. 770–830 CE) Tattvopaplavasimha that posits the impossibility of knowledge, argues against philosophical positions, such as inference and causality, and attempts to show their contradictions. Skepticism also played a role in Post-Reformation Christian thought.59 The range of skepticism also varies, depending on whether it is classical or contemporary form of skepticism. It can range from the extremes of saying “nothing is true” or “everything is true” to the extremes of questioning all ultimate, absolute, and universal claims, and can even assert “that everything is, is not, both is and is not, and neither is nor is not.”60 This is precisely why some scholars have taken to offering a sociological explanation of skepticism,61 defining it “loosely as to include nihilism, Romanticism, relativism, and Hindu and Buddhist doctrines of illusion,”62 and suggesting that skepticism flourishes where antipathy toward social group prevails.63 A consistent feature of skepticism in all its ranges and unfolding is its attention to the shortcoming of reason – its metaphysical reticence that occasions doubt and its ambiguity. “Skepticism assumes that we cannot infer what is from what seems and that any criterion of truth requires, for its truth, a further criterion which leads us into an infinite regress and thus problems of fundamental contradiction.”64 If there is any certainty in skepticism it is the certainty that certainty cannot be known.65 The sophist Gorgias famously claimed that there is no truth, and even if truth exists, we cannot know it, and even if it could be known, we cannot express it. In trying to be coy about the certainty that there is no knowledge, skeptics try to use contradiction to disavow knowledge, while still trying to avoid claiming to know that they do not know.66 Regardless, this certainty that there is no knowledge by rendering reason non-binding is the epistemic foundation of skepticism. For even when

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

47

the skeptic is certain that they do not hold any belief, their resolve to act on that basis is itself an indication that they do hold some beliefs.67 By undermining deductive and inductive inference and using reason to call into question all rational boundaries, skepticism perpetuates and completes doubt. Notwithstanding that it completes doubt, skepticism is still different from doubt in many ways. The American pragmatist, C.S. Peirce, suggests that belief begins with the irritation of doubt: “The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief.”68 He enumerates three unsatisfactory methods by which people have historically attempted to eliminate doubt and fix belief: the method of tenacity, “whereby one resolutely clings to the beliefs one has and self-deceptively avoids countervailing evidence;”69 the method of authority, which the powerful use to coerce and enforce belief by threat; and the a priori method “whereby one heedlessly fixes belief in accord with what seems ‘agreeable to reason.’”70 The skeptic is a master of the art of using what appears agreeable to reason. “Doubt dislikes paradox because a paradox is, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum. But skepticism, which does not postulate certainty, or unity of understanding, as its achievement, can consider that paradoxes and contradictions are constitutive of whatever truth there is to be had about words and world.”71 The main problem with skepticism is “that it is unanswerable in such a way that it might seem to be a negative replication of faith, an absolute negation, just as faith is an absolute position. But unlike faith, it leaves the world undisturbed by words.”72 What doubt and skepticism take to be self-contradiction, for example, the idea of the God-man and the Jesus miracle of the raising of the dead to life, seem so because the means by which these events are brought about might not be fully comprehensible to human reason, but their state of affairs are still logically possible.73 This is precisely why Lonergan chooses to speak of the experience of mystery as the dynamic state of being in love. Love, by its nature, is a subject for paradoxical expression.74 It is a subject excellently suited for paradoxical rhetoric.75 While what it is in itself might have been far from clear, it “encourages the state of nescience so congenial to paradox.”76 While it remains an intransigent mystery to those it has gripped, it is still the world’s most widespread wonder.77 “Love gives the illusion of solving, for a time at least, the fundamental metaphysical problem of the one and the many, since love so obviously supplies an example, not of the unification of the ‘many,’ that is, of two, only, but of the unification of opposites, male and female, as well. Love provides the alogical illustration, plain to the plainest sense, of identity in diversity.”78 Love might be alogical, but it has an in-built logic that persuades a person in love of some psychological miracles the person cannot refuse – “that he and another human being are ‘one,’ that he knows another human being, that he at once understands and transcends ‘himself.’”79 When Lonergan speaks of experience of mystery as that of being in love, he is not stating anything new. Traditionally, love has been invoked as a metaphor for all sorts of intense experience, including religious experience.80 To use love as a metaphor for transcendent experience, as Lonergan does, might be a way to evade the

48

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

problem of expression. “In this sense, love has, like religion, its language of negatives – love is by definition indefinable, unidentifiable, inexpressible, and alogical. Love provides, further, an experience of tautology: in the first place, through the intense consciousness it provides of the self as an entity; further, through the illusion it gives to lovers of their self-sufficiency.”81 To be in love with God is a gift that transforms our apprehension of values for those in love with God.82 Mystics of all religious persuasions understand this more than anyone else. Faith Faith (Greek pistis and Latin fides), the second point of the compass, takes its stand on the experience of mystery. Following Blaise Pascal, Lonergan paradoxically describes faith as the knowledge born of religious love.83 Others have noted how love “provides rich materials for disquisitions upon contrast, contrariety, and contradiction, upon the difference between illusion and realty, between truth and falsehood.”84 Love also opens room for some philosophical musings and asks epistemological and ontological questions to be grasped and known by faith in ways that other disciplines cannot. Simply put, besides the knowledge reached by logical deductions or factual knowledge, faith opens a gateway to another kind of knowledge, this time a knowledge reached through the discernment of value and the judgments of value by a person in love with God.85 This is why faith is often a contrast to doubt. Peirce noted “a dissimilarity between the sensation of doubting and that of believing.”86 The sensation of doubting belongs to the one without the eye of faith. For one with this sensation, the originating value is the human person and the terminal value is the human good the person can bring about.87 The sensation of believing or faith belongs to the eye of faith. For one with the sensation of faith, the originating value is divine light and love and the terminal value is the whole universe.88 Whereas philosophers can speak of thaumazein (wonder), which philosophers since Socrates have unanimously taken to be the beginning of philosophy, as a force of unity, in religion faith can be an expression of division. Faith divides the world into two: this worldly realm and the realm of God. It is how these two worlds divide and differ that the World Religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam especially, try to articulate.89 Without the sensation of faith, “the world is too evil for God to be good, for a good God to exist.”90 Lonergan speaks of faith as an apprehension of transcendental value. It has a relative and an absolute aspect.91 “Among the values faith discerns is the value of believing the word of religion, of accepting the judgments of fact and the judgments of value the religion proposes.”92 Given that it is only the eye of religious love that comes from faith that can discern God’s self-disclosure,93 other thinkers also speak of faith as having the two forms Lonergan identifies: relative and absolute. They understand the relative form of faith as the kind of understanding of God’s self-disclosure one finds in rational or natural religion and in Neoplatonic and Hegelian thoughts, which presuppose there is “a ‘divine’ truth which is somehow hidden by but also existing within the world as

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

49

we experience it.” The relative form of faith “tends to involve elements of doubt: that is, it postulates that there is something about our place within this world which makes it possible for us to establish the truth which is not the obvious simple truth of experience.”95 They think of the absolute form of faith as the pure form of faith because it does not absolutely depend on reason. It fundamentally depends on faith and is transcendental.96 In the absolute form of faith, as these thinkers understand it, there is a relation, not between I-It, but between I-Thou, in the Martin Buber sense of distinction between I-It and IThou binary.97 To use the language of Soren Kierkegaard, what is called the relative form of faith is “religiousness of immanence” and the absolute form of faith is “paradoxical religiousness.” These terms that are not easy to explain, particularly the latter, i.e., paradoxical religiousness, “comes to its highest manifestation in the Abrahamic religions.”98 If the Old Testament is, as Hans Ur von Balthasar says it is, “history, which convicts man as a sinner, and confronts God with the fact of the broken covenant,”99 then in Christianity and Islam the word was spoken for a second time: for Christians as a “new fact” (New Testament) and for Muslims as a “new text” (Quran).100 Of the three Abrahamic religions, Christianity is the more perplexing because of the LogosChrist who is God in person.101 Faith is required to comprehend how this Word that loves us so much was made flesh, suffered, and was crucified. Faith has to live with this contradiction because the truth of faith is something, which for all its incomprehensibility, is still comprehensible.102 One of the problems of faith pertains to how something that is not of this world can come and be of this world.103 But contradiction of faith is not a ground to refute faith. For within faith, as Tertullian demonstrates, a contradiction is not a refutation: “It is absurd, so I believe it,”104 On the contrary, within faith, contradiction may be embraced.105 “The absurdity of Christ crucified – or even of Yahweh or Allah uttering the word of law – can never be overcome through reason. For this absurdity is the absolute limit of faith, just as logical paradox is for skepticism.”106 While doubt denies the existence of both absurdity and paradox, because it demands consistency and sees contradiction as reductio ad absurdum, faith depends on that which both can and cannot be understood. “So the word of Christianity is Christ crucified, and – despite Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach and the rest – this is a word which does not become truer when it is expressed in terms of reason. It has to remain beyond reason in order to be the word it claims to be.”107 The strength of faith comes from the fact that it offers certainty.108 To sum up this point of the compass, the realm of faith is the realm in which love precedes knowledge (unlike where ordinarily knowledge precedes love).109 The eye of love discerns values unappreciated by those who are not in dynamic state of love with God. It also transforms human frailty.110 The realm of faith is the realm in which religious beliefs are meaningful and religious values are embraced with joy because they bring fulfilment and the kind of peace the world cannot give.111 Faith, therefore, is the most luminous of the four points of the religious compass, notwithstanding that it involves a contradiction and 94

50

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

the absurd. The contradictions and the absurd are paradoxically a further reason to embrace faith. As Lonergan puts it, “It is not propaganda and it is not argument but religious faith will liberate human reasonableness from its ideological prisons.”112 Sacrifice Sacrifice is the third point of the compass. It is related to the fourth – violence. It is in these two last points of the compass that religiosity and rationality often collide.113 If mystery is the most complicated of the four points of the religious compass, sacrifice is the most irrational. It is the “irrationality” of religious sacrifice that perpetuates doubt and fosters skepticism about religion. The “irrationality” leaves the non-religious other no other option than to reject religion. Religious sacrifice comes in different forms. In its Western and Eastern articulations, sacrificial offerings induce violence and have played a central role in the founding narratives of many of the great religions of these core civilizations. Ancient Greeks located the origins of religion in acts of sacrificial piety – the slaughtering of rams and bulls to the Olympian pantheon. Ritual sacrifices also play a great role in Eastern religions. For example, the ancient yogic practice of yajna (ritual done in front of fire accompanied by mantras and incantations to Agni, the god of fire) can take various forms, including the slaughtering of animals. It is one of the earliest features of Vedic sacrifice in Hinduism.114 Hinduism in its early Vedic phase offered human, animal, and vegetative sacrifices and these were inscribed in the Yajurveda. One of the goddesses, Durga, is depicted as blood thirsty and can only be appeased with blood. The same is true of Ganesha. The practice continued for a long time before it was subsequently eliminated in later refinements of Hinduism that followed the post-Vedic period. Human and animal sacrifices were also part of ancient Chinese rituals to the gods and ancestors who were also venerated. The 16th-century Aztecs offered human sacrifices to the sun-god before the practice was stopped by the Spanish conquistadores. Buddhism stands unique as the exception – the one religion that never practiced the ritual of human or animal sacrifice. This is understandable, since Buddhism is a non-theistic religion. In general, the sacrifices religions offer to appease deity not only show that the gods can do as they please, but are also meant to remind mortal humans that their tightly held and revered worlds can be reduced to rubbles at a moment’s notice. To offer ritual sacrifice is to make the devotee less fragile and less prone to the sudden death that comes from the anger of deity.115 The origin of the ritual of animal sacrifice goes back to the ancient Greeks. Religions in general consider the shedding of innocent blood to be an act of profound religious faith.116 The German Lutheran theologian whose study of ancient religions have influenced the contemporary study of religion, Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), describes the human experience in the face of the numinous as mysterium tremendum et fascinans (awe inspiring mystery). He explains the inexplicable “wrath of God” as a fundamental moment in the experience of the Holy. Otto’s study reveals that ancient religious sacrifices hint at the prevalence

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

51

of paradox in human religious imagination. The sacred is experienced as both fascinating (appealing) and fearsome, powerful and terrifying, all at the same time.117 Classical Judaism continued the ritual of animal sacrifice that goes back to the Greeks. The Jewish ritual of animal sacrifice came to its culmination in Genesis when Abraham, to retain Yahweh’s affection and be true to the Covenant, showed willingness to slaughter his only son Isaac (Gen. 22: 1–19). The motivation for sacrifice, in early Judaism at least, “was to propitiate divine forces and win in return some favor, such as good crops, political stability, or long life, while in others, it expressed a non-instrumental logic, giving something to God with no quid pro quo.”118 Religious sacrifice or prayer was thought to have a dual function: as a praise or request. In either form, it involves a willingness to shed some innocent blood.119 Some rationalist enlightenment thinkers, such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Gotthold Lessing (1729–81), oppose religious revelation for these and other reasons. Using rational argument, they thought that God was bound by the moral law, at least that was the case with Kant. The reductionist Kant thought authentic religion was nothing but morality. Going by the Kantian claim, it means that anyone who manages to be morally good without adhering to any religion is not missing anything.120 The Danish philosopher and paradoxer per excellence, Soren Kierkegaard (1813–55), was troubled by the idea of shedding innocent blood, at least with respect to Abraham’s willingness to kill Isaac, that it almost led him to a crisis of faith. Kierkegaard was aware of the Kantian claim that authentic religion was nothing but morality. While he did not completely accept Kant’s claim, he still struggled to reconcile Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac with the tenets of his Lutheran (Arminian) faith. Kierkegaard at times writes pseudonymously under Johannes de Silentio and Johannes Climacus. He attributes to Johannes de Silentio his Fear and Trembling (1843). He attributes to Johannes Climacus his other works, like Philosophical Fragments (1844), Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846) and De Omnibus Dubitandum Est (1843). The historical Johannes Climacus was a Greek monk (c. 570–649 CE), an abbot of Saint Catherine’s of Alexandria on Mt. Sinai. He was himself the author of Klimax tou Paradeisou (Ladder of Paradise). But Kierkegaard’s fictional Climacus is not a Christian. Kierkegaard uses the pseudonym Climacus to represent a subjective approach to knowledge. His use of the word klimax (Greek for ladder) is to depict how the mind ascends to knowledge through a series of logical plateau. Abraham’s concession to do the seemingly immoral act of killing the innocent leads Kierkegaard to characterize the act as the “teleological suspension of the ethical.”121 In a way similar to Kant, Kierkegaard struggled to relate moral reasoning with historical religion. As a rationalist, if ever he was one, Kierkegaard thought Abraham’s decision was a terrible decision. But as an existentialist, which he no doubt was, Kierkegaard thought Abraham’s decision was an act of obedience to the absolute. Here then we have an inexplicable paradox of faith. The paradox of faith somehow persuades the believer to transgress the universal ethical commands laid down by God.122

52

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

The shedding of innocent blood that is a characteristic of religion reaches its climax in the crucifixion of Jesus. The New Testament states clearly that God loves the world so much that he sacrificed His only begotten Son (John 3:16). The Son who was sacrificed, Jesus, tells his followers to commemorate his own sacrifice over and over again: “Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink of his blood you have no life in you” (John 6:53). The death of Jesus on the Cross, as a sacrificial offering, in itself has many layers of paradox. As one writer puts it, “The brutal murder of God’s son, a self-sacrifice unique and universal in its intentions, could nonetheless serve as the model for an infinity of subsequent mimetic, figurative re-enactments. And if it were hoped that it would somehow end a cycle of sacrificial violence, the history of the Church – or rather the many churches that claim descent from Christ – certainly suggests that it has yet to produce this result (with the same ironic implication that historians draw from World War I as ‘the war to end all wars’).”123 In sum, the brutal murder of God’s Son, i.e., with respect to Christianity, paradoxically points to the redemptive role of religion in society – that religion promotes self-transcendence to the point of self-sacrificing love.124 The question that needs to be answered is how to navigate the thin lines of sacrifice and violence. Ordinarily, religious experience manifests itself in changed attitudes, in a harvest of spirit that is love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control.125 Religious sacrifices induce violence. A harvest of spirit runs counter to the violence induced by religious sacrifice. How close one is to either of these polar poles, i.e., harvest of spirit and violence, is going to be determined by how one moves from common sense religious experience to the different stages of meaning in one’s religiosity. Violence The fourth point of the compass is violence. It is closely related to sacrifice and painfully problematic. Ordinarily, religion is a quest for self-transcendence. This quest belongs to the realm of the one, the true, the good, and the beautiful. The American poet, Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), granted he was not referring to transcendental beauty, writes that “Beauty is not always lovely.” He was perhaps echoing “Merciless Beauty” – the title of a poem by the 14thcentury English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. Religion can be sublime and transcendentally beautiful. Yet this transcendental goodness and beauty induces violence. From a Christian point of view, the violence of the brutal murder of God’s Son on the cross, which was brought about to atone for remission of sin, is a form of merciless beauty. The pleasure-pain principle that Plato carefully highlighted in his Dialogues is classically observable in love – the most beautiful.126 Eric Voegelin (1901–85) suggested that the great quests for truth – whether in Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Taoism – do not often occur in a vacuum. Rather, they occur in social fields and are constituted by older experiences of order and symbolizations of truths as people perceive them.127 Along the same lines, the French

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

53

historian and literary critic, Rene Girard (1923–2015), the German literary writer Walter Burkert (1931–2015),128 and the French literary critique, Georges Bataille (1897–1962),129 have all spoken about the predominance of the ambivalence of violence in religion. They have all alluded to how religion can motivate a person to sublime heights, inducing in that person the good and prohibiting violence while still simultaneously inciting violence. They have wondered whether violence is intrinsic to religion. Each one of them has also questioned whether violent religious action “represents a temporarily misdirected behavior accidentally fostered by the narrative semantics of the respective religious system.”130 Girard, for one, concluded that “violence is the secret heart and soul of the sacred.”131 Bataille also came to a similar conclusion – that sacrificial killing is the basic experience of the sacred and that religious acts reach a peak of self-awareness in homo necans (man the killer).132 Yahweh’s request that Isaac be sacrificed by his father Abraham, as noted already, has been a source of polemic and wonder in the history of Judeo-Christian faith. Kierkegaard, who recommends the example of Abraham as the paradigm for Christians, and for whom faith is not reasonable or comprehensible, says Abraham acts “by virtue of the absurd.”133

Theological Implications of the Four Point of the Compass The four points of the religious compass have many theological implications and they are all connected. The shedding of innocent blood, for example, a hallmark of ancient religions, including Judaism and Christianity, reveals different levels of tension in the exercise of faith: tension between the human person who stands in the face of an omnipotent God, tension between free-will and determinism, and tension between soteriological claims of human agency and divine will. Then there is also the dialectic of love in the exercise of this transcendental quest. Even though love induces the concept of perfection, it is almost always “readily felt as imperfection, as defect and defection, as suffering.”134 In John Milton’s Paradise Lost 135 for example, can be found “two related aporetic doctrinal paradoxes.”136 The first aporetic doctrinal paradox deals with a paradox of philosophical importance: God’s foreknowledge and human free-will. This tension or paradox has aptly been illustrated by C.S. Lewis who, following his conversion, noted that he was “compelled” to become a Christian.137 The second aporetic doctrinal paradox pertains to a metaphysical paradox: eternity and time. Eternity is one of God’s attributes and a condition of perfection.138 God exists in eternity and does not have a beginning or end. Even the name of God (Jehovah in Judeo-Christian terms) “contains all imaginable time, the past, the present, and the future.”139 The notion that God is eternal (timeless) conflicts with the Judeo-Christian idea of a personal God who takes active part in human affairs and history.140 Some speak of these antinomies, particularly where they appear in Christian scripture, as “conflicting revelational truths that are surely reconciled ‘in the mind and counsel of God’ yet present us with ‘a mystery which we cannot expect to solve in this world.’”141 Kierkegaard calls these tensions the absolute paradox and insists

54

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

that the religious believer, rather than being paralyzed by the limits of their own understanding, must move forward and take a leap of faith, in spite of the paradox.142 Philosophers all through history, notable among whom were Wittgenstein143 and Kant,144 have recognized the limits of reason and have sought to address it. While Wittgenstein’s own solution is to set the limit of thought in language,145 Kant’s claim is that when reason recognizes its limits, it sets up “antimonies” (by which he means apparent contradiction).146 Distancing himself from Kant whose system is not without flaws, but still recognizing that logical contradiction in human thought is a genuine admission that the human mind is a finite mind incapable of grasping fully the mysteries of God, Kierkegaard embraced “antinomy of reason” as a point of human reasoning that “reason both seeks and fears.”147 Thus, Kierkegaard sees religion to be, not a body of rational propositions, but a body of existential living in which one must take a stand for or against deity. It is the kind of stand that C.S. Lewis took when asked in an interview to clarify his remark that he was brought to “the Faith kicking and struggling and resentful, with eyes darting in every direction looking for an escape.”148 C.S. Lewis’s answer was riddled with paradox: “What I wrote in Surprised by Joy was that ‘before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free-choice.’ But I feel my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair. I was decided upon.”149 To return to Kierkegaard, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846), in which he disputed Hegel’s science of logic, the Danish paradoxer creatively employs paradox to distinguish between two kinds of religiousness: the religiousness of Socrates (which he calls elsewhere Religiousness A) and the religiousness of Christianity (which he calls elsewhere Religiousness B). Kierkegaard was effusive with praise for Socrates, took him as a model of Religiousness A, and uses him to criticize his own Danish culture and its conception of religion.150 He in fact wrote that his undertaking throughout his career was a Socratic task and that “the only analogy I have before me is Socrates.”151 Kierkegaard revered Socrates because he thought that Socrates had no philosophical doctrine or theory of his own; that what Socrates did was refute what others say without presenting any constructive alternative. He thinks it is in this sense that Socrates represents a negative destructive force.152 Kierkegaard was also fascinated by Socrates’ use of irony (a marked contrast between what is said and what is meant and a marked contrast between appearance and reality). He thought Socrates used the device to bait his interlocutors and draw them out. He saw Socrates’ use of irony as Socrates’ most important characteristic. It is also for this reason that the concept of irony is very important for understanding Kierkegaard’s intellectual career, something he learned from Socrates.153 As a negative destructive force, irony negates and is used to criticize various elements of the established order. Kierkegaard was also fascinated by the way Socrates used aporia (Greek for “being at a loss” or “being unable to answer”) effectively.154 Socrates had a way of bringing his

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

55

dialogue partners to a state of aporia. Socrates is very unusual in the sense that he does not do the traditional thing that people do in philosophical treatise, which is to establish a thesis. Rather, Socrates ends up not establishing anything at all. Kierkegaard is fascinated by this image of Socrates, a negative thinker – in the sense that he always feigned ignorance and refrained from giving a positive view of his own.155 Socrates might have been doing something “negative,” Kierkegaard was fascinated by the fact that Socrates, by so doing, made people to be reflective and helped them reconsider certain aspects of their beliefs and lives. “Through his questioning, Socrates led his interlocutors into the process of philosophical thinking, since they could not simply be passive recipients of a teaching presented by Socrates or someone else. Kierkegaard was then inspired to try to imitate this aspect of Socrates’ method in his own writings.”156 Thus, Kierkegaard attempted to appropriate the main elements from the thought of Socrates and make them his own: irony, ignorance, negation, aporia, maieutics, the gadfly, and so on. He gave them new meaning in the context of his own life and time. “Socrates was, for Kierkegaard, not just an object of scholarly investigation, but also a model to follow in his personal life.”157 It is for these reasons that he spoke glowingly of the religiousness of Socrates. The religiousness of Socrates is a paradox because it pertains “to the eternal and essential, the truth which has an essential relation to an existing individual because it pertains essentially to existence.”158 Adding a caveat, Kierkegaard continues, “But the eternal and essential truth is by no means in itself a paradox, but it becomes paradoxical by virtue of its relation to an existing individual.”159 Kierkegaard illustrates his point with Socrates’ search for objective truth and Socrates’ quest to prove the immortality of the soul. Suggesting that the case exhibits a logic of paradox, Kierkegaard concludes: “The Socratic ignorance, which Socrates held fast with the entire passion of his inwardness, was thus an expression for the principle that the eternal truth is related to an existing individual, and that this truth must therefore be a paradox for him as long as he exists.”160 Although it is not as clear as he would like us to believe, what Kierkegaard wants to show with the story of Socrates is what the concepts of objective uncertainty and truth are, as well as the logic of this notion of paradox.161 Socrates, on the one hand, does not know if the soul is immortal. On the other hand, he displays a certainty in his search for the truth. In other words, the paradoxical character of Socrates’ “certainty,” his “subjective truth” lies in its objective uncertainty of it.162 “The paradox is that he is at once certain and uncertain – certain subjectively and uncertain objectively.”163 Kierkegaard understands “objective uncertainty” as involving the concept of evidence, i.e., it involves the notion of evidence for and evidence against.164 It is when one has both kinds of evidence that the evidence is said to be inconclusive and one is therefore uncertain.165 With respect to religion, “objective uncertainty” is when one contemplates the order of nature, sees in it omnipotence and wisdom, but also sees in it a host of other things that disturb the mind and arouses anxiety that make it difficult to come to a conclusion.166 So when Kierkegaard speaks of Religiousness A, he thinks it involves a paradox. “One contemplates the order

56

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

of nature, finds evidence both for and against saying there is a God, sees the evidence to be inconclusive, becomes (objectively) uncertain, and then – despite his uncertainty – is (subjectively) certain there is a God.”167 This “objective uncertainty” is integral to Religiousness A and a person’s relationship with God because a person cannot in this life be objectively certain of God’s existence.168 “It is this objective uncertainty that produces or constitutes the risk that Kierkegaard rightly considers the sine qua non of faith.”169 For, both the subjective and objective elements are involved in faith. “The believer is in fact to intensify his subjective certainty by vigilantly maintaining a constant objective uncertainty.”170 Let it not be forgotten that these subjective and objective elements of faith are a portrait Kierkegaard finds in Socrates and imputes in the believer. Unlike Religiousness A where knowledge is required for certainty, in Religiousness B no such knowledge is required. For Christianity, according to Kierkegaard, “is not a matter of knowledge, so that increased knowledge is of no avail, except to make it easier to fall into the confusion of considering Christianity as a matter of knowledge.”171 For Kierkegaard, therefore, knowledge is irrelevant to faith.172 In Kierkegaard’s differentiation of Religiousness A from Religiousness B, the category of the absurd is located in Religiousness B. Faith attains its highest peak in the absurd.173 This is why, for Kierkegaard, Abraham is the archetypal faithful man. It is perhaps this absurdity that is the paradox that distinguishes Religiousness B from Religiousness A. 174 The paradox Kierkegaard sees in Religiousness B is a “logical contradiction” or “logical impossibility.”175 Whether one agrees with Kierkegaard or not, he thinks a logical contradiction or logical impossibility is involved in Abraham’s undertaking to sacrifice Isaac, as commanded by God, while still believing that God will come through with His promise that his descendants will be multiplied as the stars of the heavens. Whether the language of violence (even if it is good violence) is the best way of speaking of the human communication with the divine is a question that needs to be asked. The dialetheist, Graham Priest tells us not to expect the pieces of language we use in discourse “to fit together neatly, like some multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.”176 When natural language is applied to religious discourse, there will be obvious mismatches and misfits. The language of “violence” in religious discourse presents not only a mismatch, but also a problem. The story and the truth the language of violence intends to convey are one thing, but what the story and its truth mean in terms of experience and symbolization are another.177 For, Burkert, Bataille, and Girard, the language of violence is controversial. Perhaps we need to go beyond the literal to grasp the metaphorical meaning of what they are trying to convey. In its literal sense, religious sacrifice might be considered a form of violence because violence is meted out to a surrogate victim. Metaphorically, these thinkers highlight the predominance of violence (hate and mutual killing) in the disciplinary practices of organized religions. Ironically, it is the violence (sacrifice) done to the surrogate victim that prevents the breakdown of community. It is on this violence that human civilizations are built. These thinkers do not deny that religious sacrifice is a prophylactic against violence. But

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

57

it is to its ambivalence they draw attention – that to fail to recall our violent origins is to risk a return to them and to too easily recall it is also to risk the same return.178 Viewed from the lens of the three aforementioned thinkers, it is hard not to conclude that there is an ambivalence in the language of religious sacrifice. In his thoughtful essay, Jay Martin notes correctly that the most perplexing question concerning religion is its radical proximity to the very violence it so often purports to lament.179 Using some 20th-century examples, such as the Branch Davidians of Waco, Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, Heaven’s Gate, Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo, Meier Kahane’s Kach Movement, and the Order of Solar Temple in Switzerland and Quebec, which all manifested violence in different forms, some aimed at external enemies and others aimed at the members of the sect, Martin highlights the troubling explosion of religiously motivated violence. He draws attention to the ways religious sects or movements, in the guise of religious warfare against enemies imagined or real, or in the name of collective martyrdom as a manifestation of the intensity of their faith, or even the alleged realization of apocalyptic prophecies, religious believers “raise profound questions about the deep and abiding link between religious belief, practice and institutionalization, on the one hand, and violating the putative sanctity of human life and the inviolability of the human body, on the other.”180 Even if we dismiss the cults as paranoid movements, not genuine religions, we still have to answer the question of what cults reveal or purport to reveal. In other words, what do these cults reveal about the unfinished business that ties together the sacred and the violent? Is religion, broadly understood, a both/and, in the sense that it is partly a problem and partly a solution?181 It is hard to dispute the fact that faith and bloodshed have often found themselves in an unhappy marriage. “Monotheism’s jealous exclusion of other gods, secured in a covenant that binds together a community, might well abet the violent exclusion of those outside its limits. The boundaries within religions, separating orthodoxy from heterodoxy, have also been flashpoints of hostility that often explode into violence.”182 Again, recall two good lines from the poet Robinson Jeffers: “Beauty is not always lovely,” and “The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy.” The question of faith and human cognitive capacity to grasp it is not new. One of the paradoxes of faith is that the ability to reason, rather than diminish faith, enhances it. Medieval mystical tradition speaks of it as the coincidentia oppositorium (the coincidence of opposites).183 In this mystery, the question of God (faith) arises out of human conscious intentionality (reason). Lonergan says that in this question that arises out of our quest to know and to understand, one does not understand everything that one knows.184 It is a dialectic of faith and reason Lonergan sometimes refers to as the dialectic between the empirical and the intelligible. “What one knows without understanding, prior to understanding, is the empirical; what one knows over and above the empirical, and precisely inasmuch as one understands is the intelligible.”185 The Prussian Orthodox Christian thinker, Johann Hamann (1730–88), in his own defense of unity of faith and reason used an analogy from the Pauline

58

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

interpretation of law in the Hebrew Bible: “Just as the law was not given to make men righteous, reason was not given to make men wise. The law serves to reveal sinfulness and reason serves to reveal ignorance.”186 Hamman concludes that it is the shortcoming of reason that necessitates faith, which in itself transcends reason.187 Whether reason rests on a kind of faith or whether faith transcends reason are arguments beyond our scope here. Our concern is simply to highlight the dialectic of faith and reason vis-à-vis the paradox is poses for faith. Simply put, if religion is an utter falling in love with God, then for the one in love with God, “lapses from grace are rarer and more quickly amended.”188 To return to the dialectic of ineffable faith, the term “dialectic” has a long and varied history. Plato used it in a sense that is somewhat different from that of Hegel. Because the term has been used to designate different things, it defies one single meaning. Hence it has become customary to define the specific use of the term in relation to a particular philosopher.189 Kierkegaard suggests that in the light of the oxymoronic nature of the concept, i.e., whether you think of dialectic as a process or dialectic as a method of inquiry, it is best to call it “a logic of paradox.” He then goes on to conceive dialectic as a method of apprehending the world through paradox. Kierkegaard’s conception of dialectic in this regard is consistent with the tradition of Christian conception of dialectic stemming from Pseudo Dionysius and from him to Nicholas of Cusa and others who think of dialectic of contradiction in ways that are quite different from that of Hegel. For Hegel, dialectic of contradiction can be reconciled or resolved and the human mind can arrive at a complete notion of it, even if it is poorly articulated. But for the Christian tradition that Kierkegaard draws from, dialectic of contradiction results in a deeper knowledge attained through paradox, a knowledge which essentially remains ineffable.190 Kierkegaard also makes numerous claims about faith, insisting that faith is a paradox because in matters of faith to understand less is to understand better.191 He then proceeds to make a helpful distinction between the dialectician and the philosopher. It is good to point out that in making this distinction, Kierkegaard attaches a negative connotation to the word “philosopher.” He takes the philosopher to be one who follows contemporary Hegelian way of thinking, i.e., thinking in abstract speculative terms. The philosopher who thinks in the Hegelian mode wrongly thinks he or she can explain faith by reason. By contrast, what Kierkegaard calls the dialectician is one who thinks in the logic of paradox. The dialectician thinks the question of faith as a paradox. Dialectics, unlike the method philosophers employ, is a more viable method for apprehending faith. Kierkegaard’s antipathy for Hegel is rooted in the Hegel’s attempt to reconcile the elements in a paradox. In general, Kierkegaard does not like the idea of mediating paradox and trying to “go beyond” it.192 Thus, for Kierkegaard, “the methodological dissimilarity between philosopher and dialectician consists in different ways of approaching the paradoxical. While philosophers mediate it and turn it into something positive, a dialectician leaves it as a paradox.”193

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

59

In sum, dialectics, understood in the Kierkegaard sense of logic of paradox, helps us to grasp the relation of sacred to violence in religious systems. According to the terms of this logic, violence is a medium of communication with the sacred. It is a medium of encounter with the holy and is therefore one of the central points of religious narratives. Practicing ritualized violence should moderate or inhibit our propensity to cause violence to the other. Thus practicing ritualized violence should be a reminder to adopt various forms of counterviolence in our day to day encounter with the other. By adopting forms of counter-violence, I mean adopting a religion that promotes self-transcendence to the point of self-sacrificial love. It is only such a religion that can undo ideologies that justify human alienation.194

Conclusion As a quest for self-transcendence, the paradox of religion is multifaceted. The transcendence quest means that the religious believer is of this world and yet not of this world. The believer is caught in an immanence v. transcendence polarity. The transcendence quest means that whatever is achieved is never a secure possession because self-transcendence is a slippery concept. The believer is involved in a dialectic or tension between the self as transcending and the self as transcended.195 The religious faithful involved in the tension is, in addition, caught in some kinds of aberrations – loving and not living up to what it means to love. Ironically, genuine religion is discovered and realized in redemption from the various forms of religious aberrations.196 The dialectic or tension speaks to the larger issue of the self-referential paradox of religion. The self-referential paradox of religion becomes clearer once one understands the dialectical character of religion. Lonergan developed the notion that religious development has a dialectical character – that if religion is the realm of love, it can also be a realm of hate, if it is a realm of unity, it can also be a realm of disunity or fragmentation. All the lofty virtues we ascribe to religion can be “matched in the history of religions by their opposites.”197 He also noted, as part of this dialectical character of religious development, that religion is sustained only when God is conceived as the supreme fulfilment of human thirst for supreme intelligence, truth, reality, righteousness, goodness. Inversely, it is when the love of God is not strictly associated with selftranscendence that religion becomes easily reinforced by the erotic, the sexual, the orgiastic.198 The dialectical character of religious development is not to be conceived necessarily as a struggle between two opposites whatsoever, but as an “opposition between authenticity and unathenticity, between the self as transcending and the self as transcended. It is not just an opposition between contrary propositions but an opposition with the human reality of individuals and of groups.”199 To resolve its self-referential dilemma, religion has to be directed totally to the true, the good, the beautiful, otherwise “the cult of God that is terrifying can slip over into the demonic, into the exultant destructiveness of oneself and of others.”200

60

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

The problematic of religious sacrifice speaks to another larger matter of selfreferential paradox of religion. It leaves us with a dilemma, like the kind Kierkegaard could not wrap his mind around when he read of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. More disturbing to him than the divine command was even Abraham’s willingness to carry out the divine command. But the paradox of religious sacrifice helps us to understand Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac in terms of love. “All love is self-surrender, but being in love with God is being in love without limits or qualifications or conditions or reservation.”201 This is the deeper meaning of Einstein’s statement that the knowledge of mystery constitutes “true religion.”202 I find it apropos to conclude the chapter with a quote from Haught on the dilemma of religious certitude: “We run the risk of diminishing the mystery of reality and of ourselves if we plunge precipitously into shallow certitudes. The unravelling we sense at the edges of human existence and of the world must not be prematurely knotted by our own restrictive meanings. If there is a revelatory key to reality, we must allow it to unfold at its own pace. And at the same time we must be open to surprise at the shape it eventually takes.”203

Notes 1 Ibid. 2 Ibid. 3 Henri De Lubac, Further Paradoxes, translated from the French by Ernest Beaumont (London: Longmans, 1958), ix. 4 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 5, Understanding and Being, edited by Elizabeth A. Morelli and Mark D. Morelli (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 133. 5 Lelyveld, The Unity of the Contraries, 3. 6 Lubac, Further Paradoxes, x. 7 Lelyveld, The Unity of the Contraries, 3. 8 Ibid. 9 Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1966), 33. 10 Matthew Bagger, The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), ix. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. See also Gordon S. Wood, “American Religion: The Great Retreat,” New York Review of Books, 53 (June 2006), 60–63. 13 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, x. 14 Lubac, Further Paradoxes, ix. 15 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, Collection, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 118. 16 Ibid., 84. 17 Lubac, Further Paradoxes, x. 18 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 23. 19 Willard Van Orman Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1966), 21. 20 Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 100.

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

61

21 Ibid. 22 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, xiii. 23 See Plato, Symposium Loeb Classical Library, translated by W.R.M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925). 24 Symposium, 194B. 25 Symposium, 223CD 26 Diskin Clay, “The Tragic and Comic Poet of the Symposium,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 2 (1975), 238–61. 27 James Alexander, “The Four Points of the Compass,” Philosophy, 87 (2012), 79–107. 28 Ibid., 81. 29 Ibid., 92. 30 Ibid., 93. 31 Ibid., 99. 32 Ibid. 33 John F. Haught, Mystery and Promise: A Theology of Revelation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993), 43–44. 34 Heinze Pagels, Perfect Symmetry (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 367. 35 Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Bonanza Books, 1954), 11. 36 See Haught, Mystery and Promise, chapter 3. 37 See Schubert M. Ogden, On Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 40. 38 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol., 14, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 102. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 35. 42 Ibid., 36. 43 Ibid., 35. 44 David Basinger, “Biblical Paradox: Does Revelation Challenge Logic?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Quarterly, 30 (1987), 205–13. 45 See Mary Douglas, “Self-Evidence,” in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1975), 252–83. 46 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 41. 47 Ibid., 35. 48 Alexander, “The Four Points of the Compass,” 92; referencing Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1. 49 Alexander, “The Four Points of the Compass,” 92. 50 Ibid., 93. 51 Alan Weir, “There Are No True Contradictions,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Amour-Garb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 385–417. 52 See John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of Grammar of Assent, edited by Ian T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 243. 53 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. K. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 115. 54 See Julia Anna and Jonathan Barnes, The Modes of Skepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 55 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 74. 56 See Sextus Empiricus, Selections from Major Writings on Skepticism, Man, and God, 2nd edition, edited by Phillip P. Hallie (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 1985). 57 Alexander, “The Four Points of the Compass,” 100–101. 58 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 74. 59 Ibid., 75. 60 Alexander, “The Four Points of the Compass,” 102.

62

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

61 See Mary Douglas, “Credibility,” in Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), 235–54. 62 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 99. 63 Ibid. 64 Alexander, “The Four Points of the Compass,” 100. 65 Ibid. 66 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 105. 67 Ibid., 82. 68 C. S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” online: www.bocc.ubi.pt/pag/peirce-charlesfixation-belief.html; accessed December 3, 2021. 69 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 83. 70 Ibid. 71 Alexander, “The Four Points of the Compass,” 100. 72 Ibid., 106. 73 Basinger, “Biblical Paradox,” 205. 74 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 101. 75 Ibid., 96. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 97. 81 Ibid., 98. 82 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 103. 83 Ibid., 111. 84 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 100. 85 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 112. 86 See Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief.” 87 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 112. 88 Ibid. 89 Alexander, “The Four Points of the Compass,” 87. 90 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 113. 91 Ibid., 112. 92 Ibid., 114. 93 Ibid., 116. 94 Alexander, “The Four Points of the Compass,” 87. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid., 88; quoting Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 1961–7 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1982–91), Vol. VI, 215. 100 Alexander, “The Four Points of the Compass,” 88. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 88–89. 103 Ibid., 89. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., 90. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 119. 110 Ibid., 394. 111 Ibid., 390.

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

63

112 Ibid., 113–14. 113 See Tony Edwards, “Play, Ritual, and the Rationality of Religious Paradox,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 5 (1993), 7–25. 114 See Klaus K. Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, 3rd ed. (Albany: State University of New York, 2007), 316. 115 D. Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 211. 116 Jay Martin, “The Paradoxes of Religious Violence,” Salmagundi, 130 (2001), 31–38. 117 See Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 22. 118 Martin, “The Paradoxes of Religious Violence,” 33. 119 Ibid. 120 Stephen R. Palmquist, “The Paradox of Inwardness in Kant and Kierkegaard,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 44 (2016), 738–51. 121 See Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, translated by Howard V, Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1983). 122 Martin, “The Paradoxes of Religious Violence,” 35. 123 Ibid., 33. 124 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 54. 125 Ibid., 104. 126 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 99. 127 Charles R. Embry and Glenn Hughes, eds., The Eric Voegelin Reader: Politics, History, Consciousness (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017), 365. 128 See Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, translated by Peter Bing (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983). 129 See Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, edited and translated by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 130 Ilja Srubar, “Religion and Violence: Paradoxes of Religious Communication,” Theoretical Philosophical Paper, 40 (2017), 501–18. 131 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), 31. 132 Burkert, Homo Necans, 3. 133 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 56. 134 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 99. 135 See John Milton, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, edited by Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). 136 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 170. 137 See C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1955). 138 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 171. 139 Ibid., 172. 140 See Richard Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 141 James Anderson, Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 4. 142 See Joseph O. Chapa, “Reformed Soteriology in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments,” Journal of Reformed Theology, 10 (2016), 129–47. 143 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1961). 144 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965). 145 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3. 146 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 383–484. 147 C. Stephen Evans, “Kierkegaard and the Limits of Reason: Can There Be a Responsible Fideism?” Revista Portuguessa de Filosofia, 64 (2008), 1021–35, 1030.

64

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

148 C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 261. 149 Ibid. 150 John Stewart, Soren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4. 151 See Soren Kierkegaard, The Moment and Late Writings, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 341. 152 Ibid., 11. 153 Stewart, Soren Kierkegaard, 5. 154 Ibid., 33. 155 Ibid., 191. 156 Ibid., 15. 157 Ibid., 193. 158 Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, translated by David Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 183. 159 Ibid. 160 Ibid., 180. 161 R. T. Herbert, Paradox and Identity in Theology (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press. 1979), 56. 162 Ibid., 57. 163 Ibid. 164 Ibid., 59. 165 Ibid. 166 Ibid., 61. 167 Ibid., 59–60. 168 Ibid., 61. 169 Ibid. See also Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 182. 170 Herbert, Paradox and Identity in Theology, 63. 171 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 173. 172 Herbert, Paradox and Identity in Theology, 60. 173 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 183–84. 174 See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. 175 Herbert, Paradox and Identity in Theology, 72. See also Soren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, translated by Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944). 176 Graham Priest, In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987), 85. 177 Embry and Hughes, The Eric Voegelin Reader, 364. 178 Edwards, “Play, Ritual, and the Rationality of Religious Paradox,” 20. 179 Martin, “The Paradoxes of Religious Violence,” 32. 180 Ibid. 181 Ibid. 182 Ibid., 34. 183 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, x. 184 Lonergan, Collection, 94. 185 Ibid., 94–95. 186 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, x. 187 Ibid. 188 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 40. 189 Martin Humpal, “Why a Dialectician is Not a Philosopher: The Poetics of Dialectics in Kierkegaard’s Frygt og Baven,” Scandinavian Studies, 73 (2001), 493–500, 498. 190 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 35. 191 Humpal, “Why a Dialectician is Not a Philosopher,” 499.

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203

65

Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 27. Humpal, “Why a Dialectician Is Not a Philosopher,” 499. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 54. Ibid., 106. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 101–2. Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 11. Haught, Mystery and Promise, 57.

Bibliography Alexander, James. “The Four Points of the Compass.” Philosophy, 87 (2012), 79–107. Anderson, James. Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007. Anna, Julia and Jonathan Barnes. The Modes of Skepticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Bagger, Matthew. The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics 1961–7. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1982–1991. Basinger, David. “Biblical Paradox: Does Revelation Challenge Logic?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Quarterly, 30 (1987), 205–213. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939. Edited and translated by Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Burkert, Walter. Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth. Translated by Peter Bing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983. Chapa, Joseph O. “Reformed Soteriology in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments.” Journal of Reformed Theology, 10 (2016), 129–147. Clay, Diskin. “The Tragic and Comic Poet of the Symposium.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 2 (1975), 238–261. Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1966. Douglas, Mary. “Self-Evidence.” In Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, 252–283. London: Routledge, 1975. Douglas, Mary. “Credibility.” In Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory, 235–254. London: Routledge, 1992. Edwards, Tony. “Play, Ritual, and the Rationality of Religious Paradox.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 5 (1993), 7–25. Embry, Charles R. and Glenn Hughes, eds. The Eric Voegelin Reader: Politics, History, Consciousness. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017. Empiricus, Sextus. Selections from Major Writings on Skepticism, Man, and God, 2nd edition. Edited by Phillip P. Hallie. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1985. Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Bonanza Books, 1954. Evans, Stephen C. “Kierkegaard and the Limits of Reason: Can There Be a Responsible Fideism?” Revista Portuguessa de Filosofia, 64 (2008), 1021–1035.

66

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Gale, Richard. On the Nature and Existence of God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977. Haught, John F. Mystery and Promise: A Theology of RevelationCollegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993. Herbert, R.T. Paradox and Identity in Theology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Humpal, Martin. “Why a Dialectician is Not a Philosopher: The Poetics of Dialectics in Kierkegaard’s Frygt og Baven.” Scandinavian Studies, 73 (2001), 493–500. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965. Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Translated by David Swenson and Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941. Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1983. Kierkegaard, Soren. The Moment and Late Writings. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Kierkegaard, Soren. Training in Christianity. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944. Kinsley, D. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1986. Klostermaier, Klaus K. A Survey of Hinduism, 3rd ed. Albany: State University of New York, 2007. Lelyveld, Arthur J. The Unity of Contraries: Paradox as a Characteristic of Normative Jewish Thought. Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1984. Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970. Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1955. Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, Collection. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 14, Method in Theology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 5, Understanding and Being. Edited by Elizabeth A. Morelli and Mark D. Morelli. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. de Lubac, Henri. Further Paradoxes. Translated from the French by Ernest Beaumont. London: Longmans, 1958. Martin, Jay. “The Paradoxes of Religious Violence.” Salmagundi 130, (2001), 31–38. Milton, John. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Edited by Merrit Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey Press, 1957. Newman, John Henry. An Essay in Aid of Grammar of Assent. Edited by Ian T. Ker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Ogden, Schubert M. On Theology. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Otto, Rudolph. The Idea of the Holy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979. Pagels, Heinze. Perfect Symmetry. New York: Bantam Books, 1986. Palmquist, Stephen R. “The Paradox of Inwardness in Kant and Kierkegaard.” Journal of Religious Ethics, 44 (2016), 738–751.

Religion and Self-Referential Paradox

67

Peirce, C.S. “The Fixation of Belief.” Online: www.bocc.ubi.pt/pag/peirce-charles-fixa tion-belief.html; accessed December 3, 2021. Plato. Symposium Loeb Classical Library. Translated by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925. Priest, Graham. In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987. Quine, Willard Van Orman. The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1966. Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Sanneh, Lamin. Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. Stewart, John. Soren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Srubar, Ilja. “Religion and Violence: Paradoxes of Religious Communication.” Theoretical Philosophical Paper, 40 (2017), 501–518. Weir, Alan. “There Are No True Contradictions.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley AmourGarb, 385–417. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.K. von Wright. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge, 1961. Wood, Gordon S. “American Religion: The Great Retreat.” New York Review of Books, 53 (June 2006), 60–63.

3

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

From the standpoint of Christian biblical scholars, the matter of how best to approach the theology of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament (OT) in Christian parlance, is far from settled. Among the many issues that are still hotly contested are the “questions of objectivity/subjectivity, what ‘it meant/ what it means,’ Christian and/or Jewish O.T. theology, the descriptive and/or normative nature of O.T. theology, ‘above the fray’ and/or ‘in the fray,’ transcendence and/or immanence, confessional or non-confessional OT theology.”1 Also of importance is the question regarding whether O.T. theology should be approached as a historical or a theological discipline. Even if the current trend is tilting towards “the direction of affirming it as a theological enterprise,”2 there still remains the question of how “the shifts from a historical paradigm to a literary and/or structuralist paradigm in the study of the O.T. reflect on O.T. theology.”3 While these are all matters of great importance, the focus of this chapter will not necessarily be on these theological debates, but more so on the paradoxical imports of the theology of the O.T.

The Matter of Jewish Identity The classical Jewish identity, as found in the Hebrew Bible, was forged in the diaspora. This irony, which is easy to miss, is often taken for granted.4 The Exodus story tells us that it was in exile that the Jews first realized that they were a people beloved of Yahweh and a nation set apart.5 The classical Jewish notion of a “nation” should not be confused with the Enlightenment induced notion of a nation-state. What is meant by this modern notion of a nation-state is in many ways different from the ancient understanding of a nation. J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith’s landmark study uncover that ethnic groups, like that of classical Judaism, often exhibit the following six features, albeit in varying degrees: 1 2

A collective proper name, which they use to identify and express the essence of who they are as a community. A myth of common ancestry, which they employ to give themselves a sense of kingship.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003299820-4

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer 3 4 5 6

69

A common history, which they utilize to help them valorize their heroes, some special events in their histories, and their shared memories of common past. A common culture, which usually includes customs, traditions, language, and religion. An association with a specific homeland, which can either be physical or symbolic attachment to an ancestral land. A sense of communal solidarity.6

The designation “Jews,” like any other ethnic group, shares a combination of these six features. From the very moment Moses decided to lead the Israelites out of Egypt in the Exodus story, these six features were there, albeit in an inchoate form in some instances. But more specifically, it was in the diaspora, after the destruction of the Temple, first by the Babylonians (586 BCE) and second by the Romans (70 CE), that the Jewish identity was forged. It was during these momentous events, when they came in contact with other nations, that the Jews realized that they were one of many ethnic minorities in the Ancient Near East. Then they began to forge in a reflexive way their ethnic identity as a nation. This identity, as they understood it, has always been inseparable from the Torah – the Law that was delivered by Moses. Needless to say, the classical notion of JewJudaism is not exactly the same as the modern notion. There are as many religious Jews today as there are secular or non-religious Jews. Israel’s Supreme Court today considers the matter regarding who is a Jew to be a fluid social phenomenon, i.e., that what constitutes a Jew defies precise definition.7 Even a person born of a Jewish mother who adopts another religion is no longer considered a Jew by the Court.8 In the face of this ambivalence, I use the term “Jew” here mostly in its historical religious sense (not as a racial category or citizenship connotation) by which the people and faith are indistinguishable. Reference to Jewish people in this chapter is not to be understood as “race” or imaginary or real “nation” of Zionism – that movement formed in 1897 that sought political self-determination of worldwide Jewish people, although this is also fundamentally a religion-based concept.9 Thus, reference here to Jewish people is always a reference to the biblical “people of Yahweh” whose only common attribute is Jewish religion, irrespective of the modern understanding that a necessary and sufficient condition for a non-Jew (one not born of a Jewish mother) is religious conversion.10

Paradox in Jewish Usage Very much like Christianity that was founded on a mystery spawned by paradox, paradox is characteristic of Judaism.11 Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld has suggested that in Judaism paradox assumes the form of equivocation of the nature of reality – a way of viewing the world as a whole, the world of ideas, and the world as an arena of the holy.12 Lelyveld has also characterized paradox in Judaism as “a genuine openness to the rich variety of possibilities that life offers us,” insisting that “it flows from an intellectual humility that bows before complexity and ultimate

70

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

mystery.”13 Classical Judaism at times also makes humor a characteristic of paradox. There are far too many examples: YHWH, the master of the universe, is sometimes described anthropomorphically as laughing:14 “In the heavens the Lord laughs as He sits on His throne, making fun of the nations” (Psalm 2:4). Even some Jewish sages admit that “the riddles and the parables are also Torah.”15 What is described in a light hearted way by the Torah does not, however, lessen the solemnity of the divine command, especially “when it is used for a serious purpose or when it is discovered in the nature of reality or in the commandments of the Torah itself.”16 Rabbi Lelyveld, on whose authority I rely for this matter, suggests the example of a tradition of mitzvah (divine command) that can be fulfilled only through oversight or forgetfulness. In this particular mitzvah, a produce or crop forgotten in the course of the harvest must be left for the poor and needy.17 He argues that this tradition of mitzvah has inspired a poem that humorously characterizes a pious Jew as one who obeys divine command by forgetfulness: “Blessed are Thou, O Lord, whose gracious will enables me as They biddy to fulfill, even through some oversight.”18 Rabbi Lelyveld points to another Jewish tradition that uses paradox to deal with some troublesome ordinances that seem counter to reason or that seem to offend ethical judgment. The way classical Judaism handled this kind of ordinance is to interpret it “out of existence by applying strict literalism to it.”19 A good case in point is the para adomah, “one of the four mysteries of the Torah with which Satan challenges Israel.”20 Satan, in this instance, even refers to how the para adomah makes the pure impure and the impure pure.21 As I will show later, Scripture requires the Red Heifer to be “young,” “faultless,” meaning that even two unacceptable hairs are good enough to disqualify it, and “never borne the yoke.”22 Giving the difficulty of meeting these requirements, the Jewish way of interpreting it out of existence is to say it is one of the commands left for Elijah to solve.23 The same idea of interpreting troublesome commands out of existence is applied to “the rabbinic defense of committing the Oral Torah to writing, despite the contrary inhibition, resulting in the paradoxical conclusion that to save the Torah, the Torah is abrogated.”24 There is also a place in Jewish tradition for paradox to illuminate a moral position, the same way Christian religion uses paradox to illuminate a moral position. “Who is wise? He who learns from all men; who is the strong hero? The one who conquers his yester (drive toward evil, sex urge or libido); who is rich? He who is content with his lot.”25 But the paradox that has the greatest significance for normative Judaism and which distinguishes the Jewish approach to universal reality and human relationships, according to Rabbi Lelyveld, “is the paradox of polar contradiction that is resolved by deeper insight.”26 This entails grasping both ends of the dilemma and seeking thereof “the unity of the contraries.”27 It is this understanding, Rabbi Lelyveld, argues, that has helped Judaism to resist all dualisms, “including the classical antinomies of justice and mercy, free will and determinism, immanence and transcendence, universalism and particularism, man’s nothingness and man’s supreme worth, freedom and law, individual and community, the cultic and the ethical, this worldliness and other worldliness,

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

71

soul and body, faith and works, God as wholly other and unknowable and yet present as person in relationship, fear of God and love of God.”28 Antinomy of Grace-Works in Classical Judaism Very early in Genesis we are introduced to the dialectic of grace and works. This literary post-exilic document (c. 6th–5th cent. BCE) begins with an elaborate story of human origins and walks us through the story of the patriarchs and the election of Israel as a nation. Noah, we are told, obtained grace with God (Gen. 6:8) and shortly after that Noah is said to be the most righteous of his generation and that he walked before God and was blameless (Gen. 6:9). We are not sure if the divine favor was what enabled Noah to walk blamelessly before God and his election, owing to divine foreknowledge or if God favored him because he was righteous.29 We see the same uncertainty with Abraham’s election too. There is nothing in his call narrative (Gen. 12: 1–3) that sheds light on this ambivalence. He is considered righteous by Yahweh who incidentally also makes demands of him. It is only if he continues to walk faithfully with Yahweh that he will receive the fullness of Yahweh’s blessings (Gen. 17:2).30 This same pattern of election-righteousness and grace-merit is repeated in many other passages in the Hebrew Bible. The high point was the election of the House of David (2 Sam. 7: 5–16).31 In view of these uncertainties, Eric Voegelin has cautioned against reading the Genesis story, particularly the creation story of Genesis 1, as a narrative told either by a revelatory God or an intelligently imaginative human being. He suggests that it is neither the one nor the other, but rather both. For him, “The participatory structure of the event and the account given of it in the referential structure of the narrative are inseparably one in the paradoxic structure of the story.”32 In the parable, “Before the Law,” the German-speaking Bohemian novelist, Franz Kafka (1883–1924), graphically tells the story of a man from the country who spends his entire life trying to gain access to the Law. Kafka is intent on portraying the inaccessibility of the Law and yet he paradoxically depicts it as an “open door.”33 To be clear, Kafka’s parable, no doubt, is a deconstructionist project – his hermeneutic strategy for reading a literary text. Even Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) understands Kafka’s parable to be “an exemplary instance of the peculiar kind of differential relations he signified in the neologism difference.”34 However, while Kafka’s work is a literary project and not a Hebrew Bible rendition of the Law or Torah, its hermeneutical strategies can be an aid to understanding the Torah. It is this strategy, i.e., its irony with respect to access to the law, that I wish to uncover in using Kafka here. In telling the story of the man trying to gain access to the Law, Kafka adopts an allegorical style. The story opens with the intriguing lines in which are embedded all the elements of the story: Before the Law stands a doorkeeper on guard. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment.

72

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

The two main characters, the doorkeeper and the man from the country (who remained nameless) are “types.”35 A dialectical relationship is set up right away: the door and the doorkeeper are urban, the man from the country does not possess the sophistication of the doorkeeper. The sophisticated doorkeeper refuses the request of the man from the country for entry through the door of the law and warning him that there are numerous doorkeepers more terrifying than him.36 This catches the man from the country by surprise. He thought the law would be accessible to everyone and at all times. “The expectation on the part of the man from the country of free, equal, universal access is an unsophisticated view in that it does not foresee the exploitation of right by the might of the doorkeeper, does not anticipate that a law supposedly governing all would be controlled by a few.”37 The man from the country is assured that perhaps sometime in the future he will be allowed entry. So he elects to stand in front of the door to the law. He waits fruitlessly for years and he gets old and feeble. He soon realizes in his old age that he has been standing in front of the door to the law for years, and nobody but himself has come seeking entry to the door. He assumed that everyone will necessarily strive to reach the door as the goal of their life efforts.38 The doorkeeper, perceiving that the man from the country is at the end of his strength and his hearing failing, whispers to his ear: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.” Kafka concludes the story with a note of irony: that the doorkeeper gave the message of salvation to the man only when it could no longer help him. Building on this paradox, Derrida laments, “Kafka’s parable demonstrates that the Law is not only an ensemble of interdictions but also a ‘prohibited place’ (i.e., an inaccessible place.)”39 Derrida thinks Kafka’s parable explores the undeniable relation between the signifier and the signified, between the conceptual universality of the law and the singularity of the individual, which the man from the country represents. “The man seeks access to the law because it is universal and applies to everyone, and he is denied access to the law because he is not everyone, but only himself and no one else.”40 Here we have an ambiguity of universality versus particularity. Western philosophical construct structures the ambiguities of human existence along polar opposites: being versus appearance, soul versus body, mind versus matter, identity versus difference, nature versus culture, good versus evil, presence versus absence, and life versus death.41 The terms in each binary are not equal entities. Very often “the second term of each pair is generally viewed negatively as an inferior reality, something to be overcome, possibly by a third entity or synthesis.”42 As it turns out, ironically, all human beings have one foot in one of each pair of terms and one foot in the other pair of terms and by default set one against the other. This dichotomization paradox or the polarity of opposites is an essential feature of the Hebrew Bible (as well as the Christian Bible). John Goldingay laments that in spite of the amount of literature written yearly on the Old Testament theology (by which he means a Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible), there is still an unresolved debate regarding how the diverse features of the Old Testament faith

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

73

43

can be understood as whole. He suggests that a descriptive O.T. theology “involves holding together polarities such as universalism and election, politics and religion, faith and love, cultic piety and prophetic piety, individual and community relationships to God, openness and purity, suffering and confidence in God, creation and redemption, exodus and exile, word and event; it involves seeking to clarify their interrelation rather than abandoning one member of each pair.”44 In the age of reform, the Christian reformer Martin Luther constructed his theology around these and other polarities: letter and spirit, law and gospel, faith and love, the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of this world, freedom and bondage, and God hidden and God revealed.45 He writes, “We Christians must ascribe all the idiomata of the two natures to His Person. Christ is God and man in one person. Therefore what is said of Him as man must also be said of Him as God, viz., Christ died, and Christ is God, therefore God died, not God apart from humanity, but God united with humanity.”46 This polar structure goes back to the Scripture itself, which tries to reflect Scripture’s own comprehensive relation to life, Goldingay argues. “If life itself is determined in a polar way – one thinks of birth and death, creating and receiving, subject and object, passivity and activity, the fulfilment and the failure of life, and the like – then when the question involves true life, attention must be directed to the polarities that are determinative and that set it right.”47

Some Themes in the Hebrew that are Held in Dialectical Tension Certain defining features of classical Judaism stem from the way the tradition has dealt with some seeming opposite and contradictory themes and events, including “its openness to speculation and its hospitality to dissent.”48 Some of those themes are worth examining for the purpose of highlighting their inherent paradox. a) Tribe/State in Israel: Sociologically, a “tribe” is different from a “state.” A tribe is a clan-like grouping. A state is a bureaucratically organized centralized system consisting of multiple tribes culturally integrated. The Hebrew Bible, particularly the Hexateuch, presents a remarkable tension between Israel as a tribe and Israel as a state.49 The paradox, as some scholars have noted, has two main characteristics. First, the Davidic state has a major tribal ideology and is a vehicle for a sacred history. In the song of Deborah, for example (Judges 5), we see an authentically tribal organization in which each tribe makes its own decisions for or against war.50 Second, there seems to be a contradictory account of the bureaucratic and tribal elements of the presentation of material in the Hexateuch. In two accounts in Exodus (Ex.3–4; 4: 29), we are given an image of a bureaucratic centralized government: Moses and Aaron are asked to “go and gather the elders of Israel” and they went and “gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel.” Also, in Exodus, Moses says to Joshua, “Choose for us men, and go out, fight against Amalek” (Ex.17: 9). The very idea of a single leader choosing a single general, who in turn selects some warriors, is a bureaucratic, not a tribal way of doing things.51 There are other places in the Hebrew Bible where tribal idioms are juxtaposed with non-tribal

74

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

idioms. “The whole book of Joshua narrates what could feasibly have reference to a series of events in a tribal history; but which are presented in a mode related rather to a bureaucratic way of thinking.”52 There are many possible conclusions one could draw from this paradox. Perhaps the situation stems from “a double memory in Israel, on the one hand of a significant tribal life, on the other of a significant city-state life.”53 The very fact the authors of these books choose to fuse the two historical experiences suggests that both parts are historically important and that the tribal system of organization that was prevalent before Israel achieved the status of a state should not be dismissed as irrelevant after the foundation of the state.54 For, Israel’s religious and political pluralism stemmed from an early tribal history. Thus, the tribal/state paradox need not be treated as a contradiction, “but as a compendium, holding significant information in embryonic form: a record, in fact, of two sorts of social experience which interacted historically with each other, and also the nucleus of an ideology, which had long-reaching effects in the history of the Israelite nation.”55 b) Divine Action and Human Action: The Hebrew Bible always tries to hold two poles in tension: divine action and human passivity. The two juxtaposed poles stem from uncompromising trust in Yahweh’s faithfulness. Sometimes the passivity is presented in form of human initiative or action, deriving from Israel’s unconditional trust in the covenant. In different ways the Hebrew Bible represents this dialectical tension between divine initiative and human passivity/ action in the two personalities that model the faith of Israel: Abraham and Moses. Yahweh takes the initiative to promise land and descendants to Abraham (Gen, 12: 1–7), even allowing him to bear a child in old age as a sign of the fulfilment of the promise (Gen. 15: 2–4; 18:10).56 Although Abraham was to be a passive recipient of God’s promise, we see Abraham taking “unprompted initiative to try to convince God to be more lenient in sparing Sodom and Gomorrah from judgment” and does so with success (Gen. 18: 20–32).57 In the case of Moses, God takes the initiative to give him a mission to deliver Israel out of bondage (Exodus 3:4). But Moses is also presented as taking “unprompted initiative to try to convince God against decisively wiping out the disloyal Israelites when they worshipped the golden calf and Moses succeeded in doing so” (Exodus 32: 18).58 Exodus is a classic book that places the action of “God who acts” in tension with human activity. It presents the heroic role of Moses in the Pentateuch alongside the wars YHWH fought on behalf of the people of Israel. Here we see a synergy – a fusion of divine and human activity.59 “In the exodus story the emphasis is on the divine; in the story of Joseph before it, and in those of the Judges, Ruth, Saul, David, Solomon, Ezra, and Nehemiah after it, the emphasis lies the other way. These do express the conviction that God is at work in history, yet they also strongly emphasize the initiative of human actors.”60 The books of Judges, Ruth, Ezra, and Nehemiah emphasize human initiative and action based on unconditional trust in the covenant. These books stand in contrast to the emphasis of the role of the Israelites prophets – that though history reflects human

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

75

acts and initiatives, God is at work in history. Though there are some prophetic books, like Isaiah, that emphasize both divine initiative and human action, in general the prophets, together with some apocalyptic literature, like aspects of the book of Daniel, emphasize God’s initiative and action in the shaping of human history. c) The Divine Nature: The Hebrew Bible presents the nature of God to be such that God is both unknown (Exodus 20:21) and known (Numbers 12: 6–8), hidden and manifest. The hiddenness and manifestation of God is another paradox that is deeply rooted in Scripture. Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament testify to both the transcendence (hiddenness) and immanence (accessibility) of God. In I Kings, Solomon dedicates the Temple to Yahweh and on seeing the cloud enter the Holy of Holies, he exclaimed, “YHWH has said He will dwell in thick darkness” (I Kgs 8: 12). Deutero-Isaiah in the same manner describes YHWH as a “self-hidden God” of Israel (Is. 45:15).61 What we see here, with respect to the ancient antinomy of divine transcendence and divine immanence, is a tradition that affirms both. “God enters the world like the waters of the great ocean enter a cave, but He exists beyond the world like an infinite ocean which is not diminished by the waters in the cave.”62 d) YHWH and Israel: Some scholars have suggested that all of the Hebrew Bible. at its core is a unified relationship between Yahweh (God’s uniqueness and incomparability) and Israel (Jewish duty to worship and obey Yahweh exclusively) and that outside this core might be diverse theological viewpoints that are held in dynamic tension.63 The Jewish idea of the Torah gives us a good example of dynamic tension of a theological viewpoint. The saying, “When Torah came into the world, freedom came into the world,”64 is intended to hold together the polarities of human freedom and observance of the Law. The Law, which binds Israel together, is also that which sets Israel free.65 To cite one of Rabbi Lelyveld’s examples, “A Midrashic work commenting on Psalm 11 has David say: ‘I have feared Thee because I have rejoiced in Thee and my joy comes my fear.’”66 The Hebrew Bible also presents a polar relationship between Yahweh and Israel. The two are counterparts and yet stand together. Their contradiction constitutes a thread that “draws attention to further tensions, between election and universalism, Israel as a political entity and Israel as a religious community, cultic piety and prophetic piety, individual and community in relation to God, openness to the world or to other religions and insistence on distinctiveness or purity, suffering and confidence in God, judgment and grace, law and promise.”67 e) YHWH is both Israel’s God and a universal God: There is also the related fact that classical Judaism consistently emphasizes the paradoxical affirmation of a universal God (the God of all peoples) who is in a special covenant relationship with Israel: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth” (Amos 3:2).68 God’s election of a particular people, Israel, is intended to serve a universal purpose.69 The people of other nations, such as the Ethiopians and the Philistines, though distant and different, and even in some cases hostile to Israel, are also

76

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

God’s children and object of God’s care.70 It is through God’s particular love for Israel that the entire humanity is cared for.71 In sum, many theological themes appear in the Hebrew Bible with respect to Israel’s relationship with Yahweh. At various times in Israel’s history, some aspects of the themes gain more emphasis. When one aspect is emphasized, depending on the time and occasion, it might seem to contradict other covenant themes. Some passages, for example, “focus on active obedience to Yahweh’s commandments (Deuteronomy 6: 1–9), while others focus on not striving to make things happen but instead having faith and trust in the promises of Yahweh to come to pass (Genesis 15:6).”72 This is precisely why a framework for theological diversity is necessary for disentangling potential theological contradictions in the Hebrew Bible.73 Such a framework will help us understand that different parts of the Hebrew Bible contain theological counterpoints to other divergent perspective regarding Yahweh’s relationship with Israel.74 In all, it is not difficult to decipher that the covenant theology is built on a polarity of opposites. The polarity means “that even if all of them contain insights, not all these insights can be normative in the same way at the same time.”75 Goldingay who has long acknowledged that there are varieties of viewpoints on this matter still thinks we should “accept all of them as potentially instructive when understood against their appropriate context.”76 He thinks that this is because the books in the Hebrew Bible “constitute a range of responses to various situations, and precisely the range of these opens up the possibility that among them I may find some insight that relates to the situation I find myself in.”77 Take, for example, the biblical perspectives on death, the diversity of the covenant theology on death shows that no one stance is normative. All the different perspectives might have their own contributions to make to the attitudes of members of the believing communities of faith. “We are invited not to decide among them where lies the truth; rather, ‘the communities’ situation in the present will ultimately determine which biblical response is the most meaningful.’”78 For those in contemporary society who might find it difficult to accept the idea of afterlife, Goldingay suggests that it might be more helpful to keep in mind other perspectives, “such as the general Old Testament acceptance of mortality as natural, and its rejoicing in the ongoing life of one’s own people, in the survival of one’s own memory, and in the eternity of God himself.”79 The point here is that if polarity of opposites is an essential nature of the Bible, then theological polarity should be essential to the contemporary believer’s journey with God who is the same Yahweh described in the Old Testament.80 Do the Hebrew Bible Antinomies Foster Hermeneutics? Theological debate about the role paradox plays in hermeneutics is far from settled. Like many contested issues, there are two opposing camps in the debate. The first camp, which we will label the Anti-Paradox Theologians, denies the validity of paradox in theological hermeneutics. Their argument is that paradox

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

77

(by which they essentially mean self-contradiction) is not a category anyone can use to fit a biblical truth.81 While one cannot not deny the merit of the argument of the Anti-Paradox Theologians, it is on the side of the other group, which we will call the Pro-Paradox Theologians, that I hinge my bet. The latter correctly affirms the presence of paradoxes (by which they mean antinomies or statements that appear to contradict logic) in Scripture and affirm how the resolution of these paradoxes might in fact be to live with them.82 One of the Pro-Paradox Theologians is Werner Lemke who has done a useful study that shows how paradox helps biblical interpretation. Paradoxes can and actually do come to the service of hermeneutics, he argues. Lemke’s hermeneutical study also emphasizes how affirmations of God in the Bible can be better grasped when interjected with paradox.83 The case study he uses to make this argument is very informative. It is a tiny text about affirmation of God as found in Jeremiah 23: 23–24. The Revised Standard Version renders this tiny text that has long puzzled biblical scholars as follows: “Am I a God at hand, says the Lord, and not a God afar off? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? Says the Lord. Do I not fill the heaven and the earth? Says the Lord.” On the surface level, the text seems to be suggesting both the immanence and transcendence of God. But Lemke says, not so fast. He uses various arguments to show that the precise theological meaning and significance of the text can be better understood only when viewed through the lens of paradox. He begins by noting a minor textual difference between the authoritative Hebrew/Aramaic Masoretic text (MT) and Greek Septuagint (LXX) of Jer. 23: 23. One of the things Lemke uncovers through application of paradox as a hermeneutic is that the difference between the two texts involves the Hebrew interrogative particle “he,” which is present in the MT, but not reflected in the LXX.84 He reckons that for the ordinary eye, this might seem minor, but the theological importance is by no means insignificant. “The Greek seems to assert the opposite of what the Hebrew says. Whereas as the latter seems to stress God’s transcendence, the former appears to affirm God’s immanence.”85 Some Biblical scholars are still at loggerheads as to whether the difference between the Greek and Hebrew versions is to be attributed to a scribal error or an intentional altering of the original. If it is intentional altering of the original, then it raises the question, which of the two is the original? Lemke’s own position is that one’s understanding of the passage will depend first and

Table 3.1 Textual Comparison MT

LXX

Am I a God at hand, says the Lord, and not a God afar off?

I am a God at hand, says the Lord, and not a God afar off.

78

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

foremost on whether the person is following the MT or the LXX “and secondly, on who closely one thinks it to be related to its sequel in vv. 24–32.”86 We will leave this debate for scriptural scholars to harsh out. Our own concern is on the paradoxical nature of the text. The paradoxical nature of the text is more evident in the MT reading, not the LXX. The latter is more concerned with maintaining the Hebrew. affirmations of the nearness and distance of God. Lemke’s preference is for the MT. He thinks that the MT reading is to be preferred as standing closer to Prophet Jeremiah’s own thought than the LXX which is more concerned about continuing the Deuteronomic perspective that God could be thought of as “near” in the sense that God has revealed God’s self through the Mosaic Torah. Furthermore, Lemke uncovers two notable paradoxes about predications of divine distance in the Hebrew Bible. The first, he argues, has to do with the theology of the Hebrew covenant in general. The second, he says, pertains to Prophet Jeremiah himself. With respect to the theology of the Hebrew Bible, his position is that the distance of God was a metaphor denoting primarily a negative experience. “It suggested a break in the divine-human relationship brought about either by human sin, or through the apparent triumph of evil. In either case, it was something undesirable and to be shunned. Consequently, the desire and prayer of the righteous was for God to be bear and not far off.”87 But paradoxically, in the same Hebrew Scriptures., predications of divine distance were also used in a more positive sense of pointing to God’s transcendence. “Distance here suggested connotations of divine power, wisdom, providential foreknowledge, and inscrutability. In two instances the metaphor of distance was used to differentiate Yahweh from other no-gods of recent origin. Yahweh comes from afar for purposes of salvation or self-manifestation.”88 With respect to Prophet Jeremiah himself, Lemke argues that here we have a paradox pertaining to how Prophet Jeremiah himself invokes the metaphor of the nearness or distance of God to the people in Jeremiah 23: 25–32. Jeremiah uses the metaphor of “near God” in a derogatory sense to attack his opponents whom he thought were false prophets who invoke God’s name in vain. The “near God” was the god of the false prophets that Jeremiah raged about. These false prophets “operated under the erroneous assumption that God was at their constant disposal and beckoning. The ‘near God’ was a God whom they thought they could manipulate by means of selfinduced dreams and visions, whose will could be easily equated with the deceitful desires of their own hearts.”89 There are several other passages in which Jeremiah attacked the notions of “near God:” in the temple sermon, he attacks those who sought to localize God permanently in the temple and divorce him from everyday cultic worship and life of the people; he attacks the notions of the “near God” of the scribes whom the scribes thought they could confine to their interpretations of the written Torah (Jer. 8: 8–9); he attacks false piety of “near God” which invokes God on the lips but not in the heart (Jer. 12:2); and attacks the notion of “near God” whom some priests and prophets, including the so-called wise people, thought was their permanent and exclusive possession (Jer. 18:8).90 But by contrast, the “distant God,” for Jeremiah, “was a God whose word could not be

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

79

manipulated or horse-traded. It was a word which invaded human experience from beyond with overwhelming power. It was like a hammer that smashed rocks in pieces (Jer. 23:29).”91 Thus, according to Lemke, Prophet Jeremiah employs the metaphor to attack “a fundamental theological truth which had become perverted by being absolutized and subjected to religious abuse.”92 Lemke concludes that what is evident in the MT is the paradoxical statement of prophet Jeremiah, warning his people “that while there is a sense in which God is near to this people in various ways, one must be careful not to absolutize that divine immanence, or to seek to manipulate it for selfish ends.”93 In the end the paradox cannot be missed: God’s immanence must always be seen in the context of his transcendence and that when God draws people near, it is for the purpose of salvation, revelation, and communion.94

The Red Heifer Paradox We return to the famed Red Heifer mystery or paradox that we hinted earlier as a context for understanding how the tradition stemming from classical Judaism understands and deals with polarities that a person encounters in their religious quest. As we demonstrated to this point, the hallowed language of religion is not only multivalent, it is also “double intentional.”95 In many ways this double intentionality is everywhere evident in the paradox of Red Heifer. The Red Heifer ritual, known in Hebrew as para adumah, has fascinated biblical scholars for centuries. It is considered one of the most mysterious and incomprehensible rituals in the entire Bible.96 Certain difficulties are associated with this ritual that is found in Numbers 19. The difficulties need to be sorted out to better appreciate the ritual. Some have taken to explaining ritual as a sin-offering whose purpose in Hebrew is to remove contamination (Num. 19:9).97 Those who hold this view think that explaining it as a sin-offering “provides the necessary clues for a comprehensive explanation of the ritual and a satisfying resolution of the attendant paradoxes.”98 Numbers explicitly states that the Red Heifer is the statute of the Torah. The noun “statute,” as used in Hebrew, is different from a “precept.” Whereas a precept is a rule or principle that governs one’s personal conduct, a statute is a written law given by a legislature. Therefore, when Numbers introduces the para adumah as a statute, it means it is divine command and that is beyond human reason (see Gen 47: 22; Ex. 29:28; Job 28:26; Jer. 5:22, 31: 35–36). This is why it calls it a “perpetual statute” (Num. 19:21). The ritual itself is a combination of the two rites of purifications the Torah says YHWH ordered, i.e., the three days of sexual abstinence for all Israelites that was mandated prior to the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai (Ex. 19:15) and the seven days of reclusion and purification ordered for Aaron and his sons before they were inaugurated as priests (Lev. 8:33).99 Numbers 19 explains the Red Heifer ritual as entailing the following: that the heir to Aaron the high priest, i.e., his son Eleazar, takes a red heifer outside the camp and slaughters it. Aaron could not perform the sacrifice because he has been found unworthy, owing to his involvement with the Golden Calf.100 The priest is to burn the entire animal. There is no specification as to who burns the

80

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

ashes, except that “A man who is clean shall gather up” (Num. 19: 9). Its blood is not dashed on the altar only “toward the front of the Tent of Meeting.”101 The priest lets a ritually unclean man gather the ashes. The ashes are to be placed in a clean place outside the camp. Those carrying the ashes are rendered unclean by the mere fact of carrying the ashes. The ashes are mixed with water and called “waters of purification.”102 Jewish law renders a person ritually unclean if he or she comes in contact with a dead person or happens to be in a tent when a person dies (Num. 19: 11, 14). Such a person who is ritually impure can be made pure if he or she washes and is sprinkled with the “waters of purification” on the third and seventh days after contact with the dead. On the eighth day the person is made pure. Ritually clean, this person who has been separated for seven days before the purification and made to be outside of the camp may now return to the camp.103 The significance of the sprinkling of the “waters of purification” on the seventh day is to “impress on the individual the need for strict adherence to the rules of the sanctuary and need for preparation” so the individual can avoid the kind of errors that Nadab and Abihu made.104 What does the Red Heifer Represent? The red heifer ritual is meant to atone for the worship of the Golden Calf. The red heifer represents the Golden Calf the Israelites, under the leadership of Aaron, made when Moses went to the mountain to get the Ten Commandments. In the Bible, the color red is associated with sin. The Exodus account tells us that while Moses was with YHWH the people were sinning against YHWH by engaging in sexual misconduct and worshiping idol. When Moses came down from the mountain and saw what the people had done, “he grinds up the golden calf, mixes it water, and makes the Israelites drink thereof.”105 When Numbers prescribes that the red heifer be burned, the burning is meant to recall the grinding of the golden calf. The ashes that are mixed with water equates to the drinking imposed by Moses.106 Before Aaron and his sons were inaugurated as High Priest and priests of Israel, they were ordered to stay in a Tent of Meeting for seven days. On the eighth day Aaron emerges to offer some prescribed animal sacrifices for himself and the children of Israel (Lev. 9: 1–4) and fire from the Lord consumed the offering (Lev. 9:24).107 We are told then that Aaron’s two oldest sons, Nabab and Abihu proceeded to make a “strange” and unauthorized incense and “fire from the Lord” came and struck them dead. Moses ordered their bodies to be carried out of the camp by two other Levites (Lev. 10:4), probably Mishael and Elzaphan. These two carriers became ritually unclean by reason of contact with the dead. Because they became ritually unclean, they could not celebrate the first Passover in the wilderness. Moses said to Aaron after his sons were dead that YHWH said he will he will be sanctified and memorialized by those near to him in the ritual of the red heifer.108 Thus, the prescription to burn the red heifer also “represents the burning of the wrongdoers, representative

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

81

Table 3.2 The Red Heifer Ritual The Red Heifer Puzzle The LORD said to Moses and Aaron: “This is a requirement of the law that the LORD has commanded: Tell the Israelites to bring you a red heifer without defect or blemish and that has never been under a yoke. Give it to Eleazar the priest; it is to be taken outside the camp and slaughtered in his presence. Then Eleazar the priest is to take some of its blood on his finger and sprinkle it seven times toward the front of the tent of meeting. While he watches, the heifer is to be burned – its hide, flesh, blood and intestines. The priest is to take some cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet wool and throw them onto the burning heifer. After that, the priest must wash his clothes and bathe himself with water. He may then come into the camp, but he will be ceremonially unclean till evening. The man who burns it must also wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he too will be unclean till evening. “A man who is clean shall gather up the ashes of the heifer and put them in a ceremonially clean place outside the camp. They are to be kept by the Israelite community for use in the water of cleansing; it is for purification from sin. The man who gathers up the ashes of the heifer must also wash his clothes, and he too will be unclean till evening. This will be a lasting ordinance both for the Israelites and for the foreigners residing among them. “Whoever touches a human corpse will be unclean for seven days. They must purify themselves with the water on the third day and on the seventh day; then they will be clean. But if they do not purify themselves on the third and seventh days, they will not be clean. If they fail to purify themselves after touching a human corpse, they defile the LORD’s tabernacle. They must be cut off from Israel. Because the water of cleansing has not been sprinkled on them, they are unclean; their uncleanness remains on them. “This is the law that applies when a person dies in a tent: Anyone who enters the tent and anyone who is in it will be unclean for seven days, and every open container without a lid fastened on it will be unclean. “Anyone out in the open who touches someone who has been killed with a sword or someone who has died a natural death, or anyone who touches a human bone or a grave, will be unclean for seven days. “For the unclean person, put some ashes from the burned purification offering into a jar and pour fresh water over them. Then a man who is ceremonially clean is to take some hyssop, dip it in the water and sprinkle the tent and all the furnishings and the people who were there. He must also sprinkle anyone who has touched a human bone or a grave or anyone who has been killed or anyone who has died a natural death. The man who is clean is to sprinkle those who are unclean on the third and seventh days, and on the seventh day he is to purify them. Those who are being cleansed must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and that evening they will be clean. But if those who are unclean do not purify themselves, they must be cut off from the community, because they have defiled the sanctuary of the LORD. The water of cleansing has not been sprinkled on them, and they are unclean. This is a lasting ordinance for them. “The man who sprinkles the water of cleansing must also wash his clothes, and anyone who touches the water of cleansing will be unclean till evening. Anything that an unclean person touches becomes unclean, and anyone who touches it becomes unclean till evening” (Numbers 19: 1–22).

of violating the rules of worship.”109 The use of the ashes of the red heifer for ritual purification is also “intended to recall for us the Nabad and Abihu event, and its lessons.”110 The ashes from the red heifer are also “prescribed to purify the vessels that had been captured in a war with the Midianites” (Num. 31: 21–24).111

82

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Is Red Heifer a Typical Purification Offering? The Red Heifer is not a typical purification offering. The blood of animal, which is typically offered on the altar in all purification offerings, is not offered on the altar. Rather, the blood is burned together with the rest of the animal. All who partake in this purification, beginning from the moment it is consecrated to the moment the ashes are burned, are rendered impure. The participants must not only cleanse themselves and their garments, they must also wait until evening before they can rejoin the people. A person who has “contracted corpse uncleanness is rendered pure by sprinkling with these very ashes mixed with water.”112 The washing is to remind them “that spiritual cleansing is not sufficient without personal hygiene.”113 According to Leviticus 16, the High Priest must bathe before entering the Holy of Holies. He must also bathe after completing the ritual sacrifice before he can put on his clothes and return to the people. The requirement for the second bathe is to ensure that the High Priest returns to the level of normalcy after encountering the sacred. “For him to put on his close and rejoin the people without such a rite would be an intolerable intrusion of the sacred into non-sacred realms.”114 The High Priest also straps on his shoulder the ephod (apron). The hoshen mishpat (breast plate) that he wears in performing the sin-offering bears the names of the 12 tribes of Israel. This is a demonstration of his love and responsibility for the Jewish nation. In the sacrifice of the Red Heifer, his vocation is, in fact, tied to the mystery of the red heifer. The high priest should be a model religious leader who is ready to relinquish the religious comfort of yeshiva (institutions or training ground for the study of the Torah, Talmud and Halakah) and forge his way into the community and become for the community a bright light that leads the way. “This is what God tells Moses when he sends him away from his Torah study – his unique rendezvous with the Divine at the time of the Golden Calf: ‘Get down from the supernal heights of Mount Sinai and go down to the errant Jews worshiping the Golden Calf; the only reason I bestowed greatness upon you, Moses, was for the sake of Israel; if your nation is sinning, what need have I of you?’”115 The Heart of the Paradox We now get to the heart of the paradox of the Red Heifer. Built into the nature of the enterprise of purifying the defiled is the fact that the purifier must be touched by some of the impurities. The people involved in the sacrifice are themselves defiled in the process of partaking in the sacrifice. The ashes used in the ceremony purify the defiled and defile the pure. A case of a substance with the capacity to purify simultaneously defiling those who are supposed to be pure.116 The Midrash tells us, based on Midrashic interpretation of Ecclesiastes 7: 23: “All this have I proved by wisdom: I said, I will be wise; but it was far from me;” that even King Solomon, the wisest of all people (I Kg. 5: 9–11), wrestled hard and long with the ritual and was unable to solve the mystery. Why does the person who administers ritual purification become spiritually

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

83

impure? Why does a person who touches a dead body become ritually unclean? There are several ways of resolving the paradox. Some have suggested that the answer lies in the fact that it is the soul that gives life to the body (see. Gen. 2:7, II Kgs 4:34, Job 33:4, Ez. 1:14). Others have also suggested that the very fact that in the ritual it is the mixture which purifies those who are defiled that also defiles those involved in the act of purifying, is intended to demonstrate the priest’s love for his people and his commitment to teach them the Torah. The priest must bless the nation out of love, even at the expense of his own life. If he truly loves his people, he must assume a new level of responsibility and sacrifice his own life to rescue his people from the agony of spiritual death.117 The priest not only has a unique vocation as a leader who loves his people, his specially made garb is meant to reflect this unique vocation. “The shoulder strap of his apron (ephod) and the breast plate (choshen mishpat) worn next to his heart bear the names of the 12 tribes of Israel, demonstrating his love and responsibility for the nation. and inscribed on the head plate placed on his forehead, which is the seat of the mind, are the words, ‘sacred unto the lord,’ expressing his commitment to teaching Torah and sacred living in accordance with God’s commandments.”118 A third view, which we will take as a middle ground, has been suggested by Baumgarten – that there are two overlapping ways of describing what takes place when something holy enters a realm in which it does not belong. “That event can be called ‘sanctification,’ as in Lev. 6:11 and 6:20. It can also be discussed in the terminology of defilement, as in the case of the Red Heifer.”119 Baumgartner argues that we understand impurity in this instance as deviance from the norm – in either of the two possible directions – and that once it is so understood then the paradox of the Red Heifer is readily resolved. Whether this argument is convincing or not, the internal contradictions in the ritual of red heifer of something that both purifies and contaminates seems irresolvable.120 In sum, Jews partake in the Red Heifer ritual, not because it is rational or logical, but because it is a divine command.121 The paradox of the ritual is evident in the fact that the very priests who are preparing this ritual offering are themselves defiled by this mere fact of their participating in it. “How can a substance with the capacity to purify the defiled simultaneously defile those who are pure?”122 Perhaps the enterprise of purifying the defiled and defiling the purified that is built into the Red Heifer ritual is to show that the purifier must be touched by the impurities of those they want to rescue.123

Conclusion The Jews are people whose identity were forged in the diaspora. Even in the face of the anomalies of Jewish identity created today by the contemporary Zionist movement, Jews today still accept a common understanding of the difference between the two – that is in the Diaspora the religious side of their existence, albeit anomalous, is dominant, and in modern Israel the national side of their identity is dominant.124 Paradoxically, it is possible among Jews today

84

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

to stand within the Jewish community of faith without sharing the Jewish faith.125 More interestingly, one of the things the Zionist founders did not do was make space for religious pluralism among Jews, making Jews today to be either orthodox or secular, by which the latter can either mean non-religious or anti-religious.126 This contrasts sharply with classical Judaism, as a unified religious-national community governed by the Torah. In classical Judaism there was pluralism within Judaism. Understanding the limitations of human intellect, classical Judaism was receptive to a number of theological positions, in so far as they do not lead to meaninglessness or Godlessness.127 For, classical Judaism has always rejected the either/or approach, affirming instead both/and through a recognition of pluralism.128 The pluralism is exemplified among its various sects, particularly the Pharisees and their disputants Sadducees, and even the Qumran sect on the matter concerning what constitutes proper worship of YHWH. While there was a legitimate unity among the Pharisees and the Sadducees-Qumran community, on the matter of Jewish identity, they still had a considerable disagreement regarding the Red Heifer as a ritual sacrifice. The former does not consider it a sacrifice while the latter think of it as a sacrifice.129 They disagree on wide range of things, including the manner of preparation of the ashes of the red heifer, the purification water, and other activities performed in the rite. While the Sadducees insisted that those who prepare the ashes must be completely clean and must in their purified state wait till sundown, the Pharisees do not think they had to wait till sundown.130 The disagreement between the two groups might not be unrelated to their disagreement “concerning the inclusion of the general public in the divine service in the Temple.”131 The primary goal of the Pharisees was to enable the general public to participate as extensively as they possibly can in the Temple life and religious worship of Israel. Ironically, this desire for wider participation in the Temple life occasionally led to its defilement.132 “It seems that in their determination that the red heifer is not a sacrifice, the Pharisee allowed non-priests to take an active part in the ritual of preparing the water of purification, and even in the sprinkling of the water on the impure.”133 The tussle between Pharisees and the Sadducees brings to mind Blaise Pascal’s famous quip – that to push piety to the point of superstition is to destroy it and to push orthodoxy to the point of religious purism is also to destroy it.134 In any event, the Red Heifer ritual is meant to recall Israelite idolatry while they were in Egypt (Ezekiel 20:7), a heinous crime in the eyes of YHWH that culminated in the worship of the Gold Calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. This ritual, which includes burning a crimson thread (Num. 19:6) signifies the mother cow expiating the sin committed through her offspring.135 Even Jacob had instructed his sons to cleanse themselves after discarding the idols they had with them (Gen. 35:2).136 In all, the Red Heifer is paradoxical in many ways. Even the Pharisees and Sadducees who disagree on many things agree on this paradox – that the red heifer ritual has a higher level of sanctity than non-sacred food, but is less holy than sacrifices.137 The Red Heifer paradox is, in essence, a representation of the Torah and points to the ultimate redemption that will be brought about when the Messiah comes. According to the Talmud, only nine red heifers have been

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

85

prepared in history. Moses prepared the first one and Ezra prepared the second and the seven others occurred between Ezra and the destruction of the Temple. The tenth red heifer will be prepared by the Messiah. Since the red heifer is the most mysterious of the commandments, when the Messiah comes, he will reveal the deep secrets of the red heifer.

Notes 1 Gerhard F. Hasel, Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate, 4th edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), ix; online: http://media.sabda.org/alkita b-2/PDF%20Books/00005%20Hasel%20Gerhard%20Old%20Testament%20Theology. pdf; accessed December 20, 2021. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 For contemporary examples of how Jewish identity emerges in the diaspora, see Alan Wolfe, At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora is Good for the Jews (Boston: Beacon, 2014). 5 Recent archeological findings are casting doubt on the truth of the biblical story. They seem to be suggesting that there is no conclusive evidence to support the biblical story that the Israelites were enslaved by their Israelite neighbors, which also cast doubt on their purported 40 years sojourn in the wilderness on their way to Canaan under the leadership of Joshua. Their alternative theory is that what we know as Israel might have been Canaanites who, having lived peacefully for centuries, took on a new identity as Israel when they were joined by a small band of Egyptian Semites. According to the theory, this new settlement might have provoked a clash with their Canaanite neighbors. Interestingly the Exodus story tells of “a mixed multitude” that left with Israel when they left Egypt (Ex. 12:38).The questions as to who the “mixed multitudes” are and how to reconcile the Exodus story with archeological findings is best left for biblical scholars to resolve. See Shaul Bar, “Who Were the ‘Mixed Multitude?’” Hebrew Studies, 49 (2008), 27–39; Teresa Watanabe, “Doubting the Story of Exodus,” Los Angeles Times (April 13, 2001), online: www.latimes.com/archives/la -xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50481-story.html; accessed February 7, 2022. 6 See J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith, “Introduction,” in Ethnicity, eds., J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6–7. See also Christos Karakolis, “Church and Nation in the New Testament: The Formation of the Pauline Communities,” St. Vladimir Theological Quarterly, 57 (2013), 361–80. 7 See Lawrence S Nesis, Who Is a Jew? Shalit v. Minister of Interior et al. The Law of Return (Amendment No. 2), 1970, 14–1, Manitoba Law Journal, 53, 1970; online: https://canlii.ca/t/swsz, accessed December 20, 2021. 8 See Rufeisen v. Minister of Interior (1962). 9 Moshe Machover, “Messianic Zionism: The Ass and the Red Heifer,” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, 71 (2020), 20–39. 10 Ibid. 11 Arthur J. Lelyveld, The Unity of Contraries: Paradox as a Characteristic of Normative Jewish Thought (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1984), 3. 12 Ibid., 17. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 6. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.

86 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Exploring Theological Paradoxes Ibid., 6–7. Ibid., 7. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., Ibid., 8. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 8–9. Cephas T. A. Tushima, “The Paradox of the New Testament Concept of unmerited Grace and Conditional Forgiveness in Mathew’s Gospel,” Africa Journal of Evangelical Theology, 30 (2011), 3–13. Ibid. Ibid. Charles R. Embry and Glenn Hughes, eds., The Eric Voegelin Reader: Politics, History, Consciousness (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017), 367. See Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, online: https://zork.net/~patty/pattyland/ kafka/parables/beforethelaw.htm; accessed April 5, 2020. Raphael Forshay, Derrida on Kafka’s ‘Before the Law,’” Rocky Mountain Review, 63 (2009), 194–206. Ibid., 197. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Aicha L. Messina, “’Before the Law’ or Before the Other: Rethinking the ‘Paradox of Sovereignty in Light of Levinas’s Torah of Life,” The New Centennial Review, 14 (2014), 79–98; referencing Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 181–220. Forshay, “Derrida on Kafka’s ‘Before the Law,’” 199. See Herman C. Waetjen, “The Dichotomization of the Christological Paradox in the History of Christian Thought and Critical Biblical Scholarship,” Hervormde Teologiese Studies, 37 (2001), 105–47. Ibid., 106; referencing Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), viii and 3–59. See John Goldingay, “Diversity and Unity in Old Testament Theology,” Vetus Testamentum, 34 (1984), 153–68. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 166. Martin Luther, Works of Martin Luther, vol. V (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1931), 222. Goldingay, “Diversity and Unity in Old Testament Theology,” 166. Lelyveld, The Unity of the Contraries, 9. See Frith Lambert, “The Tribe/State Paradox in the Old Testament,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 8 (1994), 20–44. Ibid., 20–21. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 23. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 24. Christopher Kam and Christian Bellenhumeur, “Untangling Spiritual Contradictions through the Psychology of Lived Paradox: Integrating Theological Diversity in the

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

87

Old Testament with Durand’s Framework on the Imaginary,” Journal of Religion and Health (October 4, 2019), no page numbers. Ibid. Ibid. Goldingay, “Diversity and Unity in Old Testament Theology,” 162. Ibid. See Robert Murray, “The Paradox of God’s Hiddenness and the Accessibility in St Ephrem,” New Blackfriars, 85 (2004), 158–62. Lelyveld, The Unity of the Contraries, 12. Kam and Bellenhumeur, “Untangling Spiritual Contradictions through the Psychology of Lived Paradox.” See also J. Kessler, Old Testament Theology: Divine and Human Response (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013). Lelyveld, The Unity of the Contraries, 16. Ibid. Ibid., 16–17. Goldingay, “Diversity and Unity in Old Testament Theology,” 166–67. Lelyveld, The Unity of the Contraries, 13. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 14. Kam and Bellenhumeur, “Untangling Spiritual Contradictions through the Psychology of Lived Paradox.” Ibid. See D. G. Springs, Two Old Testament Theologies, Studies in Biblical Theology, 2nd series, vol. 30 (Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson, 1974); D.G. Springs, “Two Old Testament Theologies: A Comparative Evaluation of the Contributions of Eichrodt and Von Rad to Our Understanding of the Nature of Old Testament Theology,” Society for Biblical Theology, 30 (1974), 11–33. Goldingay, “Diversity and Unity in Old Testament Theology,” 159–60. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 158. Ibid., quoting L.R. Bailey, Biblical Perspectives on Death (Philadelphia, PA: 1979), 97. Goldingay, “Diversity and Unity in Old Testament Theology,” 158. Kam and Bellenhumeur, “Untangling Spiritual Contradictions through the Psychology of Lived Paradox.” See D. Basinger, “Biblical Paradox: Does Revelation Challenge Logic?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 30 (1987), 205–213. See J. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1998) and R. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998). See Werner E. Lemke, “The Near and the Distant God: A Study of Jer. 23:23–24 in its Biblical Theological Context,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 100 (1981), 541–55. Ibid., 542. Ibid. Ibid., 551. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 554. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 554–55. Ibid., 555. Lelyveld, The Unity of Contraries, 4.

88

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

96 Stephen Newman, “Understanding the Mystery of the Red Heifer Ritual,” Jewish Biblical Quarterly, 43 (2015), 106–108. 97 Albert I. Baumgarten, “The Paradox of the Red Heifer,” Vetus Testamentum, XLIII (1993), 442–51. 98 Ibid. 99 Martin A. Greenberg, “The Red Heifer Ritual: A Rational Explanation,” Jewish Bible Quarterly, 25 (1997), 44–46, 44. 100 Newman, “Understanding the Mystery of the Red Heifer Ritual,” 106. 101 Hannan Birenboim, “Tevul Yom and the Red Heifer: Pharisaic and Sadducean Halakah,” Dead Sea Discoveries, 16 (2009), 254–73, 269. 102 Greenberg, “The Red Heifer Ritual,” 44. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 45. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., 46. 109 Ibid., 45. 110 Ibid., 46. 111 Rachel Harris, “The Ritual of the Red Heifer,” Jewish Bible Quarterly, 26 (1988), 198–200. 112 Baumgarten, “The Paradox of the Red Heifer,” 443. 113 Greenberg, “The Red Heifer Ritual,” 46. 114 Baumgarten, “The Paradox of the Red Heifer,” 446. 115 See Shlomo Riskin, “Parshat Hukat: The Red Heifer Paradox,” online: www.jpost. com/jewish-world/judaism/parshat-hukat-the-red-heifer-paradox-360685; accessed April 8, 2020. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. 118 Parshat Chukat, “The Paradox of the Red Heifer Ritual,” Baltimore Jewish Times, 26 (2015), 48. 119 Baumgarten, “The Paradox of the Red Heifer,” 445. 120 Harris, “The Ritual of the Red Heifer,” 198. 121 Chukat, “The Paradox of the Red Heifer Ritual,” 48. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Walzer, “The Anomalies of Jewish Identity,” 27. 125 Ibid., 37. 126 Ibid., 33. 127 Lelyveld, The Unity of Contraries, 10. 128 Ibid., 9. 129 Birenboim, “Tevul Yom and the Red Heifer,” 254. 130 Ibid., 260. 131 Ibid., 269. 132 Ibid., 270. 133 Ibid., 271. 134 Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, translated by Paule Simon, Sadie Kreilkamp, and Ernest Beaumont (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 20. 135 Newman, “Understanding the Mystery of the Red Heifer Ritual,” 106. 136 Ibid., 107. 137 Birenboim, “Tevul Yom and the Red Heifer,” 262 (see footnote 103).

Classical Judaism and the Paradox of the Red Heifer

89

Bibliography Bailey, L.R. Biblical Perspectives on Death. Philadelphia, PA: 1979. Bar, Shaul. “Who Were the ‘Mixed Multitude?’” Hebrew Studies, 49 (2008), 27–39. Basinger, D. “Biblical Paradox: Does Revelation Challenge Logic?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 30 (1987), 205–213. Baumgarten, Albert I. “The Paradox of the Red Heifer.” Vetus Testamentum XLIII (1993), 442–451. Birenboim, Hannan. “Tevul Yom and the Red Heifer: Pharisaic and Sadducean Halakah.” Dead Sea Discoveries, 16 (2009), 254–273. Chukat, Parshat. “The Paradox of the Red Heifer Ritual.” Baltimore Jewish Times, 26 (2015). Derrida, Jacques. “Before the Law.” In Acts of Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge, 181–220. New York: Routledge, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Embry, Charles R. and Glenn Hughes, eds. The Eric Voegelin Reader: Politics, History, Consciousness. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017. Forshay, Raphael. “Derrida on Kafka’s ‘Before the Law.’” Rocky Mountain Review, 63 (2009), 194–206. Goldingay, John. “Diversity and Unity in Old Testament Theology.” Vetus Testamentum, 34 (1984), 153–168. Greenberg, Martin A. “The Red Heifer Ritual: A Rational Explanation.” Jewish Bible Quarterly 25 (1997), 44–46. Harris, Rachel. “The Ritual of the Red Heifer.” Jewish Bible Quarterly, 26 (1988), 198–200. Hasel, Gerhard F. Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate, 4th edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991. Online: http://media.sabda.org/alkitab-2/ PDF%20Books/00005%20Hasel%20Gerhard%20Old%20Testament%20Theology. pdf; accessed December 20, 2021. Hutchinson J. and A.D. Smith. “Introduction,” In Ethnicity. Edited by J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kafka, Franz. Parables and Paradoxes. Online: https://zork.net/~patty/pattyland/kafka/pa rables/beforethelaw.htm; accessed April 5, 2020. Kam, Christopher and Christian Bellenhumeur. “Untangling Spiritual Contradictions through the Psychology of Lived Paradox: Integrating Theological Diversity in the Old Testament with Durand’s Framework on the Imaginary.” Journal of Religion and Health (October 4, 2019), no page numbers. Karakolis, Christos. “Church and Nation in the New Testament: The Formation of the Pauline Communities.” St. Vladimir Theological Quarterly, 57 (2013), 361–380. Kessler, J. Old Testament Theology: Divine and Human Response. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013. Lambert, Frith. “The Tribe/State Paradox in the Old Testament.” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 8 (1994), 20–44. Lelyveld, Arthur J. The Unity of Contraries: Paradox as a Characteristic of Normative Jewish Thought. Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1984. Lemke, Werner E. “The Near and the Distant God: A Study of Jer. 23:23–24 in its Biblical Theological Context.” Journal of Biblical Literature, 100 (1981), 541–555. de Lubac, Henri. Paradoxes of Faith. Translated by Paule Simon, Sadie Kreilkamp, and Ernest Beaumont. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987. Luther, Martin. Works of Martin Luther, vol. V. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1931.

90

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Machover, Moshe. “Messianic Zionism: The Ass and the Red Heifer.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, 71 (2020), 20–39. Messina, Aicha L. “’Before the Law’ or Before the Other: Rethinking the ‘Paradox of Sovereignty in Light of Levinas’s Torah of Life.” The New Centennial Review, 14 (2014), 79–98. Murray, Robert. “The Paradox of God’s Hiddenness and the Accessibility in St Ephrem.” New Blackfriars, 85 (2004), 158–162. Newman, Stephen. “Understanding the Mystery of the Red Heifer Ritual.” Jewish Biblical Quarterly, 43 (2015), 106–108. Ness, Lawrence S. “Who Is a Jew? Shalit v. Minister of Interior et al. The Law of Return (Amendment No. 2).” 4–1 Manitoba Law Journal, 53, 1970; online: https://canlii.ca/t/ swsz, accessed December 20, 2021. Ness, Lawrence S. “Who Is a Jew? Rufeisen v. Minister of Interior.” (1962). Manitoba Law Journal, 4 (1970). Online: https://canlii.ca/t/swsz, accessed December 20, 2021. Packer, J. Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1998. Rad, Gerhard Von. Two Old Testament Theologies. Naperville, IL: 1975. Reymond, R. A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998. Riskin, Shlomo. “Parshat Hukat: The Red Heifer Paradox.” Online: www.jpost.com/jew ish-world/judaism/parshat-hukat-the-red-heifer-paradox-360685; accessed April 8, 2020. Springs, D.G. Two Old Testament Theologies, Studies in Biblical Theology, 2nd series, vol. 30. Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson, 1974. Springs, D.G.Two Old Testament Theologies: A Comparative Evaluation of the Contributions of Eichmdt and Von Rad to Our Understanding of the Nature of Old Testament Theology.” Society for Biblical Theology, 30 (1974), 11–33. Tushima, Cephas T.A. “The Paradox of the New Testament Concept of unmerited Grace and Conditional Forgiveness in Mathew’s Gospel.” Africa Journal of Evangelical Theology, 30 (2011), 3–13. Walzer, Michael. “The Anomalies of Jewish Identity.” Lyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2010), 24–38. Waetjen, Herman C. “The Dichotomization of the Christological Paradox in the History of Christian Thought and Critical Biblical Scholarship.” Hervormde Teologiese Studies, 37 (2001), 105–147. Watanabe, Teresa. “Doubting the Story of Exodus.” Los Angeles Times (April 13, 2001). Online: www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50481-story.html; accessed February 7, 2022. Wolfe, Alan Wolfe. At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora is Good for the Jews. Boston: Beacon, 2014.

4

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

Logicians have a name for statements or utterances that on the surface seem like are truth-valued but in the end fail to be either unequivocally true or unequivocally false. They call this class of statements or utterances that have borderline attribution of vague terms semantic paradox.1 A good example is Russell’s paradox (also known as Barber paradox). The paradox goes as follows: In a small village, there is a barber who shaves all men who do not shave themselves. There are many other examples of semantic paradox, like the Epimenides (or Liar) paradox: Cretans are liars; and the Eubulidean paradox: This statement is false. Some semantic paradox, such as the Epimenides and the Eubulidean paradox, are also self-referential. The semantic/self-referential paradoxes have a common structure and an in-built logical impossibility (see Chapter 1) that cast doubt on their truth-worthiness. Some twentieth century logicians think of them as raising questions that threaten traditional modes of reasoning.2 It is for this reason that some think, at least with respect to the Barber paradox, that as a matter of empirical fact there is no such barber in the barber paradox.3 Some who have examined the Eubulidean and Epimenidean paradoxes also claim that there is falsity in both Eubulidean and the Epimenidean paradox. Still, not many logicians are ready to reject all semantic or self-referential statements because not all self-referential statements lead to contradiction.4 Some paradoxers use paradox to refute certain long-held traditional belief systems – that they are too simplistic to be true. Some also use paradox to draw attention to hypocrisy or lies that sometimes go unnoticed in religion. Though not a logician in the analytic tradition, Sigmund Freud sees self-referential statements to be contradictory when it comes to religion. He sees religion, Christianity especially, as a conundrum in the mold of the semantic paradoxes. He at times acts as if he is driven by the desire to unearth a logical impossibility in religion. He makes it clear that one of his goals is to showcase the falsity of Christianity. While there is no one universally accepted solution to the semantic paradoxes in the analytic tradition, logicians have different approaches to resolving various semantic paradoxes, such as the liar paradox. One approach is to make a distinction between levels of language – that “the language used to talk about some other language is considered to be on a higher level than the DOI: 10.4324/9781003299820-5

92

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

language talked about. They require that sentences asserting the truth or falsity of a given sentence be placed in a language at least one level higher than the given sentence.”5 Freud, whom I describe as a theological irrationalist, does not make this distinction in his approach to Christianity. In this chapter, I will use Freud as an example of a theological irrationalist because theological irrationalists, in general, dismiss faith, dogmatic truth, religious inferences and objectivity as myths, deliria, and incoherent and absurd notions. They are the theological counterparts of philosophical irrationalists (skeptics) who undermine reason from within by using methods of reasoning and argument that are generally accepted.6 Alan Weir has suggested that irrationalists (be they philosophical or theological) cannot be ignored because they are like “a species of intellectual kamikaze pilots or suicide bombers,.” and that to dismiss them on the grounds that their mission is suicidal and of no threat is to be complacently blind.7 Thus, I examine Freud and other theological irrationalists, not necessarily to find flaws in their arguments, but to generate from their critiques some valuable theological insights and paradoxes.

Freud’s Stance on Religion Is Christianity a lie? Freud and theological irrationalists certainly think so. A great deal of Freud’s psychology of religion is found in Totem and Taboo (1912–13),8 The Future of an Illusion (1927), and Moses and Monotheism (1939).9 It is also in these works that Freud concomitantly discusses his psychoanalytic theory. In taking up a discussion of religion in his psychoanalysis, Freud does not always take time to distinguish Judaism from Christianity. For his purposes, he does not find it necessary to do so.10 Even in a few instances where he unknowingly hints at a difference between these two Abrahamic religions, Freud still leaves the impression that Christianity is an evolutionary stage of the movement of religion, i.e., from its Egyptian polytheism phase to the Mosaic monotheism phase and to Christianity. His work Totem and Taboo is a collection of four essays that Freud had previously published as stand-alone pieces: 1) The Savage’s Dread of Incest; 2) Taboo and the Ambivalence of the Emotions; 3) Animism, Magic, and the Omnipotence of Thought; and 4) The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism. Applying his psychoanalytic technique to these treatises collected here as a book, Freud intends it to be a solution to the unsolved problem of the development of religion, art, and other societal ills. Some psychoanalytic theorists who find value in Freud’s project have used the argument in Totem and Taboo to suggest that the legends, folktales, and commentaries that have accreted around the Torah (Pentateuch in Christian terms) all parallel with great precision what Freud says about “primal crime” in Totem and Taboo. 11 They contend “that just as in Freud’s proposed story of the originating deed transforming us from animals to humans living in organized society, the leader of a band of oppressed brothers – Moses– murders the jealous tyrant – Pharaoh– who had enslaved them, and then proceeds to receive from a vastly greater but now immaterial and immortalized “father” – God– a set of laws that order proper human relations with divinely sanctioned binding

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

93

12

force.” Freud’s other work, Moses and Monotheism, is also a collection of essays previously published by Freud to prove both the Egyptian origin of Moses and the origin of monotheistic faith, which he again traces to Egyptian polytheism. Freud attempts to show in this work that “Magic and ceremonial, amulets and formulas dominated the service of these gods, as they did the daily life of the Egyptians.”13 Here Freud sees Christianity as a cultural regression of Judaism, His argument merits a lengthy quotation: The Christian religion did not keep to the lofty heights of spirituality to which the Jewish religion had soared. The former was no longer strictly monotheistic; it took over from the surrounding people’s numerous symbolical rites, re-established the great mother goddess, and found room for many deities of polytheism in an easily recognizable disguise, though in subordinate positions. Above all it was not inaccessible, as the Aton religion and the subsequent Mosaic religion had been, to the penetration of superstitions, magical and mystical elements which proved a great hindrance to the spiritual development of two following millennia.14 Freud’s main concern in Future of Illusion is the development and survival of Kultur (translated in English as “civilization” and “culture”). Kultur, for Freud, “expresses a broad concept of human life, which includes material, economic, social, and mental factors. The delicate interplay of these factors was thought by Freud to have a direct effect on the stability or otherwise of a civilization.”15 Freud contends that the human instinct for cannibalism, lust, and murder are some of the disrupting activities that derail a culture or civilization. In the face of these disruptive hostilities, psychology can play a vital role in maintaining the equilibrium necessary for a civilization’s survival, he argues. Conceiving religion in psychological terms, Freud thinks religious ideas play an important psychological function in society, speaking of them as the “most highly prized psychologically, because they are concerned with the matters which ultimately interest as well as perplex us in life.”16 It is in the context of reflecting on civilization and culture’s survival that Freud offers his celebrated view on religion, which is of course very reductionistic. He thinks religious ideas were invented because of the human need to make their helplessness tolerable. Human life is plagued by diseases and the painful reality of death. The fact that no medicine has been found to cure death, for him, shows that the forces of nature are against us. When Freud says religious ideas are an illusion, he means to say that they are motivated by human lofty wishes and that these lofty wishes foster belief in what is not real. “We may call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.”17 Freud argues that modernity is characterized by an ever-growing power of knowledge. He thinks some people seek this power in natural science and others seek it in religion. Speaking from his psychoanalytic standpoint, Freud claims that religion “has the weakest possible claim to authenticity.”18 He

94

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

locates the psychic origin of religion, which he says is a mental production,19 in the infantile helplessness of children which, for him, is typical of the Oedipal stage of development.20 He credits natural science for exposing the errors of religious ideas and thoughts.21 He claims that the “comparative method of research has revealed the fatal resemblance between religious ideas revered by us and the mental productions of primitive ages and peoples.”22 For Freud, the danger religion poses for culture far outweighs its benefits.23 He surmises that human beings invented the idea that everything that happens in this world is an expression of a superior (divine) intelligence as a way of making their helplessness tolerable. He thinks this is why the Judeo-Christian religion invented the myth of life after death – to fulfil their illusion that someday they will leave this brutish, nasty, and short life for a world where they will find love and happiness. Put in analytic terms, for Freud, the problem of Christianity is the problem of the liar paradox, a problem to which we shall return later.

The Problem of the Liar Paradox Paradox has been “suitably domesticable within Christianity.”24 Christianity, in fact, “canonized various moral paradoxes.”25 Within Christianity can be found some metaphysical and moral paradoxes.26 Christian paradoxes are as oxymoronic as they are orthodox. Christian paradoxes describe a Christian feeling that is deeply rooted in human nature.27 The Christian lives in a world created by God and yet separate from God. In a world created by God, intellectual and moral double meanings are habituated. The human person who live in a world created by God and yet separate from God could be viewed, therefore, as “a microcosmic set of intellectual, moral, and psychological contradictions.”28 The liar paradox, which Freud analogously equates with Christianity and uses to refute religious ideas, has been around for nearly two-and-a-half millennia.29 The logic of the liar paradox is interesting on many levels. Christians themselves find it intriguing because the ancient version of the paradox made its way into the New Testament. The author of the letter to Titus (which some correctly or incorrectly associate with the Apostle Paul), denounces the Cretans for their reputation as liars. The author, whoever the author might be, appeals to a statement made by a revered Cretan prophet who said, “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons” (Titus 1:12). The author then goes on to admonish Titus to “rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in faith” (Titus 1:13). This entry into New Testament Scripture makes the liar paradox even more interesting. The Cretan prophet who uttered the famous statement was identified as Epimenides of Knossos. Epimenides lived around the seventh century BC (see chapter one). The author of the letter to Titus’ allusion to the statement of Epimenides is the author’s way of showing his disdain and disregard for the Cretans. By referring to Epimenides as a “prophet,” the author is by no means according him the same status or authority as Israelites prophets. The author of the letter is merely using a historical tradition available to the author for rhetorical purposes.30 In saying the “Cretans are always liars, evil

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

95

beasts, lazy gluttons,” the emphasis is on the adverb “always.” It connotes a sense of “from time immemorial” and “through the ages” the Cretans have been known to be liars.31 What the liar paradox in the letter to Titus does is set up an antinomy between truth and falsehood and an antinomy between denial of faith (heresy/ apostasy) and adherence to sound faith (orthodoxy). The logician W.V. Quine who assumes that it was Paul who wrote the letter to Titus thought Paul might have missed the point of the paradox. In the letter, Titus is put on notice: “One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretans are always liars.” Quine thinks the paradox is untidy and has some loopholes that can be rectified with a little tinkering. Quine attempts to resolve the paradox this way: Maybe some Cretans, like Epimenides, were liars, and others were not. Or perhaps Epimenides was a liar who occasionally told the truth. “Either way it turns out that the contradiction vanishes.”32 In spite of Quine’s attempt to resolve the liar paradox, the liar paradox is not easy to resolve. If Epimenides spoke the truth about the Cretans being liars, he is himself a Cretan, therefore a liar. If he is a liar, what he says is untrue, therefore all Cretans are not liars. But Epimenides is a Cretan and what he says about Cretans being liars is true. Since he is a Cretan and they are all liars, what he says is untrue. Christianity is continually confronted with the Epimenides conundrum or the liar paradox. The critique of Freud and other theological irrationalists against religion at least validates this claim. The problem that Christianity is confronted with here is a problem of self-reference. As liars, the Christian Cretans stand in sharp contrast to God who cannot lie. As duplicity is part of the essence of the Cretans, trustworthiness and truthfulness are part of God’s essence.33 The British scientist and fiction writer, William F. Temple (1914–89), made popular an aphorism, which he used to indict the Church: “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, and sincerely regret that it does not at present exist.”34 In the sections that follow, I will explain what self-referential term “church” means with respect to the Christian self-understanding. I will probe whether the referent “church” should be conceived in Cretan-like (duplicitous) or God-like (truthfulness) way. Dialetheists tell us that the contradictions that paradoxes generate are not apparent, but real, and that we must embrace them.35 Graham Priest, the father of dialetheism, has suggested that we have to learn to handle systems with contradictions in them and that this must start with us relinquishing classical logic.36 His main contention is that classical logic errs in assuming that no statement can be both true and false at the same time. Attempting to correct this assumption, Priest chooses to call “paradoxical” any statement that is true and false,37 suggesting “that the subject of paradoxical assertions is one full of surprises.”38

The New Testament Church In his very informative article, “When Did the Church Begin?” D.A. Carson reasons that the question of when the church began is not uncommon among theological students and that people who pose the question often have a

96

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

theological agenda at the back of their mind. Carson, however, admits that beyond the ideological divide, the question still needs to be asked precisely because the answer the Bible provides on the question is ambiguous at best.39 He thinks that whichever way one chooses to answer the question, it becomes a kind of litmus test to a nest of other questions. “People from a dispensational heritage emphasize discontinuity between the covenants, and therefore commonly argue that the church begins at Pentecost; people from a covenanttheology heritage emphasize the continuity of the covenant of grace, think in terms of fulfilment of what was promised, and therefore argue that the ‘assembly’ of the people of God is one, and that therefore it is a mistake to argue that the church begins at Pentecost.”40 The only thing the Bible attests to with certainty is the idea of a progressive revelation from God’s people (Israelites) to the New Testament (N.T.) Church. It is on this basis that we can speak of similarities and significant differences between the Old Testament (O.T.) Israel and the N.T. church.41 Paradox is everywhere evident in the N.T. and in the Church. Although the word “church” (Greek ekklesia, literally “the called out ones”) is an N.T. expression, the word itself and the idea behind it derives from the O.T. This word, which Christians use to self-identify as a “gathering of people summoned,” is rooted in the Greek notion of ekklesia – a gathering or assembly of reputable citizens who meet regularly for shared responsibility and action on matters of common interest to the polis. The O.T. speaks of many instances where God instructs Moses, “Assemble the people before me to hear my words so that they may learn to revere me as long as they live in the land and may teach them to their children” (Deut. 4:10).42 The Gospel is equally full of paradoxes regarding these new people who are called out to be witnesses of Jesus. The Gospel writers present Jesus as declaring, in a thorough Jewish context, that he will build his church (Matt. 16:18). The Gospel writers make no bones about what Jesus had in mind – that whatever Jesus had in mind will include Gentiles as well (Matt. 28: 18–20).43 The first generation of Jesus’ followers, i.e., those who received instructions from him on how to exercise church discipline (Matt. 18: 15–20), including the Fathers of the Church, see the incarnation of the Son of God as the supreme paradox.44 This is not surprising because the human person to whom the Gospel is addressed is a living paradox.45 In chapter one we discussed the etymology of the word paradox – that it derives from the two Greek words “para” (contrary) and “doxa” (opinion), meaning something contrary to opinion. We noted how, for the Greeks, paradox can also mean something “strange,” “uncommon,” “wonderful,” “remarkable” or “unexpected.”46 The N.T. is the realm of the “uncommon,” the “wonderful,” the “remarkable,” and the “unexpected.” The early Christians, to the chagrin of their Jewish hearers, interpreted some important theophanies of the O.T., i.e., those ascribed to YHWH and those ascribed to angels, as anticipatory revelations of Christ. They interpreted the incarnation as the total and concrete manifestation of the theophanies that the O.T. says will be fulfilled through a descendant of David.47 In the light of these manifestations of

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

97

God, Christian theology, Orthodox theology especially, developed the language of theosis to denote the process of the transformation of the believer who is deified by God. Two N.T. books, i.e., the Gospel of Matthew and Paul’s letter to the Romans, remarkably begin with narratives of Jesus as a descendant of David. There “Davidic detail is the tip of an iceberg”48 of the N.T. interpretation of O.T. themes. It sets up the dialectical tension between messianic themes in the O.T. and the fulfilment of these themes in the N.T. An antinomy therefore emerges between the themes of continuity and discontinuity between the two Testaments. These themes would be developed further by the Patristics. The Greek Fathers, especially, interpret the relationship between the O.T. and the N.T. typologically, seeing the Mosaic rituals and laws as “types” that are fulfilled in Christ. In the view of the Fathers, once the fulfilment has been attained, to return to the “type” will be a setback and incongruous with the faith.49 Whereas the Jews had lived thousands of years, living out the Torah and performing ritual sacrifices in anticipation of the Messiah, the N.T. presents Jesus as a Jew – that he lived his life observing the Mosaic Law. The NT also interprets Jesus’ death and resurrection through the lens of the Jewish law – that Jesus saw himself as the fulfilment of the law. Whereas in the O.T., the Law was an identity marker, in the new law of grace that Jesus inaugurates, the love of God and love of neighbor are the new identity markers. They are not only the pinnacle of the Torah, they are also of greater value than the whole Jewish sacrificial system.50 Jesus’ followers emphasize that the righteousness of God as revealed in Christ is a manifestation of God’s covenant faithfulness. Paul, distinguishing between the works of the law and grace in Christ Jesus, rejects the works of the law as appropriate for justification in the new dispensation – that the Gentiles are not bound by the demands of the Torah (Gal. 2, 15–21; Rom. 1:16). Thus, henceforth, everyone must maintain their own identity because not only did Christ die for all (2 Cor. 5: 14–15), salvation is attained, not through the law but through faith in Christ Jesus.51 Perhaps it was this dialectic that exposits the paradox of God’s hiddenness and accessibility that the French Jesuit, Gaston Fessard (1897–1978) was trying to bring to bear in his dialectic of the Jew-Greek in which he held that the Jew and the Greek both met Christ; the Jew who had the Torah rejected Christ, but it was the pagan and idol worshipper Greek who was transformed from a member of the goyim to a member of the body of Christ.52 The early Christians not only embraced the paradox of God’s hiddenness and accessibility, it also culminated in the dialectic of apophatic (negative) and kataphatic (positive) theologies that were developed from Origen through Gregory of Nyssa to Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite and beyond.53 The tradition of mystical reflection, which the late fifth century to early sixth century Christian neo-Platonic thinker Pseudo Dionysius inaugurated, is beyond the scope of this work. But he and other Christian mystics draw attention to contradictions and contraries (the dialectic of being and nothingness) that put sharp focus on attentiveness to paradox.54 Pseudo Dionysius’s influence on Thomas Aquinas,

98

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Maximus the Confessor, Meister Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa cannot be overstated. Using a neo-Platonic philosophy to draw attention to the scriptural idea of God as creator, Pseudo Dionysus distinguishes God’s transcendence from God’s immanence in creation. Employing the metaphors of light versus darkness, Pseudo Dionysius speaks of God’s transcendence as “darkness,” since a great deal of it is unknowable, and God’s immanence as “light,” since aspects of who God is, is visible through creation. This was Pseudo Dionysius’s way of speaking of God’s transcendence-immanence as a paradoxical coincidence – that it is something beyond description and beyond the grasp of our limited knowledge. For Pseudo Dionysius, God is beyond all things capable of description and within all things capable of description.55 Pseudo Dionysius also explains that the convergence of God’s transcendence and immanence requires two different modes of theology that are in the end complimentary, i.e., apophatic (negative) and kataphatic (positive) theology. The two modes of theology are a logical outcome of the ways of grasping God’s transcendence and immanence. God’s transcendence requires a denial of any name for God and God’s immanence means that names drawn from created order for God apply to God inadequately.56 A dialectic again emerges, in which propositions about God are both asserted and denied.57 The dialectic produces a paradox. Paradox, for Pseudo Dionysius, alleviates cognitive dissonance.58 Cusa, a fifteenth-century admirer of Pseudo Dionysius, will expand this paradoxical coincidence and explain it as a coincidentia oppositorium. 59 Origen, on his part, interprets the O.T. as flesh of the text that hides spiritual realities. He speaks of the O.T. as belonging to simple-minded believers who cannot perceive the higher spiritual meanings of the text.60 He was perhaps alluding to those passages in the O.T. that present Yahweh as Israel’s God and one who is impassable. In contrast, the N.T. presents Jesus as one with God and ineluctably Jewish. If the God of the O.T. was impassable, what the GodJesus comes to show us is the nearness of God, particularly that God identifies with human suffering. Although the question whether God can harbor emotions, such as anger, jealousy, rage, and wrath, is still very much contested, in Christian theology at least, the idea of an emotionally impassible God is something alien to traditional Christianity.61 Christian theologians who have expressed shock at the horror of the holocaust, Jürgen Moltmann and Dietrich Bonhoeffer especially, find the idea that God can reside in a state of bliss while his people are led to the gallows rationally indefensible.62 Thus, when the early Church employed apophatic theology, it was a way to ensure that divine emotions are thought of in a manner that was God-befitting.63 When they spoke of God’s impassability, it was not to denote God as immobile, but rather to exclude from God emotions that are irrational, sinful, and overpowering. God is impassable meant for the early Church that such properties as immutability, aseity, simplicity, and transcendence belong properly to God. “These attributes as a whole insured that God’s emotions were acts of his grace rather than forced movements by the world. God’s life is not actuated by the world, but he reveals his emotions for the world. Divine emotions are expressions of God’s moral will.”64

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

99

Jesus’ activity in the world, his mission, and the joyful expectation of his return, are all couched in a language packed with paradox. One writer puts it thus: For all the signs of God’s activity in Jesus’ own life and words, in the end, one was still left waiting and hoping. Even the triumph of Easter left the agenda unfinished: Jesus may be installed in power by God’s own side in heaven, but life on earth continues much as before. So he will come again to complete his mission, calling evil to account and gathering the faithful into God’s eternal realm. This second coming, then, would differ dramatically from the first: he would come in power, in glory, and in triumph. None will escape his coming. The whole world – indeed, the whole universe – will take note.65 Nearly all the books of the N.T. are packed with paradoxes. In the Gospels, paradoxes are one of Jesus’s favorite instruments for sounding the call to repentance.66 Whenever Jesus uses paradox, he startles his listeners, shakes their presuppositions, and forces them to examine their lives in light of his puzzling statements.67 In the kingdom of God which he has come to inaugurate, there will be role reversals: The first will be the last and the last will be first (Matt. 20:16). Those who seek to save their lives will lose them and those who lose them will save them (Matt. 16:25; Luke 17:33). The humble are exalted, and the exalted are humbled (Matt. 23:12; Luke 14:11). Those who mourn will be comforted and those who grieve will be consoled (Matt. 5:4). The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the dead will be raised from the dead (Matt. 11:5). Paul even compounds the paradox further – that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom” (I Cor. 1:20). Christian mystical tradition in the mold of Pseudo Dionysius and John of the Cross will speak of these as the vertigo of self-contradiction inherent in Christian mysticism.68 Although there is no attempt here to delve into mysticism, it still needs to be stated that the vertigo of self-contradiction helps to eliminate the human tendency to over-value oneself. But what the mystery of Christian faith produces is a dissonance, a self-abnegation or even martyrdom of a sort that effects self-transformation.69 Parables and Paradox A parable is a story used to teach morals by means of an extended metaphor.70 The Prague born German novelist, Franz Kafka (1883–1924), has done a massive work on parables as an extended metaphor. His work, Parables and Paradoxes, poignantly places realism and fantasy in a dialectic tension. Kafka is renowned for having a Kafkaesque way of using parables and in a way that sheds light on mythical stories already known to his audience. He also creatively employs parable to retell ancient Israelite stories. Jesus employs parables in a way similar but somewhat different from Kafka’s. The parables of Jesus are profound in their religious meanings and “contain sufficient measurable elements to partially qualify as scientific discourse.”72 The parables of Jesus can be termed logical and existential paradoxes in that they superimpose religious and scientific

100

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Table 4.1 Kafka on Parables and Paradoxes Prologue of Parables and Paradoxes Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross over to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter. Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.71

truths on ordinary stories. For, “Jesus’ parables reveal the interplay of a world understood from the outside (akin to a ‘scientific’ world view) with a world perceived from within faith.”73 The otherworldly realities, which the parables of Jesus signify and the full meanings he assigns to them are to be grasped essentially in their paradoxical meaning. Remove the paradox, the parables of Jesus become ordinary moral stories void of true spiritual capital.74 This is precisely why many have argued that the inability to recognize the presence of paradox in Jesus’s parables can lead to misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the parables themselves. It can also lead to a communication of a “wrong truth” that leads to “a wrong way of life.”75 Markus Locker, who makes this argument so well, uses the parable of the wise and foolish virgins that is exclusively found in Matthew (Matt. 25:1–13) to buttress the point. Table 4.2 Jesus’s Parable of the Ten Virgins The Parable of the Ten Virgins (Matthew 25: 1–13) At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. 2 Five of them were foolish and five were wise. 3 The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. 4 The wise ones, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps. 5 The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep. 6 At midnight the cry rang out: “Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!” 7 Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. 8 The foolish ones said to the wise, “Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out.” 9 “No,” they replied, “there may not be enough for both us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.” 10 But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut. 11 Later the others also came. “Lord, Lord,” they said, “open the door for us!” 12 But he replied, “Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.” 13 Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

101

Locker explains how the parable points to the anxiety caused by the delay of the Parousia for the early disciples of Jesus who were expecting an imminent Parousia. He suggests that Matthew was alluding to the two ingredients believers must possess in awaiting Jesus’s return: faith and perseverance. On the surface level, he argues, one reads Matthew as suggesting that the believers be like the wise virgins who had the wisdom to know to bring enough oil in anticipation that the groom might be delayed and therefore, not to be like the foolish virgins whose foolishness led to their being excluded from the kingdom of God for the foolhardy of being empty handed at the time of the groom’s arrival. Locker dismisses this as a facial reading of the parable. For, if the moral of the story is to show that inclusion into God’s kingdom is predicated on the fact that one does not fall asleep in waiting for Christ’s return, all ten virgins after all fell asleep. The moral of the story, therefore, must lie elsewhere.76 The five wise virgins enter the village in a twofold way: 1) by bringing extra oil; and 2) by recognizing that sharing their oil with their foolish fellow maids would render thems incapable of meeting the bridegroom and joining the wedding. Thus, the measurable variable of wisdom rests in the fact of recognizing that sharing with others in need is as foolish as not being adequately prepared. In this way, the story reveals a simple proverbial truth: do not mind foolish neighbors, especially if you come to realize that you have not enough possessions to do so.77 Locker distills the argument further to uncover the paradox in the parable: the reasoning of the wise virgins is in direct opposition to the basic tenets of Christianity, which is unqualified sacrifice of self for others. The same evangelist who tells the story of the wise and foolish virgins represents Jesus as teaching that what we do to the hungry, the thirsty, the lonely, the naked, and the imprisoned fellow human beings we do unto Christ (Matt. 25:31–46).78 “According to this moral standard, i.e., love of God, we are judged to be worthy to enter into the kingdom of God. Not seeing Christ in others and not responding to the need of others around us will render us unworthy of heaven and surrender us to nothing less than hell.”79 Locker does not see a simple or definitive solution to the existential crisis of this enigmatic story. What he sees rather are the clues for resolving the riddle, which he says are embedded in the story of Christ: “not to worry about our survival (Matt. 6:25–34), to let go of possessions unfit for a life of faith (Matt. 19:16–22) and to be creative – like leaving 99 sheep behind unprotected to find the one that is lost (Matt. 18:13).”80

Christian Life and Paradox Christian life in a world of sin and grace is paradoxical. The Christian walks by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), and is expected to “see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). G.K. Chesterton noted that “Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free.”81 No prescience is required to know that to be a follower of Jesus is to renounce self (Mark 8:34), be a “servant of all” (Mark 9:35), and voluntarily relinquish the things of this world. Jesus was clear about the matter of discipleship by self-abnegation: “Whoever wishes to

102

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

save his life will lose it but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). The Epistles speak of friendship with this world as enmity with God (James 4:4). We see in these paradoxical statements how paradox “reverses old values, exalts the lonely, bring down the exalted, and turns poverty, suffering, meekness, ignorance and ostracism into virtues.”82 Simply put, in paradoxical terms, to win favor with God and enhance one’s status in the world comes with a willingness to exercise in this life what David Neville calls “social reversal.”83 Christian philosophical thinkers and writers, such as Soren Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis, who represent Christian life in ascetical terms, often speak glowingly of suffering as an essential ingredient of Christian life and practice. Christianity, like any religious transcendental quest, observes Kierkegaard, “aims at a person’s total transformation and wants, through renunciation and self-denial, to wrest away from him all that, precisely that, to which he immediately clings, in which he immediately has his life.”84 The demand that one must accept suffering is Kierkegaard’s way of calling the Christian believer to accept the Gospel’s call for negating the self as a way to absolute dependence on God. “Suffering is precisely the consciousness of contradiction.”85 Thus, in conceiving religious life in ascetical terms, Kierkegaard hinges Christianity on an individual’s subjective appropriation of a contradiction, mainly a life of suffering. If Religiousness A (generic religious life) entails suffering, Religiousness B (Christian faith) doubles that suffering for the reason that Christian commitment to faith defies reason.86 “Christianity, for Kierkegaard, requires the passionate embrace of a paradox and a way of life that confound the understanding.”87 Very much like Pseudo Dionysius for whom paradoxes about God do not end in cognitive frustration,88 Kierkegaard does not think of the paradox of the Christian life as ending in cognitive annihilation. The acceptance of suffering as a way of exercising social reversal in this life can and do take different forms. Its main expression is discipleship of service. Narry Santos’s study of authority and servanthood in the Gospel of Mark illuminates this point. In other not to be too detailed, I will limit myself only to the examples Santos draws from the prologue of Mark. He shows how the paradoxical nature of the prologue is seen in Mark’s juxtaposition of authority-servanthood, which the evangelist represents in the figure of John the Baptist and Jesus – two men of authority who serve and are submissive to God. The study shows how Mark deliberately employs this rhetorical device to challenge his audience to depart from the accepted norm that servanthood is incompatible with authority.89 The life of John the Baptist is a clear example of how servanthood is compatible with authority. Santos argues that Mark represents the Baptist’s authority in four main ways: he is the messenger who prepares the way for the Lord as prophesied by Isiah the prophet (Mark 1:2–3); he is the voice in the wilderness sent to proclaim baptism of repentance (Mark 1:4); his message elicits positive response from people from “the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem” who came to him for baptism and confession of sins (Mark 1:5); and the Baptist wore a garb that associates him with the prophetic order of the O.T.90 This man of authority who fulfils the scriptural message of Isaiah, delivers God’s message of

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

103

baptism and repentance, had overwhelming response from the Judeans and people of Jerusalem, and is associated with the great prophet, Elijah, stuns his audience by proclaiming: “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” (Mark 1:7–8)91 Here we see in Mark what Santos calls “the jolting paradox of authority and servanthood.”92 The juxtaposition is intended by the evangelist to shock the reader. The second authority-servanthood paradox Santos presents is that of Jesus. Jesus, the authoritative powerful one who is mightier than John submits himself to be baptized by John, i.e., the same John who recognizes his inferiority to Jesus. The same Jesus who will baptize with Holy Spirit and fire submits himself to be baptized by just water.93 Again, Mark’s goal, as Santos distills it, is to encourage his audience “to follow with great gusto the exemplary model of the one mightier than John.”94 By showing that the true authority results in service, Mark shows how the two antithetical motifs of authority and servanthood can be held together in a healthy tension. One of the motifs is to force the reader to examine their own values to see if they are in line with Jesus’ values.95 Jesus’ instruction to his disciples is that they “must be perfect, just as your heavenly father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48), yet he knew that they were sinners always in need to be forgiven of their trespasses (Matt. 6:12). The community of John notes that “whosoever is begotten of God does not sin… He cannot sin because he is born of God” (I John 3:9) and still acknowledges that “If we say we that have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us” (I John 1:8). The apostle Paul was also caught in this dialectical tension between perfection and imperfection, holiness and sin. He acknowledges that he has yet to become perfect (Philippians 3:12), but pressing on toward the goal: “let us therefore, as many as are perfect” have this attitude of perfection (Philippians 3:15). Christians, as a body of believers, are enjoined to “be like the holy one who called you, be holy yourselves in all your behavior” (I Peter 1:15) even though among them are sinners. The challenge of the Christian life is how to understand and embrace these paradoxes that are the hearts and center of the New Testament and living them. The letter of James, the first of the seven Catholic epistle (the others are I and II Letters of Peter, I, II, and III John, and Jude), instructs Christians to consider it a great joy when they encounter trials because “you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance” (James 1: 2–3). A person who doubts will not receive anything from the Lord because “the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed about by the wind( James 1:6). James stresses the ambrivalent power of the tongue: with it we bless God and with it we curse those who are made in the image and likeness of God. The tongue is

104

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

for the writer of this epistle, therefore, like the rudder of a ship and a fire that destroys a great forest (James 3:1–12). “Does a fountain send forth from the same hole sweet and bitter water?” (James 3:11).

Paradox and Soteriology Earlier in the chapter we stressed how the N.T. idea of “church” (ekklesia=assembly or gathering) did not emerge in a vacuum and how it is rooted in the O.T. idea of the Assembly of God’s people who gather together to hear God’s word. The newly elected deacon, Stephen the firs martyr of the Christian church, was savvy to know that the Israelites who were gathered in the wilderness were an “assembly” of God. He called them the “church” in the wilderness (Acts 7:38). The author of the anonymous letter to the Hebrews also uses a similar typological language to depict Jesus as singing praise to God (Hebrews 2: 12). Here the author (whom we are not sure is Paul because of differences in language, style, imagery and theology to other Pauline letters) is quoting an O.T. text, “In the assembly I will sing your praise” (Ps. 22:22) and giving it a typological meaning of “church: “96 In the same way that the N.T. idea of church derives from the O.T. notion of assembly of Israelites gathered to hear the word of God, the N.T. conception of holiness is also rooted in the O.T. idea of qodesh, to be “set apart” from the common or profane. Since holiness is something that belongs exclusively to God, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isaiah 6:3), vessels and buildings used in the worship of God are meant to be “set apart.” The same applies to people who come to God. Thus, to sanctify or be made holy is to be taken out of the sphere of the profane and be set apart and introduced into the divine or sacred sphere.97 The N.T. writers consciously maintain the paradox in their soteriology. “Believers have been sanctified, yet they must be exhorted to be holy. Their sanctification is entirely the work of God, yet holiness, like love and peace, are objectives toward which the saints should strive.”98 Paul especially considers the Christian believer to be a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). The old self enslaved to sin and subject to decay has “decisively and irrevocably died through baptism; the believer thereby shares in the death of Christ.”99 Paul’s theology of grace will be the linchpin of Christian soteriology. Although he is insistent that Gentile Christians do not need circumcision to be saved because the Law is no longer a marker for the Christian life, Paul is still mindful of his own Jewish identity. He lists his own profile as follows: an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, circumcised according to the demands of the Law, a Hebrew born of Hebrews, and a dedicated and blameless Pharisee in the observance of the Law (Phil. 3:5–6). But at the same time he also recognizes that his illustrious Jewish profile no longer has any bearing on his new identity as a Christian. He sees his new identity as having been redefined in the light of knowledge of Christ Jesus. Righteousness is no longer from the Law but from faith in the Lord Jesus.100 The binary Paul created between the Law and Grace will be further expanded by Luther and the reformers. In Freedom of a Christian, 101 a work that aptly captures Luther’s stance on what it means to be a

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

105

Christian in the world, Luther employs the paradox of soteriology that Paul used in his letter to the Corinthians in which Paul stated: “I am free in all things and have made myself a servant of everyone” (1 Cor. 1:9). Luther creatively uses this paradox to come up with his own two-fold duties of a Christian: “A Christian person is a free sovereign, above all things, subject to no one. A Christian is a dutiful servant in all things, subject to everyone.”102 These dual duties of the Christian: a free lord of all things and is subject to no one; a dutiful servant in all things and is subject to everyone, constitute the gospel of freedom, which Luther claimed he discovered and which he further elaborated in other works. The discovery of the gospel of freedom was, for Luther, transformational that he had to model it. He began by changing his name from Luder (meaning “bait” or “scoundrel”) to Luther (derived from the Greek/Latin “Eleutherius,” meaning “the free one”).103 It is helpful to put Luther in perspective so we can better appreciate the freedom of the Christian, which he speaks glowingly about. In his opposition to Judaism, Paul did emphasize that because Christ had delivered us from the curse of the law, the Christian is made righteous by God on the ground of grace received by faith. But it is not only from the law that Christ delivers us, he also delivers us from the sin of the flesh and the powers and principalities of this world. The freedom the Christian enjoys from this double deliverance (curse of the law and enslavement of the flesh) comes solely from faith in Christ. Luther accepts wholeheartedly this Pauline notion of double deliverance, asserting that the source and origin of Christian freedom is God in Christ. But he is also quick to add that the Christian freedom, which the believer enjoys, has implications – to engage and serve Christ in others. It is only when the believer properly understands the divine origin and implications of their freedom that the person can “sin boldly” and “believe more boldly.104 Another paradox! Since the Reformation, the doctrine of unmerited grace has dominated Reformation theology. Reformation theology has “isolated the justification of the sinner as the heart of the Christian message and insisted that the believer remained a forgiven sinner to the end.”105 Karl Barth writes, following his interpretation of the same Pauline texts that Luther relied on for his idea that grace is unmerited and undeserved, “Scripture teaches that what unites man with God is, from God’s side, his grace.”106 Some Christian thinkers have taken to waging an all-out assault on “miserable sinner Christianity” that they think Reformed theology espouses.107 There is after all, they argue, a stringent requirement of works even in Paul’s notion of justification. More recently John Milbank has suggested that Aquinas and Luther have “essentially the same” doctrine of justification and that it was Luther’s adherence to nominalism and its univocal tendency that prevented him from seeing the Thomist paradox of a righteousness that is entirely supernatural and yet at the same time ours, since it is our deification.108 The validity of this argument need not detain us here. The notion of stringent requirement of works in Paul’s idea of justification supports, at least, the argument for a paradoxical reading of these texts. Regardless of whether one agrees with Luther and the Reformed theology that developed after him, it is hard not to

106

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

see in Scripture the grace-merit tension. The paradoxical juxtapositions of grace and works, justification and merit are not unique to Paul. Even in the Gospel of Matthew, which is rarely cited as a grace-merit tension Gospel, there is a number of parables that speaks to this issue, like the parable of the kingdom (Matt. 13) and the parable of the vineyard workers (Matt. 20:1–6).109 The LawGospel antithesis is as old as the question of the nature of the relationship between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.110 Our goal all along has been to tease out the binaries created by the New Testament writers regarding Law and Grace. The binaries place in contrast grace-merit, holiness and sinfulness, the old self and the new self, walking in the dark and walking in the light, perfection and imperfection. There is a paradoxical polarity between the completeness of Christian deliverance and the incomplete transformation in the lives of Christians.111 Christians are enjoined to wait patiently for the Parousia. For “with the Parousia of Christ comes that which is perfect. Until then, the victory which he has won remains incomplete within history.”112 It is in keeping with these polarities that the early Christians saw themselves as a people set apart. They did not intend to build a Christian society, but only separated themselves as far as possible from a world which was passing away (I John 2:17). They saw their citizenship to be, not of this world, but of the world to come.113 But while remaining in this world they must not be idle either. In keeping with this idea of not to be idle while waiting for Christ’s return, Paul worked as a tentmaker (Acts 18:3). He rebuked all idlers and busybodies (II Thessalonians 3:11ff). Christians are enjoined to “avoid stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and futile” (Titus 3:9). While having their gaze in heaven, Christians have to live out the Christian virtues in this world: “We toil, working with our own hands; when we are reviled, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure.” (I Corinthians 4:12).114 The kingdom of God they were expecting is both inaugurated and yet to be realized. The kingdom that has been inaugurated has been dealt a violence by the rulers of this world. The kingdom that is yet to be inaugurated, though a kingdom of peace, is associated with violent imageries (cf. Apocalypse) and “expectation of violence.”115 An anonymous 1st-century CE letter employed paradox to sum up the attitude expected of Christians: There is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all of the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland but for them their homeland, wherever it might be, is a foreign country … They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all, but all persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many. They are totally destitute, but possess an

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

107

abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do, they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then, they rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life.116 In the face of these binaries and dualities, the Christian must still heed Nietzsche’s warning that antithesis is “the narrow gate through which error is fondest of sneaking into the truth.”117 Wisdom lies in maintaining a balance between these dualisms. Was not the whole point of Kierkegaard’s “existential thinking” to help the person of faith go beyond the subject-object dualism?118 Does the Paradox of the Church Mirror Russel and Gödel Paradox? The very notion of “church” is self-referential . The founder of mathematical logic, Gottlob Frege, argued that words not only designate their referent, they also express what they mean to designate. The word “church” today might mean different things to different people – a holy place of worship, a community of comfort, and a preserver of tradition and civilization. But what is undeniable is that each of these meanings has a self-referential connotation. Because there are multiple ways of approaching the Church, there are plethora of approaches to studying this self-referential term. The theoretical approaches that have been explored by researchers include, but not limited to, paradoxical narratives that focus on missionality, post-coloniality, racial equality, sexual orientation, and violence.119 These approaches to the study of the Church hint at Russell’s antinomy (see chapter one). Two crucial words in the Russell’s antinomy are “class” and “member.” What we call “church” has a class of leadership and a class of multitudinous members who belong to it. It is by these two sets of classes that the term church itself becomes definable. The N.T. speaks of “church” as a body with many members (Rom. 12: 5–10; I Cor. 12: 22–27). The church of the N.T. came into existence as a dialectic antithesis to O.T. Israel. The O.T. church, from the time of Moses through the prophets and up to its formal establishment in the Davidic dynasty, was centralized in a geography, ethnic lineage, Sabbath worship, and professional priesthood. In other words, worship of Yahweh was centralized in the Temple in Jerusalem, membership in this kingdom was limited to lineage of Abraham, Sabbath day worship was the hallmark of what it means to be a Jew, and the Levitical priesthood was an exclusive professional guild.120 The N.T. church provides an antithesis – centralized in Christ, but decentralized in geography, ethnicity, form of worship, priesthood, and other forms of organization.121 “As a spiritual entity, the church is centralized in the Head, Jesus Christ, unified by the indwelling Holy Spirit, sent into every part of the world, communion for all peoples, manifest in local churches, acknowledging every day (ultimately) alike, and affirming the priesthood of every believer.”122 For this reason, the N.T. was always from the very beginning a church even before the early followers of Jesus knew it. Herein lies one of the many paradoxes of the church. Although

108

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

N.T. churches were organized along different lines, depending on local circumstances and culture, what the church is by nature ought to have been reflected theologically in the Spirit-generated functions of the local churches, whether or not these local communities knew it.123 “The missio Dei as God’s creative, graceful movement toward humankind provides the metanarrative for why both the Old Testament Israel and the New Testament church exist.”124 The Second Vatican Council’s conciliar documents, particularly Lumen Gentium, characterizes the Church as a mystery. To invoke Russell’s paradox of sets, the Church belongs to a class of sets that can be legitimately considered a mystery. But paradox in all its effectiveness precedes De Ecclesiae mysterio. It is the paradox proper to the Church that introduces us to its mystery.125 Frege said of the linguistic expressions “morning star” and “evening star” that while they refer to the same planet, the things they reference are certainly different. Similarly, paradox and mystery are linguistic expressions that help our quest to understand the self-referential term “church,” but they refer to different aspects of the church. At the heart of the church is a paradox that is at once precious and precarious. Its members need to keep it in balance because a perversion can take different odd turns.126 In a nutshell, the Church cannot escape both the Gödel and the liar paradox. Gödel proved that every deductive system is either incomplete, in that it misses a relevant truth, or bankrupt, in that it proves a falsehood. Gödel’s proof is related to the liar paradox, which is a pseudomenon in that it can yield a falsehood version.127 It was the falsehood version that Freud latched on to with respect to his views on religion, Christianity in particular. The paradox of the Church is such that it can yield a truth version of itself, remaining true to its divine mission. It can also yield a false version of itself, if in moral bankruptcy it descends low to the trappings of human frailty.

Conclusion The liar paradox hangs unwittingly on the neck of the Church. The question whether Christianity is a lie is itself a paradoxical question. Regardless of Freud’s motive for wanting clarity, the desire for clarity and lucidity about human experiences and things we believe in are a necessary part of human intelligibility. The French philosopher and atheist, Albert Camus (1913–60), once suggested that we would all be dishonest if we deny that we would rather have clarity and lucidity regarding the nature of reality and things pertaining to our human existence.128 Although a theological irrationalist like Freud, the difference between Freud and Camus, however, is that Camus ( an atheist like Freud), knew not to be too hasty in piecing together the puzzles of human reality.129 Freud thought he could solve the puzzle of human reality if he can prove the falsity of general religiousness. He took upon himself the task of “helping the masses of the people” not to believe in God. He also thought the masses will not only inevitably realize that Christianity is a lie, they will also “infallibly” discover it on their own, “even if this work of mine were not published.130”

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

109

Our reason for posing the Freudian question in logical terms is not to prove that Freud was wrong, but to show why the puzzle of the Christian life cannot be hurriedly pieced together. What the Freudian question has done is provide us a way for probing the various ways that Christianity might be thought of as paradox. In An Uncertain Certainty, Graham Burton, using the work of the philosopher James Olthius, contends that the world is too complex, contradictory, enigmatic, flawed with folly and pride, and scarred by ignorance and pride for anyone to think they can come up with an easy solution to the world’s puzzle. Buxton suggests that we need to learn “to live with uncertainty, with mystery, ambiguity and paradox.”131 Burton, more or less, was affirming what psychologists have long called the Tolerance of Ambiguity – that we find a way to process information about ambiguous and complex world-realities when confronted with one.132 One of the values of paradox is that it opens up an avenue for comprehending complex world realities and can even become for us a tool for processing information on complex matters. To return to the enigma of Christianity that Freud thought was lie, Acts 11:26 tells us that it was at Antioch that the disciples of Christ were for the first time called Christians. The irony of the Acts story is that it was not the Christians themselves that chose the name. Rather, it was the enemies of Christians who saw that they were living by a creed and a code that stem from an understanding of who Jesus Christ is and was for them that chose to call them Christians. This can be translated to mean that the early Church was living out the truth of what they professed and believed. Hence, the name. The French Jesuit, Henri-Marie Joseph Sonier de Lubac (1896–1991), one among the many to articulate in a systematic way the idea of the Church as paradox, realized that the conclusion that the Church is a real paradox cannot be avoided when one looks at the contrasting history, succession of changes, developments, crises, and metamorphoses the church has gone through since its inception.133 Lubac noted that even as the contemporary world tends towards uniformity, a great distance or abyss seems to separate Christian communities in different countries in both their mentalities and the ways of speaking about the faith.134 Lubac reckons that the Church has not always lived up to its mandate as a force of unity in a fragmented world and sympathizes with those who might think that professing Catholicism today can be a mark of division.135 What the self-referential term Church represents is precarious and is involved in a tension that suggests a paradoxical understanding. The universality of the Church must be balanced with its particularity: the one and the many; the local and the universal. It cannot be “too open or closed, too high or low, too authoritarian or flexible, too conventional or contemporary, too individualistic or corporate.”136 The precariousness of the church and the conflict of opposites in the tension expose a contradiction and a loophole, like the kind of ambiguity we find in the liar paradox or paradox of Epimenides. Lubac, who has done an extensive work articulating the notion of Church as paradox also sees in the Church a conflict of

110

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

opposites. He makes a case for how the Church must embrace within itself things that which ordinarily would be considered incompatibles: I am told that she is holy, yet I see her full of sinners. I am told of her mission to raise man above earthly cares, to remind him of his heavenly vocation, yet I see her endlessly busy with the temporal things of this earth, almost as if she wished to install us permanently here. I am assured that she is universal, as open as intelligence or divine charity, yet so often her members, as if under some compulsion, huddle together in closed enclaves, just like human beings everywhere. She is called immutable, the reliable lynch-pin in the chaos of history, and yet look now! – under our very eyes, the rapidity of her renewal in our time alarms many of her own members.137 Lubac thinks it appropriate that the paradox of the Church be at the service of paradoxical humans. The Church “espouses its characteristics with all the attendant complexities and illogicalities – with all the endless contradictions that are in man.”138 These make the Church more adaptable to the exigencies of humankind. Lubac notes further that when we speak of the Church, we speak of an entity that is at once human (a product of the earth) and divine (a gift from above). As a product of the earth, the Church consists of members, many of whom have been wounded in their nature and oriented towards the past. As a divine gift, these members tend towards the future and are elated in hope of a future-looking orientation.139 The Church is multiform and yet one. She is universal and yet possesses the capacity to absorb every culture. She wants its members to be open “and yet she herself is never fully open.”140 How is one to understand the real nature of the Church? Lubac thinks that the essence of the Church cannot be truly captured even with analogies, for the profundity of Church is beyond the reach of natural intelligence. He thinks that the most self-definition of what the Church is “is still in the cul-de-sac of mystery.”141 At any length, Lubac speaks of the Church as a community and likens it to a mother. “The Church is our mother she gives us Christ. She brings about the faith of Christ in us.”142 This mother-church has a tripartite division. a) The Institutional Church: These, according to Lubac, are the teaching or hierarchical church “that holds the keys confided to her by the Lord.”143 b) The Living Church: What Lubac calls the living church are those active (e.g. laity) and contemplative (e.g. monastics) members of the church who are working, praying, remembering, searching, believing, hoping, and performing a number of innumerable tasks that link the visible members (i.e., church on earth) of the church with its invisible members (church in heaven).144 c) The Secret Army: Lubac calls this the humble people close to God. They are loyal to the church even to the point of self-sacrifice. They perform their task “without thought of revolt or even reform, always taking the road that

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

111

ascends despite a fallen nature that beckons elsewhere, testifying in silence to the continuing fecundity of the gospel and to the already present kingdom.”145 Essentially what Lubac is doing with the tripartite division of the Mother Church is point to a range of spiritual gifts that exist in the Church. The Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 12–14 enumerates the range of these gifts and suggested how they are to be recognized and used in the service of the Church. Paul’s enumeration of various gifts of the believers and how they are to be used is an anticipation of Lonergan’s differentiation of consciousness. Paul expects the Church to follow his own example and become all things to people, communicating the gifts God has endowed the Church to various brands of common sense.146 Jesus envisioned a unity (John 17:21). Yet the church has for long been divided along various confessions of faith, opening up in the church dichotomies of “a real and an ideal unity.”147 The church has not really followed Paul’s lead of being different things to all people and that is why some people view the Church differently, depending on how they use this self-referential term. Some of those who see the Church negatively as “conservative,” “anti-gay,” “antichoice,” “violent” and “illogical” think they can still love Jesus without loving the Church. There is no denying that one can possibly love Jesus without loving the Church is an absurd dichotomy.148 Again, it evokes the liar paradox that the church seems incapable of escaping. The logician Quine says of the liar paradox that “something of the paradox can be salvaged with a little tinkering.”149 How the Church does this tweaking with respect to ambiguities of its own self-understanding remains to be seen.

Notes 1 Vann McGee, “Ramsey’s Dialetheism,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley ArmourGarb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 276–91. 2 See James D. Carney and Richard K. Scheer, Fundamentals of Logic (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 150. 3 Lawrence Goldstein, “The Barber, Russell’s Paradox, Catch-22, God and More: A Defence of a Wittgensteinian Conception of Contradiction,” in The Law of NonContradiction, 295–313. 4 Alan Ross Anderson, “St. Paul’s Epistle to Titus,” in The Paradox of the Liar, edited by Robert L. Martin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 1–11. 5 Howard Kahane, Logic and Philosophy (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1973), 314. 6 Alan Weir, “There Are No True Contradictions,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 385–417. 7 Ibid. 8 See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, translated by A.A. Brill (London: Routledge, 1919). 9 See Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, translated by Catherine Jones (London: Hogarth Press, 1939). 10 R. T. Herbert, Paradox and Identity in Theology (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press. 1979), 37. 11 See Robert A. Paul, Moses and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud’s Myth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996) and Robert A. Paul, “Yes, The

112

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Exploring Theological Paradoxes Primal Crime Did Take Place: A Further Defense of Freud’s Totem and Taboo,” Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 38 (2010), 230–49. Paul, “Yes, The Primal Crime Did Take Place,” 230. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 24–25. See also Peter Schafer, “The Triumph of Pure Spirituality: Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, 9 (2002), 381–406. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 139–40. Margaret M. Yee, “Sigmund Freud’s The Future of An Illusion,” Modern Churchman, 27 (1985), 38–42. Ibid. Sigmund Freud, The Future of An Illusion, translated by W.D. Robson-Scott (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), 27. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 40–42. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 67–68. Ibid., 62. Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1966), xii. Ibid., 31. See Ralph Venning, Orthodox Paradoxes: Theological and Experimental, Or a Believer Clearing Truth by Seeming Contradictions, 6th edition (London: Rothwell, 1657). Colie, Paradoxica Epidemica, 32. Ibid. Greg Littmann and Keith Simmons, “A Critique of Dialetheism,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 314–35. Paul S. Jeon, To Exhort and Reprove: Audience Response to the Chiastic Structures of Paul’s Letter to Titus (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 51. Ibid., 52. See Willard Van Orman Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1966), 8. Jeon, To Exhort and Reprove, 52. I.T. Ramsey and N. Smart, “Paradox in Religion,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes 33 (1959), 195–232. Littmann and Simmons, “A Critique of Dialetheism,” 314. Graham Priest, “The Logic of Paradox,” Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8 (1979), 219–41. Ibid. Ibid., 240. D. A. Carson, “When Did the Church Begin?” Themelios, 41 (2016), 1–4. Ibid. J. Scott Horrell, “Freeing Cross-Cultural Church Planting with New Testament Essentials,” Bibliotheca Sacra, 174 (2017), 210–25. Carson, “When Did the Church Begin?” 1. Ibid., 1–2. Henri De Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, translated by Paule Simon, Sadie Kreilkamp, and Ernest Beaumont (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 8. Ibid. Narry F. Santos, Slave of All: The Paradox of Authority and Servanthood in the Gospel of Mark (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003), 3. See Robert Murray, “The Paradox of God’s Hiddenness and the Accessibility in St Ephrem,” New Blackfriars, 85 (2004), 158–62.

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

113

48 Thomas L. Brodie, The Birthing of the New Testament: The Intertextual Development of the New Testament Writings (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2004), 206. 49 See James B. Wallace, “New Testament Studies and the Orthodox Church,” Religious Studies Review, 45 (2019), 11–18. 50 David J. Neville, “Moral Vision and Eschatology in Mark’s Gospel: Coherence or Conflict?” The Journal of Biblical Literature, 127 (2008), 359–84. 51 Christolos Karakolis, “The Church and Nation in the New Testament: The Formation of the Pauline Communities,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 57 (2013), 361–80. 52 See Gaston Fessard, De l’Actualité historique (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1960), 40–52. 53 Murray, “The Paradox of God’s Hiddenness and the Accessibility in St. Ephrem,” 158. 54 See Pseudo Dionysius, The Complete Works, translated by Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987). 55 Matthew Bagger, The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 32. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Wallace, “New Testament Studies and the Orthodox Church, 13. 61 John B. Song, “An Exploration of Novatian’s Hermeneutic on Divine Impassibility and God’s Emotions in Light of Modern Concerns,” Journal of Reformed Theology, 6 (2012), 3–23, 3. 62 Ibid., 4. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 23. 65 As cited in Neville, “Moral Vision and Eschatology,” 371. Quoting John T. Carroll, “The Parousia of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts,” in The Return of Jesus in Early Christianity, edited by John T. Carroll, et.al. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2000), 6. 66 Robert P. Maloney, “An Upside-Down Sign: The Church of Paradox,” America, 177 (November 22, 1997), 7–11. 67 Ibid. 68 John of the Cross, The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, translated by Allisson E. Peers (Westminster: Newman Press, 1964). 69 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 39–40. 70 See Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 107. 71 See Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, online: https://zork.net/~patty/pattyland/ kafka/parables/parables.htm; accessed April 5, 2020. 72 Markus E. Locker, “And who shaves God? Nature and role of paradoxes in ‘science and religion’ communications: ‘A case of foolish virgins,’” Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 1 (2009), 187–201. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 196. 76 Ibid., 197. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 198. 80 Ibid.

114

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

81 See Slavoj Zizek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 39. 82 Santos, Slave of All, 1. 83 Neville, “Moral Vision and Eschatology,” 367. 84 Soren Kierkegaard, The Gospel of Suffering, translated by A.S. Aldsworth and W.S. Ferrie (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1955), 36. 85 Ibid., 483. 86 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 26. 87 Ibid., 27. 88 Ibid., 33. 89 Santos, Slave of All, 3. 90 Ibid., 64–65. 91 Ibid., 66. 92 Ibid., 57. 93 Ibid., 68. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 272. 96 Carson, “When Did the Church Begin?”, 1. 97 Clarence T. Craig, “Paradox of Holiness: The New Testament Doctrine of Sanctification,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, 6 (1952), 147–61. 98 Ibid., 153. 99 Karakolis, “Church and the Nation in the New Testament,” 372. 100 Ibid., 372–73. 101 See Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” in Luther’s Spirituality, translated and edited by Philip Krey and Peter Krey (New York: Paulist Press, 2007). 102 Ibid., 70. 103 Jonathan Linman, “Exploring Paradoxical Christian Freedom in 2017,” The Living Pulpit (Summer 2017), 12–14. 104 Ibid., 13. 105 Craig, “Paradox of Holiness,” 153. 106 See Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1983), 164. 107 See R. Newton Flew, The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology (London: Oxford University Press, 1994). 108 John Milbank, “The Last of the Last: Theology, Authority and Democracy,” Revista Portuguessa de Filosofia, 58 (2002), 271–98. 109 For more on the matter of grace-merit in the Gospel of Matthew, see Cephas T.A. Tushima, “The Paradox of the New Testament Concept of unmerited Grace and Conditional Forgiveness in Mathew’s Gospel,” Africa Journal of Evangelical Theology, 30 (2011), 3–13. 110 Ibid., 9. 111 Craig, “Paradox of Holiness,” 155. 112 Ibid., 154. 113 Ibid., 157. 114 Ibid., 159. 115 John J. Collins, “The Zeal of Phinehas: The Bible and the Legitimation of Violence,” The Journal of Biblical Literature, 122 (2003), 3–21. 116 As cited in Maloney, “An Upside-Down Sign: The Church of Paradox,” 11. 117 Roger Hazelton, “The Nature of Christian Paradox,” Theology Today, 6 (1949), 323–35. 118 Ibid., 327. 119 See Stephen Joubert, “Invited into the Markan Paradox: The Church as Authentic Followers of Jesus in a Superhero Culture,” Hervormde Teologiese Studies, 75 (2019), 1–8.

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

115

120 Horrell, “Freeing Cross-Cultural Church Planting with New Testament Essentials,” 218. 121 Ibid., 211–12. 122 Ibid., 219. 123 Ibid., 212. 124 Ibid., 213. 125 Henri de Lubac, The Church: Paradox and Mystery, translated from the French by James R. Dunne (New York: Alba House, 1969), 2. 126 See Barry L. Callen, “The Precarious Church Paradox and the National Association of the Church of God (Anderson)” Wesleyan Theological Journal, 53 (2018), 101–12. 127 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 19. 128 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 20. 129 John Haught, Mystery and Promise: A Theology of Revelation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993), 57. 130 Freud, Future of Illusion, 68–9. 131 Graham Buxton, An Uncertain Certainty: Snapshots in a Journey from “EitherOr” to “Both-And” in Christian Ministry (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 8. 132 See Adrian Furnham and Tracy Ribchester, “Tolerance of Ambiguity: A Review of the Concept, It’s Measurement and Applications,” Current Psychology: A Journal for Diverse Perspectives on Diverse Psychological Issues, 14 (1995), 179–99. 133 Lubac, The Church, 1. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., 2. 136 Callen, “The Precarious Church Paradox and the National Association of the Church of God,” 101. 137 Lubac, “The Church,” 2. 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid., 3. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid., 5. 143 Ibid., 4. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 146 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 14, Method in Theology, edited by Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 306. 147 Ibid., 338. 148 Joubert, “Invited into the Markan Paradox,” 2. 149 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 8–9.

Bibliography Anderson, Alan Ross. “St. Paul’s Epistle to Titus.” In The Paradox of the Liar, 1–11. Edited by Robert L. Martin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. Bagger, Matthew. The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Brodie, Thomas L. The Birthing of the New Testament: The Intertextual Development of the New Testament Writings. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2004.

116

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Buxton, Graham. An Uncertain Certainty: Snapshots in a Journey from “Either-Or” to “Both-And” in Christian Ministry. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014. Callen, Barry L. “The Precarious Church Paradox and the National Association of the Church of God (Anderson)” Wesleyan Theological Journal, 53 (2018), 101–112. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. Carroll, John T. “The Parousia of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts.” in The Return of Jesus in Early Christianity. Edited by John T. Carroll, et.al. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2000. Carney, James D. and Richard K.Scheer, Fundamentals of Logic. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Carson, D.A. “When Did the Church Begin?” Themelios, 41 (2016), 1–4. Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Collins, John J. “The Zeal of Phinehas: The Bible and the Legitimation of Violence.” The Journal of Biblical Literature, 122 (2003), 3–21. Craig, Clarence T. “Paradox of Holiness: The New Testament Doctrine of Sanctification.” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, 6 (1952), 147–161. Dionysius, Pseudo. The Complete Works. Translated by Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. Erickson, Millard J. Christian Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1983. Fessard, Gaston. De l’Actualité historique. Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1960. Freud, Sigmund. The Future of An Illusion. Translated by W.D. Robson-Scott. London: Hogarth Press, 1962. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. Translated by A.A. Brill. London: Routledge, 1919. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. Translated by Catherine Jones. London: Hogarth Press, 1939. Furnham Adrian and Tracy Ribchester. “Tolerance of Ambiguity: A Review of the Concept, It’s Measurement and Applications.” Current Psychology: A Journal for Diverse Perspectives on Diverse Psychological Issues, 14 (1995), 179–199. Goldstein, Lawrence. “The Barber, Russell’s Paradox, Catch-22, God and More: A Defence of a Wittgensteinian Conception of Contradiction.” in The Law of NonContradiction: New Philosophical Essays, 295–313. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Hazelton, Roger. “The Nature of Christian Paradox.” Theology Today, 6 (1949), 323–335. Herbert, R.T. Paradox and Identity in Theology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Horrell, Scott J. “Freeing Cross-Cultural Church Planting with New Testament Essentials.” Bibliotheca Sacra, 174 (2017), 210–225. Jeon, Paul S. To Exhort and Reprove: Audience Response to the Chiastic Structures of Paul’s Letter to Titus. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. Joubert, Stephen. “Invited into the Markan Paradox: The Church as Authentic Followers of Jesus in a Superhero Culture.” Hervormde Teologiese Studies, 75 (2019), 1–8. Kafka, Franz. Parables and Paradoxes. Online: https://zork.net/~patty/pattyland/kafka/pa rables/parables.htm; accessed April 5, 2020. Kahane, Howard. Logic and Philosophy. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1973. Karakolis, Christolos. “The Church and Nation in the New Testament: The Formation of the Pauline Communities.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 57 (2013), 361–380. Kierkegaard, Soren. The Gospel of Suffering. Translated by A.S. Aldsworth and W.S. Ferrie. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1955.

Christianity and the Liar Paradox

117

Linman, Jonathan. “Exploring Paradoxical Christian Freedom in 2017.” The Living Pulpit (Summer 2017), 12–14. Littmann. Greg and Keith Simmons, “A Critique of Dialetheism.” In The Law of NonContradiction: New Philosophical Essays, 314–335. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall and Bradley Armour-Garb. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Locker, Markus E. “And who shaves God? Nature and role of paradoxes in ‘science and religion’ communications: ‘A case of foolish virgins.’” Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 1 (2009), 187–201. de Lubac, Henri. The Church: Paradox and Mystery. Translated from the French by James R. Dunne. New York: Alba House, 1969. de Lubac, Henri. Paradoxes of Faith. Translated by Paule Simon, Sadie Kreilkamp, and Ernest Beaumont. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987. Luther, Martin. “The Freedom of a Christian.” In Luther’s Spirituality. Translated and edited by Philip Krey and Peter Krey. New York: Paulist Press, 2007. Maloney, Robert P. “An Upside-Down Sign: The Church of Paradox,” America, 177 (November 22, 1997), 7–11. McGee, Vann. “Ramsey’s Dialetheism.” in The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays, 276–91. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley ArmourGarb. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Milbank, John. “The Last of the Last: Theology, Authority and Democracy.” Revista Portuguessa de Filosofia, 58 (2002), 271–298. Murray, Robert. “The Paradox of God’s Hiddenness and the Accessibility in St Ephrem.” New Blackfriars, 85 (2004), 158–162. Neville, David J. “Moral Vision and Eschatology in Mark’s Gospel: Coherence or Conflict?” The Journal of Biblical Literature, 127 (2008), 359–384. Newton, Flew R. The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology. London: Oxford University Press, 1994. Paul, Robert A. Moses and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud’s Myth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Paul, Robert A. “Yes, The Primal Crime Did Take Place: A Further Defense of Freud’s Totem and Taboo.” Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 38 (2010), 230–249. Priest, Graham. “The Logic of Paradox.” Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8 (1979), 219–241. Quine, Willard Van Orman. The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1966. Ramsey, I.T. and N. Smart. “Paradox in Religion.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volumes, 33 (1959), 195–232. Santos, Narry F. Slave of All: The Paradox of Authority and Servanthood in the Gospel of Mark. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003. Schafer, Peter. “The Triumph of Pure Spirituality: Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.” Jewish Studies Quarterly, 9 (2002), 381–406. Song, John B. “An Exploration of Novatian’s Hermeneutic on Divine Impassibility and God’s Emotions in Light of Modern Concerns.” Journal of Reformed Theology, 6 (2012), 3–23. Tushima, Cephas T. A. “The Paradox of the New Testament Concept of unmerited Grace and Conditional Forgiveness in Mathew’s Gospel.” Africa Journal of Evangelical Theology, 30 (2011), 3–13. Venning, Ralph. Orthodox Paradoxes: Theological and Experimental, Or a Believer Clearing Truth by Seeming Contradictions, 6th edition. London: Rothwell, 1657.

118

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Wallace, James B. “New Testament Studies and the Orthodox Church.” Religious Studies Review, 45 (2019), 11–18. Weir, Alan. “There Are No True Contradictions.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays, 385–417. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Yee, Margaret M. “Sigmund Freud’s The Future of An Illusion.” Modern Churchman, 27 (1985), 38–42. Zizek, Slavoj, John Milbank, and Creston Davis. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.

5

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

Theological paradox is a rich and variegated area of theological activity. Even the very word paradox sounds paradoxical.1 We have demonstrated in the previous chapters that paradox exists in thought and reality and that paradox is everywhere evident in human affairs. In so doing, we determined that paradox is by no means the same as dilemma, notwithstanding that some dilemmas take the form of paradox and vice versa. Situational dilemmas are a common feature of life. When dilemmas and paradoxes appear in symbolic forms, they capture our attention. When they occur in real-life situations, they demand even more attention. Plato provides a good example of this in the paradox of the court, a formidable example of conundrum posed by paradox. It is also known as the Protagoras paradox or the Counter Dilemma of Euathlus. The paradox is a 5thcentury BCE Athenian classic. Protagoras was the teacher of Euathlus. Euathlus, studying under Protagoras, wanted to become a lawyer. But he was not able to pay the required fees. So he had an agreement with Protagoras, according to which Protagoras would train him but will not receive payment until Euathlus won his first case. When Euathlus finished his study he delayed going into practice, leaving Protagoras unpaid. Frustrated at not being paid, Protagoras brought a suit against Euathlus, hoping to recover the fees. It then happens that Euathlus first case is now this suit by Protagoras (his teacher).2 From Protagoras’s perspective, if Protagoras won the case, then the decision of the court would be that Euathlus has to pay him. If, however, Protagoras lost the case, Euathlus has won his first case and therefore has to pay Protagoras, according to the terms of their contract. Protagoras reasons that either way, “he has to pay me.” But from Euathlus’s perspective, if he won the case, he does not have to pay Protagoras because the decision of the court is that he does not pay. If, however, Euathlus lost the case, he will not yet have won his first case, and therefore, according to the terms of the contract with Protagoras he does not have to pay. So Euathlus reasons, either way “I do not have to pay.” In the two reasonings between the master and the teacher, we see contradictory conclusions. It is for this fact that great thinkers have attempted a mastery of paradox and have tried to fuse it with their philosophical thoughts. Theologically, even the scriptures are full of such dilemmas and paradoxes. The man Jesus Himself was a living paradox.3 In the way it is used in religion DOI: 10.4324/9781003299820-6

120

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

and understood in theological discourse, paradox can entail any or a combination of multiple elements of the following five tropes: i “Both-and” preposition: Paradox does not take an either-or form. It often takes a both-and form. The both-and approach makes us aware that the two antithetical sides of the proposition have equal weights, such that each side of the paradox is incomplete and false without the other.4 ii Tension or conflict situations: Paradoxical statements always inevitably involve tension or conflict. The tension-conflict is the element by which the mind is first troubled.5 iii Surprise-wonder encounters: As a supplement to both-and propositions and tension-conflict, paradoxical statements contain elements of surprise and wonder. It produces a sense of awe and ambivalent emotion that are intended to elicit humility.6 iv Rhetorical or stylistic form: Paradox is a style of rhetoric. Its intent is to demonstrate achievement of human intelligence. In ancient times, rhetorical paradox was designed as epideixis (in Latin laudes or laudationess)– to show case the skill of an orator and arouse the admiration of the audience.7 How far early this intellectual exercise began is still a guessing game. But its appearance in the works of the sophist Gorgias (Encomium of Helen and Encomium of Palamides), whether genuinely written or attributed to him, as well as its appearance in Gorgias’ own contemporaries, Isocrates (Praise of Thersites) and Polycrates (Praises of Mice and Pebbles), shows how far early the rhetorical devise has been recognized.8 As a literary form, the ancient rhetorical paradox has an in-built duplicity and with a difficult balance to maintain.9 The use of paradox in both rhetoric and theological discourse is always intentional. It is a calculated attempt to alter language in order to attract attention, secure emphasis, and illuminate a hidden truth. In the Renaissance, for example, some humanists, like the German poet and satirist who later became a follower of Martin Luther, Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523), wrote works like Nemo (1518), a comic poem that satirizes the princes and the papacy and contributed to the second volume of Epistolae Obscurorum Vivorum [Letters of Obscure Men] (1515–17) in which he used creative language to attack monastic life and practices. There is also the Dutch humanist, Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), who wrote Encomium Moriae [In Praise of Folly] (1509) to satirize religious superstition and attacked European and Church practices. v Requisite demand for audience: For the four elements (enumerated above) to be appreciated, there must be an audience. “Participation of the audience requires that the one using paradox make certain assumptions about the audience’s values, which would then be questioned, undermined or overthrown by means of a paradox.”10 Hutten and Erasmus were masterful at these.

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

121

Methodological Consideration and the Appeal of The Jesuit Henri de Lubac In the preface to his highly praised work on paradox, Roy Sorensen notes that it is true that mathematicians characterize prime numbers as their atoms, since all numbers can be analyzed as products of the primes, but that he regards paradoxes as the atoms of philosophy because they constitute the basic points of departure for disciplined speculation.11 The same can be said of Christology – that paradoxes are atoms of Christology. Central to the Christian message is the doctrine that the Second Person of the Trinity became man (incarnation) and that in him there is a union of two natures: divine and human. The challenge posed by this doctrine has led to the suggestion that Christology falls neatly into two broad divisions – that the first is concerned with the truth of the two juxtaposing propositions: Christ is God and Christ is man; and that the second is concerned with investigating the mutual compatibility of these two propositions.12 In addition, the doctrine raises problems on many levels, chief among which is how to reconcile divine immutability with the changes that are integral to being human: being born, growing, ageing, being nailed to the cross, and dying.13 These challenges or difficulties, which are not easy to resolve, are at the heart of the argument opponents of Christianity cite as contradiction. The opponents of Christianity work with a notion of contradiction that relies on direct appeal to notions of truth and falsity, something that Patrick Grim has called a semantic notion of contradiction.14 In the next chapter we will examine in detail the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC), also known as the Law of (Non) Contradiction. This principle that goes back to Aristotle and which for long time went unchallenged, is now being contested by dialetheists. In the meantime, it suffices to say that Grim, who has weighed in on how to understand or approach PNC, distinguishes four different approaches to contradictions: first, a semantic approach, a second approach that characterizes contradictions in terms of their form (synaptic), a third approach to contradictions in terms of assertions and denial (pragmatic), and a fourth approach that is ontological.15 So, there are indeed varieties within PNC. Grim uses this to argue that a distinction between full contradictions and mere contraries is admissible in all four approaches to contradiction.16 As will be made clearer in the next chapter, dialetheism, which defines itself in opposition to PNC, also shows a similar variety within its ranks.17 The classical problem of Christology is not framed in the relation of logical sequence that tells you what follows from what and what arguments are logically superior. Rather, the classical problem of Christology is framed thus: What is the ontological connection between the Logos and the human existence of Jesus of Nazareth?18 In their attempt to answer the question, the early Church applied many titles to Jesus. The Swiss New Testament scholar, Oscar Cullman, has grouped these titles under following four rubrics: Christological titles that refer to the earthly work of Jesus, Christological titles that refer to the present work of Jesus, Christological titles that refer to the future work of Jesus, and

122

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Christological titles that refer to the preexistence of Jesus.19 The fluidity of these titles and the interpenetration of one cluster to another reveal both the antinomy and paradox of the faith of the early disciples. Take for example, Jesus the High Priest is the same Jesus who is a Carpenter; Jesus the Second Adam is the same Jesus the Savior; He is also the Son of Man and at the same time God. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to do an exegetical and philosophical analysis of these terms. I have done this elsewhere.20 What I want to allude to here is how the paradoxical nature of these titles, some of which conflict with each other, reveal a paradox the early Church tapped into. Athanasius tried to generate a theological thinking or paradox that brings all these antinomies together in his argument against the Arians – his so-called method of double account: “He was ever God, and is the Son, being the Father’s Word and Radiance and Wisdom and that afterwards for us He took flesh of a Virgin, Mary Bearer of God, and was made man.”21 A strict adherence to logical sequence can constrain acceptance of the doctrine of the God-man that touches deeply on the mystery of the incarnation. How is what Jesus is in his ontological reality related to what Jesus is soteriologically for us? Put differently, is Jesus God because the Church experiences and confesses him as God or the Church experiences and confesses him as God because he is God (Rom. I:4; 10:9; I Cor. 12:3). The juxtaposition of experience with confession of faith has troubled theologians over the centuries. It is at the heart of the debate whether Christology ought to begin from above or from below and which is the best starting point of Christology. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rudolph Bultmann, and Paul Tillich all have their theories and all give primacy to the soteriological element. For Wolfhart Pannenberg, Christology does not begin from the faith of the community, even though experience might be regarded as a genuine starting point. Pannenberg himself adopts a Christology from below where he begins with an examination of how the historical man Jesus of Nazareth is related to God and uses experience to ground the confession of Jesus as God. At the same time we know that human experience is prone to deception and therefore cannot be the basis of indubitable argument. The apostle Paul fought the illusion of the Corinthian Gnostics on this matter.22 This is why Pannenberg insists that Christology must investigate what Jesus was before we can recognize what Jesus is for us today.23 Exposing further the weaknesses of the approach that gives primacy to soteriology, Pannenberg writes: Table 5.1 Cluster of Christological Titles of Jesus Christological Titles that refer to the earthly work of Jesus

Prophet, Suffering Servant, Rabbi, Carpenter, High Priest

Christological Titles that refer to the present work of Jesus Christological Titles that refer to the future work of Jesus Christological Titles that refer to the preexistence of Jesus

Second Adam, Lord, Prophet, Savior Messiah, Son of Man, High Priest Logos-Word, Son of God, Wisdom, and God

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

123

Aren’t we dealing much more with projections of human yearning for redemption and deification, human striving for assimilation to God, human obligation to satisfy for sins that have been committed, human experience of steadfastness in failure, in the recognition of one’s own guilt, and-most clearly in recent Protestantism-with projections of the ideal of perfect religiosity, perfect morality, pure personality, radical trust in the form of Jesus? Isn’t it merely that men’s yearnings are referred to Jesus, personified in him? Kant has expressly spoken of how Jesus is a model for the idea of moral perfection. Such a statement is not very far distant from Feuerbach’s thesis, that all religious conceptions are merely projections of human needs and wishes in an imaginary upper world.24 This does not mean that what Jesus was should be separated from what Jesus is, and that is exactly what Pannenberg is trying to suggest. It is only after investigating what Jesus was and knowing what Jesus is for us today that we can have a secure ground for not separating the two. In Grundzuge der Christologie, Pannenberg makes an assertion that seems like a paradox – that God’s revelation comes indirectly through history, but that a full comprehension of the content of that revelation will come only at the end of history. In other words, what we know of God in history pales in comparison to what we will know at the eschaton because it is at the eschaton that we will have full comprehension of who God is.25 Thus, for Pannenberg, Jesus “‘has meaningfulness for us, only in so far as this meaningfulness is intrinsic’ to him and to his history. ‘The soteriology must follow from the Christology and not vice versa.’”26 Not all modern theologians cut their teeth in the starting point of Christology. Some choose rather to exploit the multivalent meanings paradox can generate in Christology. One of these theologians is the French Jesuit and a prominent member of the ressourcement movement, Henri de Lubac (1896–1991). Lubac’s theology stems from an epistemology that accepts as a given, paradox and mystery.27 He approaches paradox as a way of understanding the relationship between nature and the supernatural. His paradox scheme forbids privileging one over the other. Lubac has in fact been described as “a master of paradox,”28 at least in Catholic circles. He teases out in several works the paradox of Christian faith. He envisions the Church as both a paradox and a mystery. When he speaks of the Church as paradox, he means that the Church is something that inclines towards mystery and yet remains mundane. When he speaks of the Church as a mystery, he means that the Church is an entity that in its ultimate depths are beyond us and yet reveal God to us.29 Following eminent logicians of his century, Lubac adopted the line of reasoning that paradoxes are propositional statements that do not defy logic. Paradoxes, for him, are not only inviolable, they also maintain “the simultaneity of the one and the other.”30 Citing multitudinous examples in both ecclesiology and Christology, Lubac inevitably concludes that paradoxes “do not sin against logic.”31 He insists that while the laws of logic remain inviolable, they escape the domain of paradox.32

124

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Lubac concentrates on how the Gospels are full of paradoxes. Paradoxes are, for him, the means “by which the mind is at first troubled.”33 He takes time to distinguish between two types of paradox: the paradox of mere expression (as when one exaggerates in order to lay emphasis) and real paradox. There is here an antimony: one has a truth that upsets us and the other balances it out. “The second truth does not restrict the first, but only places it in the proper perspective.”34 Paradoxical truth is not limited to one plane, Lubac insists. This was why Jesus and Paul never tried to explain their uses of paradox. “They feared a foolish interpretation less than one which would debase the truth and deprive it of its heroism.”35 Lubac is in essence suggesting that Jesus Christ is the proto-paradox. His line of reasoning is in accord with that of the Fathers of the Church for whom the incarnation is the supreme paradox.36 Consider, for example, the case of Tertullian who noted famously: “The Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed because it is absurd (ineptum). And he was buried and rose again; the fact is certain because it is impossible (impossibile).37 This famous Tertullian paradoxa will be thoroughly discussed in the next chapter.

Christian Poetic Imaginations One of the best contemporary theological treatises on Christology as paradox is by the American Jesuit, Edward Oakes (1948–2013). The title of his book, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy, 38 captures the depth of the paradox he intends to convey. Oakes sees Christological paradox as both an enigma and a dilemma. At the very beginning of the book, he asks: “How can the infinite become finite without losing its infinity? Can such a question be meaningfully posed without lapsing into hopeless contradiction?”39 Oakes wonders how the verb “to be” (to become), which in all its ramifications denotes “change,” can be applied to God who in God’s self is unchangeable. Ordinarily when something changes, it can either be that the thing changes from a weak state to a strong state, as in when biologists say that a tadpole has become a frog or that one has effected a transformation, as in when the Greek oracle proclaims that Socrates is becoming wiser. The tadpole becoming a frog is the “becoming of metamorphosis” and Socrates becoming wiser is a way of denoting a movement from potentiality to actuality.40 Oakes points out how “neither sense can apply to God strictly speaking, since first, as Pure Act, God has no potential left to fulfill, and second, because if the Logos of God, as we say, ‘turned into’ a man, he would no longer be God, any more than a frog is still a tadpole….Yet the Bible uses that verb when it says ‘the Word became flesh’ (John 1:14), and so the paradox remains.”41 Oakes wonders how a Christology can be developed without violating the central logical axiom of all sciences, i.e., the principle of non-contradiction.42 Interestingly, the title of Oakes book is taken from a line from the 19th-century English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) for whom Oakes reserves high praise. He thinks that Christian poets, like Hopkins, are better attuned to recognizing the paradox of Christianity. Not only do poets “have no qualms with the paradoxes of Christology,” they also “seem to wallow in it.”43

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

125

In the history of Christian theology, we can point to many poets who have used paradox to capture the essential meaning of Christology. Table 5.2 is an excerpt from the poem, The Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ by the English poet and High Church Anglican, Christopher Smart (1722–71). Smart depicts the nativity of Jesus as a “Master’s manger” where our “Savior lies.”44 He depicts Jesus as God who has become “a native” of his own creation. Here the “eternal is so young.” The paradox of an omnipotent and omnipresent God becoming fragile and confined to particularities of time and place is made manifest. Smart also uses the poem to refute skepticism: “See the God blasphemed and doubted/In the schools of Greece and Rome.” He ends the poem with a paradox: God “is incarnate and a native/Of the very world He made.” The Table 5.3 poem by English Jesuit poet, Manley Hopkins, depicts the antinomy of a child being the father to his own (earthly) father. While this might seem like a contradiction, it is actually portending a riddle, like “married bachelor” or “square circle.” Here the child is God and his earthly father is in fact His own creature. In Table 5.4, Hopkins continues these antinomies but now with respect to the child and the mother. The child who is God infinite, was confined to the finite womb of a woman. Growing up, the child depended on the breast milk of the mother, yet it is the same child that provides the mother the grace to do it. Again, Mary the mother has given birth, yet she is called virgin and “immaculate.” He compares the Virgin Mary to the air we breathe. In Table 5.5, the English poet, Sir John Betjeman (1906–84), speaks of the incarnation (Christmas), juxtaposing words that ordinarily would have been contraries: “Sleepless children’s heart are glad,” “The maker of the stars and sea” is born as a baby in “an ox’s stall.” Because of Christmas, God walked as “man in Palestine.” Christmas brings “sweet and silly” gifts “inexpensive scent.” Table 5.2 Christopher Smart God all-bounteous, all-creative, Whom no ills from good dissuade, Is incarnate, and a native Of the very world he made

Table 5.3 Gerald Manley Hopkins ‘The child is father to the man.' How can he be? The words are wild. Suck any sense from that who can: ‘The child is father to the man.' No; what the poet did write ran, ‘The man is father to the child.' ‘The child is father to the man!' How can he be? The words are wild.45

126

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Table 5.4 Gerald Manley Hopkins Excerpts from The Blessed Virgin Of her who not only Gave God’s infinity Dwindled to infancy Welcome in womb and breast, Birth, milk, and all the rest

20

But mothers each new grace That does now reach our race – Mary Immaculate, Merely a woman, yet Whose presence, power is

25

Great as no goddess’s Was deemèd, dreamèd; who This one work has to do – Let all God’s glory through, God’s glory which would go Through her and from her flow Off, and no way but so.46

Table 5.5 Sir John Betjeman Christmas The bells of waiting Advent ring, The Tortoise stove is lit again And lamp-oil light across the night Has caught the streaks of winter rain In many a stained-glass window sheen From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green. The holly in the windy hedge And round the Manor House the yew Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge, The altar, font and arch and pew, So that the villagers can say ‘The church looks nice’ on Christmas Day. Provincial Public Houses blaze, Corporation tramcars clang, On lighted tenements I gaze, Where paper decorations hang, And bunting in the red Town Hall Says ‘Merry Christmas to you all’. And London shops on Christmas Eve

30

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

127

Christmas Are strung with silver bells and flowers As hurrying clerks the City leave To pigeon-haunted classic towers, And marbled clouds go scudding by The many-steepled London sky. And girls in slacks remember Dad, And oafish louts remember Mum, And sleepless children’s hearts are glad. And Christmas-morning bells say ‘Come!’ Even to shining ones who dwell Safe in the Dorchester Hotel. And is it true? And is it true, This most tremendous tale of all, Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue, A Baby in an ox’s stall? The Maker of the stars and sea Become a Child on earth for me? And is it true? For if it is, No loving fingers tying strings Around those tissued fripperies, The sweet and silly Christmas things, Bath salts and inexpensive scent And hideous tie so kindly meant, No love that in a family dwells, No caroling in frosty air, Nor all the steeple-shaking bells Can with this single Truth compare – That God was man in Palestine And lives today in Bread and Wine.47

In Table 5.6, the anonymous 15th-century poem pretty much sums up the essentials of Christology: Jesus is God and Man; he was born of “maid” (virgin). The poem leaves us wondering if as man Jesus died, does this then mean that God died? If He is God, when he died as man, does he continue to live as God? The poem ends by juxtaposing faith and reason. In Table 5.7, the 13th-century Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, appears to provide a synthesis of the faith and reason, with respect to understanding who Jesus is: a God who becomes a finite man, born of a mother who is a virgin, a creator and maker of heaven and earth who is born a pauper, a God who dies, and a crucified, dead, and buried man who lives. Aquinas presents these in poem containing “the same chiasmic paradoxes that characterize the best of Christian poetry.49 Adoro Te Devote is one of the five hymns Aquinas composed at the request of Pope Urban IV (reigned 1261–64) who instituted the feast of Corpus Christi (Body of Christ) in 1264. The hymn is found in the Roman missal. It is meant to honor Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Catholics sing the hymn during adoration of the Blessed Sacrament – capturing the Christological paradox of omnipotence.

128

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Table 5.6 Anonymous Poem The Divine Paradox A God and yet a man? A maid and yet a mother? Wit wonders that wit can Conceive this or the other. A God and can he die? A dead man, can he live? What wit can well reply? What reason reason give? God, truth, itself does teach it; Man’s wit, sinks too far under By reason’s power to teach it. Believe and leave to wonder48

Table 5.7 Thomas Aquinas’ Hymn, Adoro Te Devote Adoro devote, latens ueritas, te que sub his formis uere latitas. Tibi se cor meum totum subicit, quia te contemplans totum deficit. Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur, sed auditu solo tute creditur. Credo quicquid dixit dei filius, nichil ueritatis uerbo uerius. In cruce latebat sola deitas, sed hic latet simul et humanitas. Ambo uere credens atque confitens, peto quod petiuit latro penitens. Plagas sicut Thomas non intueor, deum tamen meum te confiteor. Fac me tibi semper magis credere, in te spem habere, te diligere. O memoriale mortis domini, panis uiuus uitam prestans homini. Presta michi semper de te uiuere, et te michi semper dulce sapere. Pie pellicane, Ihesu domine, me immundum munda tuo sanguine. Cuius una stilla saluum facere, totum mundum posset omni scelere. Ihesu, quem uelatum nunc aspicio, quando fiet illud quod tam sicio? te reuelata cernens facie, uisu sim beatus tue glorie.

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore, Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more, See, Lord, at your service low lies here a heart Lost, all lost in wonder at the God you are. Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived: How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed; What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do; Truth Himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true. On the cross your godhead made no sign to men, Here your very manhood steals from human ken: Both are my confession, both are my belief, And I pray the prayer of the dying thief. I am not like Thomas, wounds I cannot see, But can plainly call you Lord and God as he; Let me to a deeper faith daily nearer move, Daily make me harder hope and dearer love. You are our reminder of Christ crucified, Living Bread, the life of us for whom he died, Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind With your sweetness that we all were meant to find. Bring the tender tale true of the Pelican; Bathe me, Jesu Lord, in what your bosom ran Blood whereof a single drop has power to win All the world forgiveness of its world of sin. Jesu, whom I look at shrouded here below, I beseech you send me what I thirst for so, Some day to gaze on you face to face in light And be blest forever with your glory’s sight. Amen.

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

129

Das Ungeheurer (Monstrosity) of Christ Christian poets are not the only ones best attuned to understanding the paradox of Christianity. Several other Christian writers who might not have been poets have also tried to capture the paradox of Christology as they understand it. Many are still puzzled by it. The English writer and theologian, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936), stands in a long line of many who have attempted to bring out this paradox. He writes, “When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross, the cry which confessed that God was forsaken by God.”50 There is also Lubac’s famous quote, “If Christ was not truly man, conceived, and born of woman, He would not truly be our savior. But if He had not also really died and been resurrected, then our faith in Him would be in vain and we would not be saved. Death and resurrection do not destroy the work of incarnation; they consummate it.”51 Among the many who have been puzzled by the paradox can also be found those who end up ridiculing it. In their jointly authored book, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? the Slovenian Marxist, Slavoj Žižek, and the British Anglican theologian, John Milbank, paradoxically employ a bizarre title to recover the effect of what it means to say God became man in Jesus Christ. The appellation of the book alone evokes mixed emotions: a repulsion among Christians and a delight among atheists.52 Much of the book is devoted to debating Christian theological heritage in the light of contemporary social and political ideologies. The two theologians seek a “materialist theology” that can remedy “capitalist nihilism” and a world order under the dictates of “fiend of mindless material consumption.”53 Their debate is regarding how the theological and the material can unite to fund resistance to capitalist nihilism. They seek an answer to what the two thinkers see as the political, economic, and social problems of our day. On the logical front, much of Žižek and Milbank’s work is devoted to diagnosing a paradox. One of the standard views of paradox is that it “consists of a number of claims, each of which enjoys some plausibility but which, together, yield a conclusion that s apparently unacceptable.”54 Žižek, in particular, seeks to diagnose the paradox of Christianity in order to highlight what is wrong with the paradox. He thinks he can also resolve it. “To resolve a paradox is to uncover either the odd-premise-out or the questionable reasoning, the culprit that leads us to accept the problematic – and contradictory – conclusion.”55 Žižek and Milbank begin the work by alluding to some binaries that confront our world, reminding us in their introductory chapter that much of modernity is premised on a false dichotomy between reason and faith and that this dichotomy continues to plague contemporary theology, both Catholic and Protestant alike. Žižek and Milbank use their differences to reinvigorate the old Catholic-Protestant debate on Reformation theology. As valuable as the old-Protestant-Catholic disputation might be to their project, this particular aspect of their debate is of no interest to us here. From our analysis of paradox thus far, we have established that if a set of sentences yields an acceptable conclusion, through acceptable principles of inference (like Žižek and Milbank are doing in the introductory chapter to

130

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

reinforce the Catholic-Protestant debate on Reformation theology), we cannot say there is paradox. We already know that there are different accounts or conceptions of paradox. But all the various accounts agree that a paradox is not paradoxical just because it yields an inconsistent position, but that a paradox is paradoxical because it entails a conclusion that is apparently unacceptable, even if its premises and conclusions follow a valid inferential reasoning.56 Therefore, we will put our focus only on what Žižek and Millbank have to say about the historical Jesus. To use their phrase, this would be the so-called four words: “He was made man.”57 It is with these four words that they got their paradox off the ground. It is on these four words that they provide us “with reason for thinking some of the premises, or the principles of inference, we initially thought to be plausible, are implausible.”58 Žižek and Milbank’s book is meant to be an ideologically driven debate. Žižek reads Christian theology through the lens of Hegelian dialectics. He has also employed Hegelian dialectics in his other works. Here, like in some of his other works, Žižek calls for a revival of atheism. In the opening chapter titled, “The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity,” Žižek suggests that all through history, it is only Hegel who has been able to think through the implications of the “four words” in his metaphysics.59 Central to Žižek’s thesis is what Hegel says about das Ungeheurer [the monstrosity] of God’s appearance in a finite flesh in Jesus Christ in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. 60 Following Hegel, Žižek sees the world as an “essentially dark place that embodies an inherent negativity.”61 Not surprisingly, he suggests a Hegelian reading of Christianity – a reading in which God the Father empties himself irreversibly into the Son whose death on the cross opens the way for a third bond called the Holy Spirit. Žižek’s Hegelian interpretation means that in the process of World-Spirit, God sublates God’s self into Christ and from Christ into the Holy Spirit. Žižek sees the movement of history as inevitably resolved through the Hegelian dialectics. He thinks Hegel was right to suggest that “what dies on the Cross is not only the earthly-finite representative of God, but God himself, the very transcendent God of beyond. Both terms of the opposition, Father and Son, the substantial God as the Absolute In-Itself and the God-for-us, revealed to us, die, are sublated in the Holy Spirit.”62 Whereas Žižek appropriates Hegel, by contrast, Milbank appropriates the central theological doctrines of Augustine, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, and Henri de Lubac, essentially advocating the opposite of Žižek’s position.63.Milbank sees the world as ultimately positive and filled with the “excesses of God’s infinite love.”64 Drawing from Aquinas and the paradoxes employed by the Christian theologian and philosopher of late 5th-to-early-6th century CE, Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, Milbank argues that God, in a way, exists outside of God and that the fundamental structure of reality is not the Hegelian dialectical antagonism, but peace and harmony resulting from the indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity. For Milbank, it is not the Hegelian dialectics, but paradox that constitutes reality. Unlike Hegel’s dialectics, which is a contradiction that must be overcome, paradox is “rather an outright impossible

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

131

coincidence of opposites” and an “overwhelming glory” that saturates our everyday reality.65 The position Milbank adopts here is consistent with his other positions elsewhere. Milbank has always insisted that the metaphysical cosmology of the high Middle Ages was thoroughly informed by and transformed through the Biblical legacy before this metaphysical worldview was dealt a deadly blow and lost, due largely to the influence of the nominalists, like William Ockham (1285–1347). He thinks it was the nominalists who made it difficult to think through the realism of universals.66 “In consequence, Ockham’s Trinity becomes three ontic persons within one unity of an individual; his Christology appears monophysite because he cannot think the divine hypostasis relationally: transubstantiation is trivialized into bilocation and extrinsicist miracle.”67 Lessons from the Žižek-Milbank Debate There are many lessons to be drawn from the Milbank-Žižek debate. The logician W. W. Quine once noted, “One man’s antinomy can be another man’s veridical paradox, and one man’s veridical paradox can be another man’s platitude.”68 It is all much clearer in this debate that what for Žižek is an antinomy, which ends in falsehood, is for Milbank an antinomy, which is truth-filled. Second, the debate is reminiscent of one of the paradoxes of knowledge and identity that Plato discusses in the Theaetetus. In this dialogue, Socrates questions Theaetetus about the nature of knowledge. Theaetetus answers that things one learns in geometry and things one learns from a cobbler are two instances of knowledge. Whereas the dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus is a dialogue between a master and his student regarding how knowledge is acquired, the dialogue between Žižek and Milbank is not a puzzle a master puts before a student on whether virtue is knowledge. It is rather a dialogue between two teachers on what it means to grasp the paradox of an omnipotent God who became a powerless human being. Third, unlike Socrates who went all the way and held nothing back in search of truth, Žižek is content with limiting his musings to Hegelian solutions in which he seems comfortable. Against this kind of approach to knowledge, Lubac admonishes, “The fear of falling a prey to error must never prevent us from getting to the full truth.”69 Just as excessive daring can lead to error, “there are also errors of timidity which consist precisely in stopping short, never daring to go any further than half-truths.”70 Here we can recall the case of Karl Barth whose theological presupposition in the Church Dogmatics is that God is not man, but a “wholly other.”71 Barth insists that we must not formulate theologies which “rob God of his deity.”72 Barth might be right about it being a blunder to rob God of his deity, but “is it not also a blunder to rob God of his world, a world which everybody, Christian or not, manages to talk about?”73 Then there is also Jesus Christ – God and man. How can one talk about Jesus and God without involving oneself in a paradox?

132

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Fourth, clearly obvious in the Žižek-Millbank debate is one of the dialogue partner’s unwillingness or, even inability to grasp a conceptual truth, thereby reducing an obvious paradox to a riddle. A paradox might be a species of riddles,74 but paradox is more than riddles. Riddles can be resolved through logical reasoning. In Sophocles play, Oedipus Rex, we are introduced to a Sphinx who challenges travelers on their road with a riddle. “What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, three legs in the evening?” she asks, hoping that her victims will remain ignorant of the underlying metaphors.75 Oedipus might have been tragically unable to solve the problem of his own origins, but he was able to decode the riddle of the Sphinx: “At the dawn of life, a baby begins life on all four, then learns to walk upright on two legs, and finally spends his twilight years hobbling around with a cane.”76 But unlike riddles, paradoxes are essentially irresolvable. What the paradox of Christ becoming man does is give rise to a thought, which held to be true by a kind of supernatural intuition, though reason still wants to know why and how the thought is true.77 The “Love of truth never goes without daring,” remarks Lubac, “And that is one of the reasons why truth is not loved.”78 We might recall that in the first chapter we noted how medieval logicians thought logical paradoxes were irresolvable. Accordingly, the logician, Quine (1908–2000), defined paradox as an argument whose conclusion contradicts a widely shared opinion. Paradoxes are like oxymora because in oxymoron, in spite of the semblance of a contradiction, there is no real contradiction of a conceptual truth. Žižek’s difficulty with Christology is not in any way surprising. What Žižek is doing is approach Christology with a language of confirmation theorists in the mold of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) who appealed to a logically transparent language of science to resolve all disputes. Confirmation theorists are often caught in the uneasy web of Sorites Paradox – an antinomy that raises the problem of semantics of vagueness. A version of Sorites Paradox is associated with Zeno (see Zeno’s paradoxes in Chapter 1). What goes by Sorites Paradox is the idea that one grain of sand does not make a heap. “For any number n, if n grains of sand are not a heap, then the addition of just one more grain does not make them a heap. But in that case you can never get a heap, for each grain you add leaves you just as much without a heap as before.”79 This is the kind of language Žižek is using, honing in on the “vague” language we use in our discourse of the Christ-Man. “Vagueness” of language is not a problem for poets who, generally, are those members of society “best endowed to see the value of paradox as a valued avenue to truth.”80 This does not mean that poetic use of paradox necessarily justifies theological paradoxes, but only that poets have the ability to make their audience recognize the world of truth lurking in the “vagueness” of language. What we are dealing with in Christology is not a riddle or “vagueness,” as Žižek makes it seem, but a paradox of omnipotence. Even Roy Sorensen who assumes paradox to be a riddle knew better to distinguish between two types of riddles: seduction riddles (which are constructed to make a bad answer appear to be good) and mystery riddles (which appear to have no answer).81 At the very least, Christology ought to be approached, not as seduction riddle, but as a mystery riddle.

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

133

Christology – A Veridical Paradox Christology is a voyage into the arena of veridical paradox. A context is required to explain what this means. In The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, Willard Van Orman Quine recounts the story of Frederic, protagonist of The Pirates of Penzance, a widely acclaimed comic opera that premiered in New York in 1879 and London in 1880. In this comic opera, Frederic is twenty-one years old, but has in actual fact only celebrated five birthdays. Several circumstances have conspired to make this possible. “Age is reckoned in elapsed time,” Quine notes, “whereas birthday has to match the date of birth; and February 29 comes less frequently than once a year.”82 Quine goes on to suggest that no one will disagree that Fredric’s situation is possible, regardless how absurd it might sound. His situation is paradoxical only “in its initial air of absurdity.” Its likelihood is as little as 1 to 1,460.83 Does the absurdity of Frederick’s situation mean that a paradox is just any conclusion that at first sounds absurd but still has an argument to sustain it? After emphatically answering NO, Quine then carefully distinguishes veridical, i.e., truth-telling paradoxes, from falsidical paradoxes. A veridical paradox is a statement whose proposition might seem at first to be absurd, but in actual fact contains an abstract truth. An example would be the Frederick case. A falsidical paradox, for its part, is a statement whose proposition not only seems at first to be absurd, but is also false, in addition to containing fallacy in the purported proof.84 An example would be Russell’s Barber paradox. In the two examples, one paradox is strange but true and the other paradox is both strange and false. When these two paradoxes are compared, “Frederick’s situation seemed absurd at first, but a simple argument sufficed to make us acquiesce in it for good. In the case of the barber, however, the conclusion is too absurd to acquiesce in at any time.”85 Christology (the science of Christ) belongs to the class of veridical paradox. The Christian confession of Jesus as truly God and truly man is as absurd as it is true. Take away the paradox you end up with heresy, Oakes suggests.86 There are far too many examples in Christian history we can cite where a denial of the central paradox of Christology did inevitably lead to heresy. The 2nd century Greek philosopher and early opponent of Christianity, Celsius, sarcastically noted in The True Discourse (c. 179 CE) that the one the Christians were calling God was the same one they claim suffered and died on the cross and wondered how a God could have been born in the flesh and the same body be consumed by Christians. Even the gnostic gospels “sought to put a screen between the person of the Savior and the pain and suffering described in the canonical Gospels.”87 Not only do these antagonists fail to get the question right, they also rejected the truth of the Christian teaching on the assumption that it defies common sense and reason. In their mind, the very notion of incarnation embodies logically contradictory ideas.88 Even Heraclitus, the 6thcentury BCE pre-Socratic Ionian philosopher, admitted that we have to accept the reality of contradictions because contradictions are all out there.89 The heretics appear to treat paradox of Christology as if it is a symptom of the frailties of human reason, rather than something that points to ineffable truths.

134

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Origen Adamantius (184 CE–253 CE) attempted a response to the heretics by invoking the Aristotelian union of matter and form. It is on the basis of the absurdity of the paradox of Christianity that Cyril of Alexandria (378 CE–444 CE) can affirm that in Christ we find “the strange and rare paradox of the Lordship in servant’s form and divine glory in human abasement.”90 Cyril of Alexandria also understood the Incarnation as meaning that “the one who is immaterial could [now] be touched; he who is free in his own nature came in the form of a slave, he who blesses all creation became accursed; he who is all-righteousness was numbered among the transgressors; life itself came in the appearance of death.”91 Cyril of Alexandria provided a more nuanced position, describing Jesus in the paradoxical terms of one filled with wisdom who himself is wisdom, a most high who is rich in poverty, and God who empties Himself. Cyril of Alexandria thinks the seed of this paradox is already latent in the Fourth Gospel. The author of the Fourth Gospel, according to the Alexandrian theologian, does not describe the Word as becoming man, but the Word as becoming flesh, simply because the evangelist wanted to stress the paradox of the incarnation.92 To return to what Quine says of the two types of paradoxes, falsidical paradox “packs a surprise, but it is seen as a false alarm when we solve the underlying fallacy.” For its part, a “veridical paradox packs a surprise, but the surprise quickly dissipates itself as we ponder the proof.”93 Does the paradox of incarnation not pack a surprise and dissipate as soon as one tries to understand how God is man? Only those enamored by the paradox can affirm, as did the theologian and mystic, Abbot William of St. Thierry (1085–1148): Fides meretur veritatem [Faith is deserving of the truth]. St. Aug stine also affirmed something similar: Gaudium de veritate, gaudium de Te, Veritate est [[Joy in truth, joy in thee, who art Truth].94

Conclusion Sorensen once employed an anecdote of amoeba to explain what paradoxes are and what they are not: Paradoxes are questions (or in some cases, pseudo questions) that suspend us between too many good answers. When an amoeba divides in two, does it go out of existence? On the one hand, organisms can survive the loss of half of their bodies. The only problem with the mother amoeba is that she has been too successful; instead of losing half her body as a dead tissue, she has created a second healthy amoeba. On the other hand, amoeba reproduction seems like suicide because there is nothing to survive as. It would be arbitrary to identify the mother amoeba with just one of her daughters. And to say that the mother amoeba continues as the pair of daughters conflicts with the idea that organisms are unified individuals.95 Sorensen concludes the anecdote with the remark that the case for a solution to a paradox looks compelling only when taken in isolation.96 His remark might need some nuancing, especially in the light of the paradox of the incarnation to

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

135

be taken up in the next chapter. Here I find useful the insights of Bernard Lonergan. If it can be argued, as some 20th-century logicians in the mold of Frege, Russell, and Whitehead have done successfully, that most problems of mathematics are problems in applied logic,97 then it can also be posited that most problems in Christology are problems of inability to codify the in-built paradox of the incarnation. Just like an amoeba goes through a process of metamorphosis, suggesting that there is no one fixed amoeba, it will be foolhardy to expect that one can reach a logical ideal of fixed terms that have been immutably formulated in one’s comprehension of the man Christ. Lonergan reminds us that even the Council of Nicaea had to go through the painful lesson of going beyond scriptural language to formulate scriptural truth. Chalcedon also had to go through the painful lesson of having to employ terms in senses that were unknown both to scripture and patristic tradition to help us understand the paradox.98 Lonergan helps us to understand that Chalcedon’s insistence that the one and the same Lord Jesus Christ is perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, truly God and truly man, consubstantial with the Father in his divinity and consubstantial with us in his humanity and born of the Father in his divinity before all ages and born of the Virgin Mary in his humanity in time and place is not a logical proposition that makes sense to reason.99 It is rather a declaration that becomes luminous only when seen through the lens of paradox. The paradox brings us back to Gödel’s celebrated 1931 theorem about the limits of provability in axiomatic theorems of mathematics.100 That the axiomatic theorem is true is surprising, and that it could be proven is even more surprising.101 The same thing can be said about the incarnation – that it is true is surprising, and that it can be proven is even more surprising. This is why it is hard not to agree with Oakes appropriation of the provocative title of Žižek and Milbank’s controversial work, The Monstrosity of Christ, i.e., that Jesus Christ is “monstrous in the original sense of the word – a source of fear and wonder for Christian and atheist alike.”102 What the monstrosity of Christ reveals, among other things, is essentially that, “Human life and human history are not doomed to meaninglessness. They do not develop and end in ultimate absurdity or Sisyphus-like frustration. Our longing for salvation is destined to achieve fulfillment.”103

Notes 1 Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, translated by Paule Simon, Sadie Kreilkamp, and Ernest Beaumont (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 8. 2 See Irving M. Copi, Introduction to Logic (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 208. 3 Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, 8. 4 Narry F. Santos, Slave of All: The Paradox of Authority and Servanthood in the Gospel of Mark (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003), 8. 5 Ibid., 9. 6 Ibid., 11. 7 Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1966), 3. 8 See Arthur Stanley Pease, “Things Without Honor,” Classic Philology, 21 (1926), 27–42.

136

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

9 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 5. 10 Santos, Slave of All, 13. 11 Roy A. Sorensen, A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xi. 12 See C. F. J. Williams, “A Programme for Christology,” Religious Studies, 3 (1968), 513–24. 13 See Michael Gorman, Aquinas On the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 14 Patrick Grim, “What is a Contradiction?” in The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley ArmourGarb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 49–72. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 55. 18 See G.G. O’Collins, “The Christology of Wolfhart Pannenberg,” Religious Studies, 3 (1967), 369–76, 376. 19 See Oscar Cullman, Christology of the New Testament, revised edition. Translated by Shirley C. Guthrie and Charles A.M. Hall (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963). 20 See Cyril Orji, A Semiotic Christology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021), see Chapter 3. 21 See Lois Farag, Athanasius of Alexandria: An Introduction to His Writing and Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020), 62. 22 O’Collins, “The Christology of Wolfhart Pannenberg,” 369. 23 Ibid., 370. 24 Ibid. 25 See Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Grundzüge der Christologie [Jesus-God and Man], translated by Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe (London: SCM Press, 1968). 26 O’Collins, “The Christology of Wolfhart Pannenberg,” 370. 27 See Avery Dulles, “Henri de Lubac: In Appreciation,” America (September 1991), 180–82, 182. 28 Dennis Doyle, “Henri de Lubac and the Roots of Communion Ecclesiology,” Theological Studies, 60 (1999), 209–27. 29 Ibid. 30 de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, 12. 31 Henri de Lubac, Further Paradoxes, translated from the French by Ernest Beaumont (London: Longmans, 1958).76. 32 Ibid. 33 Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, 13. 34 Ibid., 11. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 8. 37 I.T. Ramsey and N. Smart, “Paradox in Religion,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 33 (1959), 195–232. 38 See Edward Oakes, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy: A Catholic and Evangelical Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). 39 Ibid., 2. 40 Ibid., (see footnote 1). 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 2–3. 43 Ibid., 3. 44 See full poem, Christopher Smart, The Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; online: www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=232; accessed December 20, 2021. 45 See Gerald Manley Hopkins, The Child is Father to the Man, online: https://poets. org/poem/child-father-man; accessed December 20, 2021.

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

137

46 See Gerald Manley Hopkins, The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe; online: https://hopkinspoetry.com/poem/the-blessed-virgin; accessed December 20, 2021. 47 See Sir John Betjeman, Christmas; online: https://allpoetry.com/poem/ 8493411-Christmas-by-Sir-John-Betjeman; accessed December 20, 2021. 48 See Anonymous, God and Yet a Man, A? Online: www.poetrynook.com/poem/ god-and-yet-man; accessed December 20, 2021. 49 Oakes, Infinity Dwindles to Infancy, 6 (see footnote 8). 50 As quoted by Edward T. Oakes, “Atheists and Christians Together,” First Things (July 2009), 56–58. 51 Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, 67. 52 See Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 53 Ibid., 3. 54 Bradley Armour-Garb, “Diagnosing Dialetheism,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Graham Priest, N.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 113–25. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 121. 57 Žižek, Milbank, and Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ, 25. 58 Armour-Garb, “Diagnosing Dialetheism,” 113. 59 Žižek, Milbank, and Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ, 26. 60 Ibid., 74. 61 Ibid., 8. 62 Ibid., 60. 63 Ibid., 7. 64 Ibid., 8. 65 Ibid., 163. 66 John Milbank, “The Last of the Last: Theology, Authority, and Democracy,” Revista Portuguessa de Filosofia, 58 (2002), 271–98. 67 Ibid. 68 W.V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1966), 14. 69 Lubac, Further Paradoxes, 4. 70 Ibid., 5. 71 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God, Vol. II (London: T. and T. Clark, 1957). 72 Ibid., 281. 73 Ramsey and Smart, “Paradox in Religion,” 212. 74 Sorensen, A Brief History of the Paradox, 3. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 4. 77 Oakes, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy, 12. 78 Lubac, Further Paradoxes, 5. 79 Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 357. 80 Oakes, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy, 9. 81 Sorensen, A Brief History of the Paradox, 3. 82 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 3. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., 5. 85 Ibid., 4. 86 Oakes, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy, 15.

138

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

87 Jaroslav Pelican, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), Vol.1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 174. 88 Gerald O’Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 239. 89 Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, 20. 90 Oakes, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy, 16; quoting Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, translated by John Anthony McGuckin (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1995), 101. 91 Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, 61. 92 Oakes, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy, 17. 93 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 11. 94 Lubac, Further Paradoxes, 21. 95 Sorensen, A Brief History of the Paradox, xii. 96 Ibid. 97 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 36. 98 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 14, Method in Theology, edited by Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 132. 99 Ibid., 260 100 See Kurt Gödel, “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I,” Monatshefte für Mathematik Physik, 38 (1931), 173–198. 101 Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 35. 102 Oakes, “Atheists and Christians Together,” 58. 103 Leo Donovan, S.J., ed., A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner’s Theology (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995), 65.

Bibliography Anonymous. God and Yet a Man, A? Online: www.poetrynook.com/poem/god-a nd-yet-man; accessed December 20, 2021. Armour-Garb, Bradley. “Diagnosing Dialetheism.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, N.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 113–125. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God, Vol. II. London: T. and T. Clark, 1957. Betjeman, John. Christmas. Online: https://allpoetry.com/poem/8493411-Christma s-by-Sir-John-Betjeman; accessed December 20, 2021. Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Coli, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Copi, Irving M. Introduction to Logic. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Cullman, Oscar. Christology of the New Testament. Revised edition. Translated by Shirley C. Guthrie and Charles A.M. Hall. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963. Cyril of Alexandria. On the Unity of Christ. Translated by John Anthony McGuckin. Crestwood. New York: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1995. Donovan, Leo S.J., ed. A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner’s Theology. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995. Doyle, Dennis. “Henri de Lubac and the Roots of Communion Ecclesiology.” Theological Studies, 60 (1999), 209–227.

Christology and the Paradox of Omnipotence

139

Dulles, Avery. “Henri de Lubac: In Appreciation.” America (September 1991), 180–182. Farag, Lois. Athanasius of Alexandria: An Introduction to His Writing and Theology. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020. Gödel, Kurt. “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I.” Monatshefte für Mathematik Physik, 38 (1931), 173–198. Gorman, Michael. Aquinas On the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Grim, Patrick. “What is a Contradiction?” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 49–72. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Hopkins, Gerald Manley. The Child is Father to the Man. Online: https://poets.org/p oem/child-father-man; accessed December 20, 2021. Hopkins, Gerald Manley. The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe. Online: https://hopkinspoetry.com/poem/the-blessed-virgin; accessed December 20, 2021. Lonergan. Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 14, Method in Theology. Edited by Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. de Lubac, Henri. Further Paradoxes. Translated from the French by Ernest Beaumont. London: Longmans, 1958. de Lubac, Henri. Paradoxes of Faith. Translated by Paule Simon, Sadie Kreilkamp, and Ernest Beaumont. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987. Milbank, John. “The Last of the Last: Theology, Authority, and Democracy.” Revista Portuguessa De Filosofia, 58 (2002), 271–298. Oakes, Edward. “Atheists and Christians Together.” First Things (July 2009), 56–58. Oakes, Edward. Infinity Dwindled to Infancy: A Catholic and Evangelical Christology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. O’Collins, G.G. “The Christology of Wolfhart Pannenberg.” Religious Studies, 3 (1967), 369–376. O’Collins, G.G. Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Orji, Cyril. A Semiotic Christology. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Grundzuge der Christologie [Jesus-God and Man]. Translated by Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe. London: SCM Press, 1968. Pease, Arthur Stanley. “Things Without Honor.” Classic Philology, 21 (1926), 27–42. Pelican, Jaroslav. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), vol.1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Quine, W.V. The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1966. Ramsey, I.T. and N. Smart, “Paradox in Religion.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 33 (1959), 195–232. Santos, Narry F. Slave of All: The Paradox of Authority and Servanthood in the Gospel of Mark. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003. Sorensen, Roy A. A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Smart, Christopher. The Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Online: www. yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=232; accessed December 20, 2021. Williams, C.F.J. “A Programme for Christology.” Religious Studies, 3 (1968), 513–524. Žižek, Slavoj, John Milbank, and Creston Davis. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.

6

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of Non-Contradiction

The question before us is whether the theological language of the Incarnation, i.e., the God-man, falls within the parameters of figure of speech that contradicts itself but which on further and deeper probing yields some true insights. Christians, religious believers who do not share the Christian faith, and people of no faith alike, have all given attention to what seems contrary to reason in Christian faith, albeit in different ways and for different purposes. While non-Christians and people of no faith point to contradictions in Christian teaching and even repulsion at Christianity’s seeming fideism, Christians on their part see no contradiction whatsoever. The latter berate their critics for lacking in understanding of what they take to be the paradox of Christian faith. The Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) holds that both sides of a proposition, which contradict each other, cannot be true. But paradox has a way of effacing PNC. Within the literary tradition paradoxers in poetry and rhetoric have no difficulty accepting that some sentences can be true and false at the same time. The Greek writer and classical poet, Homer, who authored many works, including the Iliad and Odyssey, accepted that human knowledge is partial and incomplete and uses Muses (inspirational goddesses thought to the fount of knowledge) to inspire. Many of Homer’s interpreters, including the Stoics, had no difficulty accepting the difficult language of the Homeric poems and thought they contained hidden wisdom. Hesiod, on his part, differed from Homer in the sense that he uses Muses in his famed works, including the Theogony, not just to inspire as Homer did, but also to teach how truth and falsehood are plausible at the same time in the same sentence. The English playwright of the Elizabethan era, William Shakespeare, very much like Hesiod and many other ancient Greek writers, also took for granted that some sentences can be both true and false at the same time. Shakespeare, like many poets of his era, uses contradictory statements to unlock hidden meanings. It is in unlocking some hidden truths that these poets delight and astound their audience. Shakespeare’s Macbeth.1 For example, is notorious for its many paradoxes. I will highlight nine of such paradoxes to help set up the argument I wish to develop. Paradox 1: At the beginning of Macbeth, Shakespeare makes us aware of a storm and introduces us to three witches whose plan is to find Macbeth and let him know of their predictions. The witches use paradoxical statements to make their predictions to Macbeth and tell him about his impending battles: “When the battle is won and lost” DOI: 10.4324/9781003299820-7

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 141 (Act 1, Scene 1). Later in the play, Shakespeare makes it fully known to us that Macbeth had won several battles on his way to becoming king (after killing King Duncan). But Shakespeare also makes us aware that each battle won by Macbeth has come simultaneously with many losses, including the loss of his wife and his own life afterwards, making true the witches’ paradoxical statement that the battle will be won and lost at the same time. Paradox 2: Shakespeare tells us that witches put a curse on Macbeth, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (Act 1, Scene 1, line 11). We later understand this to mean that the witches were telling Macbeth that although people might see them as evil, they see themselves as good. So, the witches are evil and good at the same time. Paradox 3: In Act 1, Scene 3, Shakespeare tells us that Banquo asked the witches to predict his own future and that the witches had complied with these paradoxical lines: “Lesser than Macbeth, but greater. Not so happy, yet much happier. Thou shall get kings, though thou be none” (Act 1, Scene 3, lines 66–68). So Banquo is simultaneously lesser and greater than Macbeth, not happy and happy, has kings and no king. Paradox 4: Shakespeare makes us aware of Macbeth and Banquo’s responses to the witches predictions – that they were left wondering if believing the witches was a good thing, “This supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good” (Act 1, Scene 3, lines 133–34). Paradox 5: Shakespeare tells us that after Macbeth’s bloody execution of Macdonwald King Duncan who was pleased at first remarked, “So from that spring whence comfort seemed to come, discomfort swells” (Act 1, Scene 2, lines 27–28). This is Shakespeare’s way of telling us that what is good is bad, what is bad is good. Paradox 6: Shakespeare tells that after the murder of Duncan that Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, were left to wonder what to do next, and in their wonderment remarked, “False face must hide what false heart doth know” (Act 1, Scene 7, line 82). Paradox 7: Shakespeare tells us that after Macbeth had murdered Duncan that his regrets set in, “To know my deed, ‘twere best not know myself” (Act 2, Scene 2, line 760). Paradox 8: At the end of the play, Lady Macduff’s angry response to the seeming role of the father figure her son Banquo (who died very early in the play) is a lament, “Fathered is he, yet he is fatherless” (Act 4, Scene 2, line 27). Paradox 9: Malcolm and Macduff discuss plans, should Macbeth become king, “This tyrant whose sole name blisters our tongues, was once thought honest. You have loved him well; he hath not touched you yet” (Act 4, Scene 3, lines 12–14). From these examples alone, it is evident that Shakespeare has no difficulty accepting that a statement can be both true and false at the same time. It is also evident that his audience has no difficulty accepting it either. The rhetorical idea that truth and falsity can inhere in the same sentence and both remain true rings true also in religious discourse, particularly Christianity, which is the paradoxical par excellence. To Tertullian has been attributed the phrase, Credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd), which Anselm (1033–1109) later modified to produce Credo ut intelligam (I believe so that I might understand). Often cited in the case of Kierkegaard is his commendation of Abraham’s action in Fear and Trembling for his willingness to sacrifice his son at the command of God, a commendation his critics allege is both irrational and immoral.2 Contrary to the charge of critics, what makes both Tertullian and

142

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Kierkegaard stand out in this respect is their view that reason is limited and cannot answer certain questions of the God-man relationship. Both insist that religious faith allows for a way to recognize those limits and reflect on them in beneficial ways.3 Contrary to what critics allege about the Tertullian and Kierkegaard paradox, Tertullian and Kierkegaard do not offer a neutral argument to show that Christianity is true. What they offer rather is an argument from faith that explains how Christianity might be known to be true by those who already have an assumption that Christianity is true.4 Their argument can be taken as an early anticipation of dialetheism, at least in a religious sense. For dialetheism purports to show that contradictions are truth-bearers and that true contradictions are perfectly natural.5

Dialetheism and The Principles of Non-Contradiction The main source of the classic law or Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) is Aristotle. In Metaphysics (I.3), Aristotle writes: “It is impossible that the same thing both belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect.”6 Paradoxically, the central principle at issue in Aristotle’s formulation goes under two apparently contradictory names: the Law of NonContradiction and the PNC. Over the years there have been many variations of this principle that was first formulated by Aristotle. In fact, modern logicians have identified an upward of 240 variants of what contradiction can entail in logic.7 For the sake of consistency, I will refer to the law simply as PNC. In all, the basic tenets of PNC come down to these four ideals: 1 2 3 4

It is not the case that both p and not p are true; Nothing is both true and false; No proposition and its negation are both true.8 No contradictory statement is ever correctly assertible.9

There is an ambivalence on the part of Aristotle regarding substantiation of PNC. On the one hand, he seems to be saying that PNC can be substantiated and even takes steps to substantiate it in his works. On the other hand, he seems to be suggesting that PNC is strictly speaking indemonstrable.10 This ambivalence, however, did not stop Aristotle from claiming that PNC is the most secure of all principles. Some critics think that since Aristotle’s formulation, PNC has been entrenched as an “unassailable dogma” of Western thought.11 This “dogma” was transmitted from Aristotle to Boethius and Abelard and many others after them.12 As philosophers and logicians, they all hold that contradictions lack content and that from what lacks content nothing that possesses content can be inferred.13 The dogma of PNC that went unchallenged for a long time has in recent years been revisited by Graham Priest14 and J.C. Beall, among many others.15 What they call “dialetheism” is challenge to the dogma of PNC. “Dialetheism” is a term that was coined in 1981 by Priest. He intended it as a challenge to the

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 143 Aristotelian principles of PNC.16 Priest, who has since been regarded as the father of dialetheism, argues for a new way of handling logical paradoxes. He insists that instead of dissolving logical paradoxes or trying to explain what is wrong with them, “we should accept them and learn to come to live with them.”17 Explaining his reasoning, Priest writes: A paradox is an argument with premises which appear to be true and steps which appear to be valid, which nevertheless ends in a conclusion which is false. A solution would tell us which premise is false or which step invalid; but moreover it would give us an independent reason for believing the premise or the step to be wrong. If we have no reason for rejecting the premise or the step other than that it blocks the conclusions, then the ‘solution’ is ad hoc and unilluminating. Virtually all known ‘solutions’ to the paradoxes fail this test and this is why I say that no solution has yet been found.18 Following Priest’s rejection of PNC, Beal adds that except for a few who still hold on to the dogma of PNC,19 modern philosophers largely reject many of Aristotle’s views, including his views on contradiction.20 Beal explains the progress that has been made in paraconsistent logic – that the progress has contributed to the “unassailable dogma” of Western thought being assailed. He then goes on to argue that, “Neither Aristotle’s arguments for (non) contradiction nor modifications of those arguments have produced strong arguments for the thesis that no contradiction could be true – that the intersection of truth and falsity is necessarily empty.”21 Aligning his view with that of Priest, Beale contends further that there are reasons to think that in the least some contradictions are true.22 This, in a nutshell, is what dialetheism is about or at least what Priest tried to show in his seminal work in which he suggested that the semantic paradoxes and the set-theoretic paradoxes are actual examples of true contradictions.23 Dialetheism might be a novel and interesting idea, it is not without difficulties either. One of the criticisms that have been leveled against dialetheism is “that there are some methodological considerations that have not yet been taken explicitly into account by the dialetheist, and which – when properly investigated – provide string suasive currents that should bear the thinker decisively away from dialetheism.”24 In other words, not all contemporary logicians subscribe to dialetheism. Many still have reservations about their quest to downplay PNC. While there are legitimate criticisms against dialetheism, what goes by the name dialetheism is an effort by logicians to wrestle with the truthfalsity dilemma. The American pragmatist and logician, C.S. Peirce, had wrestled with the same problem in his fallibilist theory. Peirce intended fallibilism to be a corrective to the transcendental theories that think of truth as apriorily derived. Fallibilism is a non-foundationalist epistemology that is meant to help settle opinion, Peirce was clear that contrary to what those Platonic-Aristotelian derived theories might claim, the human mind does not grasp truth intuitively

144

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

and immediately. Truth is always mediated. This led Peirce to the pragmatic admission that the “mind has a much better chance of reaching the truth if it admits its capacity for error than if it denies that capacity.”25 In the field of theology, Lonergan underscores this Peircean idea that human knowledge is not intuitive, but mediated. Lonergan characterizes the human person as a being with a capacity to raise questions and answers. He painstakingly explains how knowledge goes through a process of experience, understanding, judgment, and decision and labels this process by which we derive knowledge intentionality analysis. For Lonergan, our knowledge occurs within a horizon. What he calls “horizon” is a field of vision or standpoint. As our fields of vision vary, “so too the scope of our knowledge and the range of our interests are bounded. As fields of vision vary with one’s standpoint, so too the scope of one’s knowledge and the range of one’s interests vary with the period in which one lives, one’s social background and milieu, one’s education and personal development.”26 This way, Lonergan gives a metaphoric meaning to the word “horizon,” insisting that the set of questions a person is raising and the set of questions the person is answering all occur within a horizon. This way also, he is able to explain that “what lies beyond one’s horizon is simply outside the range of one’s knowledge and interests: one neither knows nor cares.”27 This means that our knowledge is not absolute because there are things we do not know, either because we do not care about them or because they do not fall within our horizon. In Insight,28 he uses some condensed paradoxes to speak of the things we know and the things we do not know: 1 2

3

There are known knowns – things we know that we know. These are questions that we have asked and their answers yield these known things. There are known unknown – things that we know that we do not know. The paradoxical known unknown are determined by questions we are asking but have not yet answered. There are unknown unknown – things that we do not know that we do not know.29

In a later writing, he reinforces the distinction between these three and explains their roles in our quest for self-transcendence:30 We can distinguish the known, the known unknown, and the unknown. This distinction is applicable to any stage of development, and it gives us a tool that enables us to speak briefly about the development in the subject. The known is the range of questions that I can raise and answer. It is settled by the series or group of questions I can ask and answer. Beyond the known… there is the known unknown, the things I know I don’t know. That is a much broader circle. There is a range of questions that I can raise, find significant, consider worthwhile, have some idea how to answer. But at the moment I cannot answer them…. Thirdly, there is the unknown unknown, the range of questions that I do not raise at all, or that, if they were raised, I would not understand, or find significant, or, if I understood what is meant, I would see

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 145 no point in asking them… This is the realm of the unknown unknown, the field of indocta ignorantia. And how big it is we do not know.31 Some analytic philosophers think there is a fourth category of condensed paradox: unknown known – those things a person deliberately refuses to acknowledge they know. But Lonergan does not speak of the unknown known. It is the class of unknown unknown that Lonergan places questions we have not asked and are not answering because we might not even know anything about these questions, let alone how to pose them. Thus, a person’s existential boundary is between known unknown and unknown unknown.32 Borrowing a phrase from Heidegger, Lonergan calls the gap between the self one thinks one is and the self one really is, i.e., the self that lies beyond one’s horizon, an “existential gap.”33 The existential gap between known unknown and unknown unknown depends on a person’s horizon. Lonergan writes, “In fact, our questions outnumber our answers, so that we know of an unknown through our unanswered questions.”34 The known unknown is open to interpretation and can be distorted. But Lonergan insists that religious experience is oriented towards mystery of the known unknown and explains how a person’s orientation to the known unknown can be either a myth or a mystery. Taken together, dialetheism and Lonergan’s condensed paradoxes of the known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns can be useful for understanding what the Anglican clergyman, John Macquarrie, has termed a “dialectical theism.” Macquarrie proposes dialectical theism as a way of avoiding the conclusion that any statement we make about God contains all and the whole truth. One of his essential arguments is that when we make statements about God, such as “God is all-powerful,” we should also leave ourselves open to the possibility that the opposite might be true, i.e., that God is also powerless. Before he developed his paradoxical dialectical theism, Macquarrie was known for his highly influential work, the Principles of Christian Theology (1966). Here he admitted the influence of Heidegger’s notion of Being in his theology and “the Anglican Principle,” which holds that faith must find confirmation in reason. Owing to these two influences, Macquarrie has always insisted that faith must be subjected to thought and be made coherent with reason and conscience. He thinks that human life is polarized and fragmented on many levels and sees a need for a unified structure. He thinks the unified structure can be found in religion and faith and that his philosophical theology can be a solution. In this early work, he labelled his philosophical theology an “existential ontological theism.” Some opponents think his “existential ontological theism” amounts to panentheism and Macquarrie did not deny it either.35 But Macquarrie effected a shift from the 1980s onward. From 1983–84 he gave the Gifford Lectures – a series of lectures at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. These lectures, have been collected and published under the title, In Search of Deity.36 It is here that Macquarrie develops the idea of a dialectical theism as an alternative to what he calls classical theism. In Macquarrie’s view, classical theism has played out in both philosophy and theology and in both cases, classical theism has overemphasized some of God’s attributes, such as transcendence, and has rendered them unsatisfactory. He thinks classical theism has also

146

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

engendered a “monarchical” view of a God who is removed from creation. Macquarrie finds this classical view to be unacceptable. He thinks it exaggerates the distance between God and creation and tilts theological discourse towards deism.37 Macquarrie criticizes Hume for his idea that God is far removed from the world. He thinks this kind of idea is based on a faulty view of God that fails to recognize the dialectical character of the infinite God’s relations with finite reality. It is not only Hume or natural theology that Macquarrie rejects, he also criticizes some Christian thinkers, like Aquinas and Calvin, insisting that “no matter how carefully classical theism is formulated, it still tends to present a distinctly ‘monarchical’ view of God, that is to say, God as one-sidedly transcendent, separate from and over or above the world.”38 He thinks what this imbalance has done is create a picture of a capricious God and in so doing devalues our creation.39 Macquarrie argues that “the intellect demands a more dialectical concept of God” and that our human religiousness consciousness “seeks a God with whom more affinity can be felt, without diminution of his otherness.”40 Macquarrie proposes a dialectical theism as a way of resolving what he sees as a faulty view of God’s relation to the world. His dialectical theism draws from various figures in the history of philosophy, like Plotinus, Hegel, Leibniz, Whitehead, and Heidegger. He also draws from various figures in the history of Christian tradition, including Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa. He outlines six dialectical oppositions or contrasts within deity: 





  

A dialectical contrast between being and non-being (nothingness): God is not another object in the world to be taken to exist in the way we think of objects as existing. So it is true, in a sense, to say that God does not exist or that God is not a thing or a being alongside other beings. A dialectical opposition between the one and the many: There are grounds to speak of differentiation within the being of God. Natural theology expresses this differentiation in terms of dialectical opposition of the one and the many– tri-unity in which all things flow from and return to deity. For, God is the source of all beings and beyond being. A dialectical opposition between knowability and unknowability: This is a dialectic between knowability and incomprehensibility of God. God is knowable, but our knowledge of God is a mediated knowledge (indirect, as opposed to direct or unmediated knowledge). We know how God expresses God’s self anthropomorphically in creation and how God can be grasped when God expresses God’s self in non-anthropomorphic ways through symbols. But the being of God is inexhaustible. A dialectic between God’s impassability and passability: God expresses God’s self in the world while still retaining God’s transcendent status. A dialectic of immanence and transcendence: God is the source of the world who is present in the world and at the same time beyond the world. A dialectic of eternity and temporality: Our knowledge of God has a past, present, and future. But God is a being that transcends a succession of past, present, and future.

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 147 In sum, there are different ways of holding opposites together. The dialetheists call for a radical revision of PNC because they think some contradictions are true. Lonergan employed some condensed paradox to speak of things we know and things we know that we do not know. Macquarrie uses dialectical theism to hold some seemingly opposite qualities we attribute to God in dialectical tension. Rather than an either/or approach, they all seek a both/and approach either with respect to things we know in this life or regarding our mediated knowledge of God. In dialectical theism, it coalesces into the paradox of God’s transcendence and immanence. It is a paradoxical coincidence, in the language of Pseudo Dionysius, or coincidentia oppositorium, in the language of Nicholas of Cusa that has confounded Christian and non-Christian writers. It is recapitulated again in the Incarnation. In the Incarnation Jesus is revealing and simultaneously concealing that which is transcendent in that which is immanent.41 As Pseudo Dionysius succinctly puts it, what is to be said of this mystery remains unsayable and what is to be understood about the mystery remains unknowable.42 Enlightenment Attack and Dialetheism A great deal of the argument of the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), against religion and the Scottish essayist and Enlightenment thinker, David Hume’s (1711–76), attack on religion, like those of many other Enlightenment philosophes, stem from their understandings and applications of PNC. Part of the ingrained habit of the dogma of PNC is a priori reasoning that thinks of truth and falsity as exclusive. These philosophers and philosophes defended the epistemic status of logical claims and deployed PNC in their attack on religion. They made no concessions that there might indeed be cases in which seemingly religious contradictions can be true. From a logical point of view, the principles of PNC are difficult to debate and those who accept the principles as irrefutable have strong argument on their side.43 Since the basic tenet of PNC is that no contradictory statement is ever true, those who despise religious statements on logical grounds think religious statements are clearly a violation of this principle. The history of this matter in logic and the philosophy of religion is long and too complex to rehash here. The view of logical empiricists who separate analytic truths (truths settled by conventional rules establishing the meaning of various linguistic terms) from empirical truths (truths expressed through observable facts) is also central to the PNC debate.44 When Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), suggested that the gods are a human invention, i.e., that the gods are created out of human ignorance and fear of the unknown, and attacked contradictory doctrines of religion, logically at least, he had the principles of PNC in mind. In part XII of Leviathan, Hobbes states that the supernatural qualities we confer on deity “are of the same substance with that which appeareth in a dream to one that sleepeth or in a looking-glass to one that is awake.”45 Following along the same line, Hume launched a calibrated attack against religion. Hume’s work, Natural History of Religion

148

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

(written in 1751 and published in 1757)46 and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (written in 1751 and published in 1779, i.e., three years after Hume’s death),47 are the two key works in which Hume attacked organized religion and questioned the validity of religious claims. If to Hume is to be ascribed the title, founder of the science of religion,48 to him must also be credited the beginning of philosophy of religion because it is in these two works that Hume laid the foundation for the critical study of religion.49 In these works also Hume offers philosophical and historical analysis of religion, at least as he sees it. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he lays out a fierce attack against cosmological and ontological arguments for the existence of God that were current in his time. A big chunk of his ire was directed against Deism, which was, at the time at least, based on theoretical and moral arguments. Hume pointed out that religion, even in its most abstract and theoretical form, was irrational and that deism has shown even more so why revealed religion is irrational. In Natural History of Religion, he attacks religious appetite for “absurdity and contradiction.” For Hume, paganism is more sensible than Christianity. He thought that paganist, at least, consists in the cults of the gods, unlike Christianity that consists in the theory of the absurd. Following Hobbes argument that Christianity is irrational, Hume lumps religion and practices of asceticism together in the waste basket of irrationality. He insists that religion is a superstition in which the superstitious person, to placate deity, embraces “any practice, recommended to him, which either serves to no purpose in life, or offers the strongest violence to his natural inclinations.”50 He locates the cause of this religious absurdity in human nature – fear. But what Hume and his logical empiricists never did satisfactorily is raise question whether the classical conception of logic, with respect to truth and falsity, can ever be proven to be flawed. They were resolute that there are no instances in which some logical contradictions can be tenable. They took as an epistemic fact that PNC rests on a fundamental law of logic and therefore cannot be questioned or debated. It is this resoluteness that dialetheism now questions. Dialetheists think such position is “misguided.”51 In reformulating PNC, Priest and Beale especially, offer some good reasons for thinking that some contradictions are true. Many dialetheists today agree that there are sentences that are both true and false and that PNC has failed to achieve what it was intended to do Although there is diversity within dialetheism and not all dialetheists seek the overthrow of PNC, many in the group are proposing a re-think of logic. They argue that contrary to classical conception of logical reasoning, logic is not a priori. Basing their argument on what obtains in quantum mechanics, they argue that the debate over the viability of PNC “is not to be conducted entirely in a priori terms.52 They think that quantum mechanics has shown that classical logic provides wrong results when applied to the quantum domain.53 They think conducting this debate on a priori terms makes one guilty of logical monism (the view that there is only one logic).54 The view that logical reasoning can proceed in a nona priori terms has received support from the likes of A. Tarski,55 W.V. Quine,56 and H. Putnam.57 Despite the boost, the view that the debate can proceed in

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 149 non-a prior terms is still not universally held . There are some notable objections to the notion of logical non-a apriorism.58 However, some have suggested a middle ground. In their helpful essay on “Logical Non-Apriorism and the ‘Law’ of Non-Contradiction” (2004), Otavio Bueno and Mark Colyvan argue that “it is possible to revise logical principles (or logical rules) on the basis of extra-logical considerations – which include empirical considerations.”59 They suggest that “extra-logical considerations play a role in the selection and evaluation of logical principles (or rules).”60 The reason for bringing up the debate is not to engage in it or attempt to settle the dispute, but to show that neither of the arguments for a priori logical reasoning or non-a priori logical reasoning rests on an epistemic ground anymore, contrary to what each would claim. Foundationalism, at least in epistemology or logic, is now passé. The only tenable form of foundationalism now in epistemology and logic is fallibilism.61 Even “the clearest, simplest, and most intuitively obvious claims and definitions, our best candidates for foundational status in mathematics, can be and often are inconsistent and even (given commitments regarding consequence relations) trivial.”62 This is consistent with the view of Peirce, who went to great lengths to attack any doctrine of infallible intuition.63 Intuition plays a major role in normative logic because “logicians start with their own set of rejected and accepted arguments,” i.e., the judgments they consider the judgments of fact in logic.64 Peirce was clear that every idea, including those of logic and mathematics, is vague and might possibly be false or prone to errors and contradictions.65 For this reason, he suggested that every idea must be subjected to fallibility test. Not only did Peirce not want to strip the foundationalists of their claims to infallible certainty, he also wanted to “keep open the possibility of discovering a rational reconciliation of science with religious values.”66 Kierkegaard was not a dialetheist in the sense we know the term. But in ways similar to how dialetheists make room for some logical contradictions to be true, Kierkegaard makes room for some contradictions to be true in religion. He thinks the key lies in appreciation of paradox. He employs paradox to refute the logical empiricists’ foundationalist claims, like those of Hume who accords privileged status to PNC. Hume and his logical empiricists decide which principles are right or wrong on foundational grounds alone. Even when faced with the religious question, for which logical exemptions can be made, they see no need to re-examine the convictions or intuitions that have been made on logical principles. Here again we see the value of Peirce who insisted “that whatever is supposed to be ultimate is supposed to be inexplicable.”67 Peirce was reacting to the positivist followers of Auguste Comte who tried to replace religion with some “dubious sociological laws” and the positivist followers of Herbert Spencer who wanted to replace religious yearning with “a mechanical philosophy of evolution.”68 Spencer follows along the lines of many positivists and empiricist who, for centuries, held the dogma that contradictions cannot be true. Thus, in the light of Kierkegaard’s appreciation for paradox, we can say that although religion does not call for a revision of the classical laws of logic, as the dialetheists do, there is a religious appetite for contradictions in

150

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

much the same way there is an appetite for contradiction in poetry. We can hold, at least tentatively, that paradox holds the key for the non-viability of the dogma of PNC beyond philosophical logic. Even the dialetheist argument for revision of PNC is anchored on “the phenomenon of paradox.”69 Priest writes: The paradoxes are all arguments with apparently analytic principles concerning truth, membership, etc., and proceeding via apparently valid reasoning, to a conclusion of the form “a and not a.” Prima facie, therefore, they show the existence of dialetheias. Those who would deny dialetheism have to show what is wrong with the arguments – of very single argument, that is. For every single argument, they must locate a premise that is untrue, or a step that is invalid.70

The Paradox of the God-Man Throughout Christian history believers have struggled to characterize the union of two natures in Christ in a way that meets the satisfaction of all the contending parties. The challenge has been complicated by the seemingly endless medieval debate regarding the meanings of “person” and “nature.” Thomas Aquinas held that “a person is a subsisting individual of a rational nature”71 and that “nature is a principle in virtue of which something exists as a supposit of a certain type, a principle that is not caused by any principles of its supposit and does not actualize any potentialities of its supposit.”72 Aquinas distanced himself from any notion that the two natures are united in nature. He draws from the Chalcedonian definition (451 CE) to affirm that the two natures (divinity and humanity) are united in a person.73 The Early Church fought all kinds of heresies stemming from these matters. On one side of the spectrum were those heresies that denied the divinity of Jesus – Arianism and Ebionism. On the opposite end were those heresies that denied Jesus’ humanity – Docetism and Apollinarianism. There was also Nestorianism – that heresy that Jesus was two distinct persons – and Eutychianism – the heresy that Jesus had one blended nature. Many of these heresies stem from the various attempt to reconcile the contradictions of the union between the two natures of Christ.74 Some of the heretics might have been following a semantic approach to contradiction, i.e., that a contradiction cannot be true; that in a sentence with true and false statements, if one is true, the other must be false. Even when the Ecumenical Councils have intervened to condemn heresies and state the orthodox Christian position, like the Chalcedonian affirmation that Christ is truly God and truly man, the decrees of the Councils do not resolve the problem of how to reconcile PNC with Christian doctrine. What the decrees of the Councils do instead is “sharpen the edges of the problem.”75 While orthodoxy might not have offered any satisfactory solution, the affirmations of the Councils at least suggest that Christian orthodoxy was aware of the self-contradiction and knows that there is a way of responding to it, even if its response appears “as mere sand throwing.”76

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 151 In truth, when dealing with Christ, some pairs of contraries or predicates render perplexing our notion of the God-man.77 Take the question of how many esse (existences) are in Christ as an example. Aquinas and the medieval scholastics wrestled endlessly with this question: “Since Christ is one person, it might seem that there is only one esse in him; on the other hand, since he has two natures, it might seem that there are two esse in him, one for each nature.”78 It is a question regarding whether Christ, at the Incarnation, acquired “a second existence of his supposit” (a new existence) and whether after the Incarnation there is “a second existence of nature” (another existence in Christ).79 There are also the questions of whether Christ is impassible and passible and whether one should ascribe simplicity or multiplicity to Christ. Is Christ omnipotent and omniscient or does he have limited knowledge? On the matter of esse, Aquinas’ own answer is that “Christ has one existence from the standpoint of personhood, but not from the standpoint of nature;”80 that Christ also has “a second qualified existence’ (secundum quid). This is to say, “Christ had more than one existence, but not in a way that violates the requirement that he be one person.”81 On the question of impassibility, to get around what seems like an obvious self-contradiction, some theologians recourse to what is called a reduplicative strategy, i.e., that Christ as God is impassible and Christ as man is passible.82 “There will be a relational accident in the assumed humanity, and that humanity will be subject to a mutatio, but there will no corresponding relational accident in the Word, and the Word will not be subject t]o a mutation.”83 Aquinas himself used similar reduplicative phrases: “insofar as he is divine,” Christ is impassible and in so far as he is “qua human,” Christ is passible.84 The suggestion is that divine simplicity can be ascribed to Christ. “To ascribe divine simplicity to Christ is to say that Christ has no multiplicity of constituents derived from his divine nature.”85 The logic of this position is that the assumption that the Aristotelian PNC in all its variety – semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and ontological – holds for everything cannot be substantiated. This is where dialetheism comes handy. From the point of view of proofs, not everything need follow PNC, and from the point of view of models, there are worlds in which contradictions are in fact true.86 The two maxims of truth – Assert what is true and Avoid what is untrue – do not always get along amicably.87 “Were we constrained only by the first maxim, we would assert everything we could think of, whereas if only the second constrained us, we would say nothing at all; but as it is, we must strike a delicate balance.”88 A delicate balance might be by way of admitting that some contradictions are not false – that they might be true. This opens up a window for more appreciation of paradox. It is in the light of this appreciation for paradox that the Tertullian paradox and the Kierkegaard paradox will now be examined. Tertullian Paradox Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus (160 CE–225 CE), known simply as Tertullian, offered many paradoxes as a person and as a teacher. The paradox of his life as a person begins with the fact that he was an African who was a

152

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

master of Latin and Greek rhetoric. As a Christian, he was an outspoken opponent of heresy and ironically was himself suspected of championing heresy.89 Working together with some Latin-speaking Christians of North Africa, Tertullian and these creative minds produced some technical vocabulary, such as Trinity, substance, person, sacrament, and merit, that will later enrich Christian theological vocabulary. These terms received a lot of significance in the whole of the Latin West.90 Tertullian spent much of his life in Carthage. According to his own autobiographical account, before his conversion to Christianity he was married and a pagan. His philosophical influences include Plato and Seneca the Stoic. He was impressed by the constancy of the Christian martyrs in North Africa. It was the faithfulness and steadfastness of the martyrs that influenced his conversion to Christianity.91 As a Christian, he might have been one of the lay elders in North African churches.92 Most of Tertullian’s literary activity came during the reigns of Septimius Severus (193 CE–211 CE) and Caracalla (211 CE–217 CE). North Africa at the time was going through a series of persecution. The persecutions produced notable martyrs, like Perpetua and Felicitas.93 In what now seems like an irony, Tertullian noted how persecution aided the spread of Christianity. He summed up the value of martyrdom to the Church with his memorable phrase, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.”94 Tertullian became the first Latin Father of the Church until he lapsed into Montanist heresy.95 Both before and after he lapsed into heresy, Tertullian “produced a series of theological works remarkable for vigorous reasoning, an unabashed use of legalistic rhetoric against his opponents, and an intransigent acceptance of paradoxical conclusions.”96 He was also a master of antithetical statements. Unfortunately, some of his antithetical statements have been taken out of context to produce a caricature and a falsification of the man.97 Two antithetical statements credited to him standout in this respect. The first is his often-quoted statement, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” The context of this statement was his battle with heretics. He wanted to show that philosophy (like Judaism and natural law in Tertullian’s view) was incomplete without the perfection of Christ and therefore is the source of errors of the heretics.98 The second is the statement he made in his works, On the Flesh of Christ and On the Resurrection to defend the Incarnation and the resurrection of the flesh against the Docetism of Marcion and the Gnostics: credibilie est quia ineptum est [It is credible because it is foolish] and certum est quia impossibile est [often rendered as “I believe because it is absurd”]. These cryptic statements are what go by the Tertullian paradox. It is still debatable whether Tertullian actually added the “absurd” condition to the statement credited to him. There are some who think that the phrase credo quia absurdium [I believe because it is absurd] might have been an Enlightenment invention that was first put out in 17th-century England and furthered and modified by Voltaire to produce the modern version of the paradox. They think that it might have been part of the Enlightenment project to depict religion as irrational and an epistemic vice.99 Whether Tertullian was an author of radical fideism, as the

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 153 Enlightenment project depicts him, or whether he espoused “a lamentable religious credulity” that needs to be contrasted with more rational versions of Christian belief,100 is beyond the scope of this work. Our concern is only to examine the statements credited to him. Our reason for examining the statements is not just because they are counterintuitive, but also because they provocatively assert the impossible event of a divine death and therefore function as a reason for belief, not disbelief.101 Admittedly, we do this against the objections of critics, ancient and modern, who think it mere “sophistry to maintain that the immortal God died.”102 What goes by the Tertullian paradox is at the heart of the Christian belief and Christian theology. In his polemic against the Gnostics and the Docetism of Marcion and Valentinus titled, De Carne Christi [On the Flesh of Christ] (c. 203 CE–206 CE),103 a work he wrote before he became a de facto Montanist, Tertullian attacked Marcion and Valentinus for their claim that Christ was not actually born of the flesh and that Christ was a phantasma of human form.104 The heretical view follows Marcion’s general argument that the idea of the Incarnation of God involves a contradiction. Marcion thought that being born as a human would involve a change in the divine nature and that a change involves a person ceasing to have some attributes and acquiring others. He reasoned that the attributes of God are eternal and since God cannot change, therefore God could not have been born in flesh as man.105 Tertullian responds that Marcion’s refusal to believe in genuine Incarnation could stem “only from a belief either that it would be impossible, or that it would be unworthy, a shameful degradation of the divine nature.”106 Tertullian then goes on to argue that while it might be true of temporal objects that if they change they lose some attributes and acquire others, one cannot suppose the same of God. For to suppose the same of God is to neglect the necessary differences between God and temporal objects.107 Against Marcion’s objection that even if it were possible for God to take real flesh, God could not be incarnated because it would be unworthy of God to do so, Tertullian responds with an accusation that Marcion is trying to subvert the basis of the Christian faith. He suggests that Marcion’s argument stands to destroy the crucifixion and resurrection as well.108 To counter Marcion’s potential wrecking of the Christian faith, Tertullian writes: Answer me this, you butcher of the truth. Was not God really crucified? And as he was really crucified, did he not really die? And as he really died, did he not really rise from the dead? … Is our whole faith false? … Spare what is the one hope of the whole world. Why do you destroy an indignity that is necessary to our faith? What is unworthy of God will do for me … the Son of God was born; because it is shameful, I am not ashamed: and the Son of God died; just because it is absurd, it is to be believed; and he was buried and rose again; it is certain, because it is impossible [Non pudet, quia pudendum est … prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est … certum est, quia impossibile].109

154

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

It is in this response that we find the phrase that goes by the Tertullian paradox. There is in fact a double paradox in the Tertullian paradox. The first paradox is morally outrageous, “Because it is shameful, I am not ashamed.” The second paradox is intellectually outrageous, “It is certain, because it is impossible.” The two paradoxes consider the Incarnation from two different directions.110 Unlike those Christian antagonists who find in the statement some “grave logical difficulties,”111 Tertullian, on his part, chose to revel in the paradox. His reveling in the paradox brings to mind what dialetheists remind us – that there is no simple connection between truth and assertability, even for sentences that are free of semantic defects. They tell us that there are other norms, apart from truthfulness, that we need to worry about, if we want to ascertain that what is uttered in a statement is useful, relevant, and socially appropriate.112 The Kierkegaard Paradox Earlier we noted how Kierkegaard’s vision of paradox is at the heart of the Christian religion. In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard (through his pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus) calls the Incarnation the “absolute paradox.” He suggests that to embrace such a paradox is to embrace “ the absurd.”113 In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard (through his pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus), claims that “the absurd” contains “the contradiction that something that can become historical only in direct opposition to all human understanding has become historical.”114 Although he has been criticized for describing the object of faith as a “contradiction,” by contradiction Kierkegaard does not mean a logical contradiction.115 Scholars of Kierkegaard tell us that when he speaks of “contradiction” here, it is Kierkegaard way of depicting the Incarnation as a unique and an absolute paradox. “Contradiction” in this respect is to be understood as “something that no human mind could have invented, and something that has no parallel in any human philosophy or religion.”116 Kierkegaard’s argument has been likened to that of the medieval greats, like Thomas Aquinas, who distinguished truths that are above reason, truths that reason is not competent to evaluate, from propositions that are against reason, and which reason could therefore know to be false.117 On the basis of this argument, one can understand Kierkegaard as holding that “this fundamental Christian truth is above but not against reason.”118 The Incarnation, for him, represents truth above reason. Kierkegaard thinks that what makes the Incarnation appear contradictory is not metaphysical in character, but ethical. “Insofar as God has created human beings, they have an affinity with him. The absolute difference between God and human beings does not stem from the fact that we are his creatures but from human sinfulness.”119 Shedding further light on what Kierkegaard means, a Kierkegaardian scholar writes: I think we must understand this claim in the following way. The Incarnation is a fundamental mystery to human reason. Even an unfallen human race which had not sinned would not fully understand the actions of a God

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 155 willing to become incarnate for the sake of his creation. The truth of the Incarnation is essentially above human reason s ability. One might say that the limitation of reason here in view is irremediable, one that is rooted in finitude and not sinfulness. However, if human beings were not sinful, their inability to grasp the Incarnation would not be a barrier to belief. Human beings would freely recognize their own limitations and would wonder and marvel at Gods awesome love that is expressed in the Incarnation.120 The very essence of this argument seems to make Kierkegaard “a responsible fideist.”121 Kierkegaard calls the paradox of the God-man the absolute paradox because it is the doctrine of God who has existed in human form, a God who has been born, and grown up, etc.122 He also calls it “the absurd” and the “unintelligible” because it involves a contradiction and this contradiction which constitutes the absurd “is a breach with all thinking.”123 Although it is absurd and in breach with all thinking, “it is nevertheless not ‘nonsense.’”124 When Kierkegaard says the doctrine of the God-man is absurd, “absurd” here for him means “incomprehensible” because we are dealing with a mystery that cannot be resolved by mere thought. This is consistent with Kierkegaard’s earlier definition of faith. For him, faith is not something positive or concrete, but a paradox, a contradiction. Like Socrates’ approach to knowledge that barely resolves things but leaves them open, Kierkegaard’s approach is a negative approach that barely resolves anything. Rather, he chooses to leave the issue wide open as a problem.125 Kierkegaard speaks of faith as “the objective uncertainty with the repulsion of the absurd, held fast in the passion of inwardness, which is the relation of inwardness intensified to its highest…. Faith must not be satisfied with incomprehensibility, because the very relation to or repulsion from the incomprehensible, the absurd, is the expression for the passion of faith.”126 When Kierkegaard speaks of the religious life, i.e., Religiousness B (Christian life), it is always with a view to showing its ascetic component. For him, the paradox of the Christian doctrine of an eternal God who enters into a created world culminates in a realization that one is incapable of doing nothing by one’s self apart from God (self-annihilation). It is a kind of negativity that leads to a new birth.127 The negativity deepens faith, completes the person’s renunciation of the finite, and places them in absolute relation to the absolute God. He sometimes refers to the suffering that comes from faith as the martyrdom of faith.128 “The martyrdom of faith opens the individual to dependence on God’s transcendent transformative activity. The faithful individual ‘breaks’ from ‘immanence’ – that is, he frees himself from the vain delusion that he is ontologically and epistemologically adequate to the truth.”129 In sum, from a Christian point of view, the doctrine of the Incarnation is itself an argument that some contradictions can be true. It opens up avenues for more appreciation of paradox as a theological tool. Not only has the God-man question vis-a vis the valuable insights of dialetheists render the Aristotelian notion that PNC is the most secure of all principles theologically suspect, it also makes discourse on paradox theologically viable. In the light of what we know

156

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

about dialetheism, we can say that Christian orthodoxy, like the Chalcedonian affirmation of the two natures, adheres to the dialetheist principle – that some contradictions are true.

The Doctrine of the Trinity There are three mysterious unions that Christians confess: the union of the divinity and humanity of Christ, the union between Christ and the believer, and the union of the three divine persons. The doctrine of the union of the three divine persons is a logical outcome of the other two unions. It is not that the first two precedes the third, but that they all flow from each other. It is with respect to the limitations of our human understanding of these mysterious unions that Pannenberg writes, “To find a basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, we must begin with the way in which Father, Son, and Spirit come to the scene and relate to one another in the event of revelation.”130 There is a hint of paradox in this differentiation of the persons of the God-head, i.e., in the way Pannenberg suggests that all God-talk must begin with or be founded on a Trinitarian idea of God. It is akin to Karl Rahner’s grundaxiom, which is equally paradoxical in nature: the economic Trinity is the Immanent Trinity and the Immanent Trinity is the Economic Trinity. It was Rahner’s way of addressing the tendency in Christian theology to separate the Trinity from Christian life and spirituality.131 There is even more hint of paradox in the way Pannenberg articulates the way the Creator-God is known to us as Father. Pannenberg begins with the notion that without a Trinitarian idea our understanding of Jesus and the Christ-event will remain shallow. This is because he thinks the differentiation of the God-head is “constitutive of Jesus’ message and attitude.”132 The God Jesus came to proclaim and the message He identified himself with is that of the Creator-God proclaimed by Israelite prophets. It is this God that Jesus calls Father. Pannenberg is aware of the arguments of those critics who think the idea of calling God Father, which has roots in Israelite prophets, is an offshoot of the patriarchal constitution of Israelite family. Critics, therefore, want to jettison the notion of God as Father because they think it is a projection of human gender and that it is now culturally inappropriate for our time.133 Sigmund Freud was one of those critics and he himself identifies the Judeo-Christian Father-God with his Oedipus complex.134 Freud distinguishes between the two forms of the Oedipus complex in boys: one positive and the other negative. The negative form, “which has its origins in the fact that children are bisexual,”135 need not detain us here. The positive form, according to Freud, emerges at a very early age when the boy “develops an object-cathexis for his mother” by virtue of feeding on the mother’s breast. The boy, at the same time, has to deal with his father and tries to do this by identifying with him. The two relationships, according to Freud, “proceed side by side, until the boy’s sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense and his father is perceived as an obstacle to them; from this the Oedipus Complex originates.”136 With the emergence of the Oedipus complex, the boy begins to

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 157 develop a hostile attitude towards his father and now wishes to get rid of him in order to possess his mother. One way of dealing with the Oedipus complex, according to Freud, is that the boy begins to identify with his father. That way, the boy continues to retain the affection of his mother. Freud identifies “religion as the locus in which a boy may continue to express his affectionate desire for the father, but indirectly.”137 Religion, in effect, enables people to act toward their father in terms of the negative Oedipus complex, but in a disguised form that they do not make themselves vulnerable to social censure.138 This is essentially how Freud understands the Judeo-Christian idea of God as Father. Freud aside, there is also the notorious “death of God-theologian, Herbert Braun, who wants to dispense with the term “God” altogether.139 Pannenberg dismisses Freud’s identification of the Father-God with the Oedipus complex and rejects the call to dismiss or revise our notion of God as Father in the light of contemporary changes in gender roles and family structure. “Such a demand would be justified,” he writes, “only if the idea of God were simply a reflection of the prevailing social relationships. This is a view which ultimately presupposes a projection theory of ideas of God after the manner of Feuerbach.”140 Very early in his career, Pannenberg had given attention to the paradoxical understanding of God as “Father.” In what seems like a catechetical instruction to his Lutheran faithful, he writes: Is the description of God as Father not an obvious reflection of a patriarchal order of society? And if that is the case, can this word still be considered the natural expression of our experience of God in the altered conditions of present-day society? In answering such questions we must first notice that the creed does not simply make the baptismal candidate state that God is his Father; it talks about the Father per se, namely the Father of Jesus of Nazareth. Accordingly, it is not primarily speaking, important whether we can appropriately talk about God in relation to ourselves through the image of the fatherhood; the name “Father” identifies the God about whom the creed is talking about as the God of Jesus.141 Thus, when Pannenberg insists that both the Old and New Testaments support the “concept of fatherhood as the norm,”142 he is in fact speaking of a metaphorical or paradoxical understanding of the term “Father” when applied to the Creator-God. Christian antagonists often to point to the contradictions in the doctrine of the Trinity, as they do with the Incarnation, and use it as a basis for dismissing Christianity as a true religion.143 The deist, Thomas Jefferson, ridiculed the mystery of the Trinity as “unintelligible.” He called it an abracadabra and hocus-pocus “incomprehensible to the human mind that no candid man can say he has any idea of.”144 John Locke (1632–1704), in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), suggested that an abstract triangle “must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon; but all and none of these at once.”145 Each time George Berkeley (1685–1753) quoted this Lockean idea of an abstract idea-triangle, he did it with derision

158

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

and frustration because he found it annoying. He thought Locke’s idea of triangle has obvious “starring contradictions.”146 Analogously, Christian controversialists see the same kind of “starring contradictions” in the doctrine of the Trinity. Here we return again to the dialetheist idea regarding some true and false statements that are defensible and believable. We know that PNC states that no contradiction can be true. But the nature of what a contradiction entails is now being contested by logicians who themselves now speak of as many as 240 and counting variants of what contradiction could mean in logic.147 Priest in “What’s So Bad About Contradictions?” distinguishes between believing some contradictions and believing all contradictions and concludes that it is rationally defensible to believe some contradictions.148 What Priest and other dialetheist are trying to do is help resolve some difficult problems in the theory of truth. They are not asking that we accept indiscriminately all contradictions, but that we “accept them in cases that have already been acknowledged as pathological.”149 Dialetheism is a counterforce to PNC in so far as it affirms that some propositions (truth bearers) are both truth and false. It is the idea that truth and falsity come inextricably intermingled, like a constant boiling mixture, and that “one cannot, therefore, accept all truths and reject all falsehoods.”150 The doctrine of the Trinity falls within the boundary of those contradictions that are believable and defensible. The Christian believes in a God, who is One, and Unity, and God who is Triune. Each time a Christian affirms this creed, the Christian is affirming a logical or empirical paradox.151 When Christians affirm the creedal formula of the Trinitarian Godhead, they are using the mystery of faith to deny the logic of PNC.152 Rahner used this Trinitarian doctrine to show how God is both remote and near to us. He was not unaware of the age-old dualism of the transcendence and immanence of God. What he tried to do is use the doctrine of the Trinity to bridge this dualism. His starting points of theology is a paradoxical one – that human beings are creatures oriented towards an ineffable mystery, God. He speaks of Jesus Christ as man in a radical way and that Jesus is the full and complete revelation of God who does not want to offer us anything but God’s self. Rahner writes: It is only through this doctrine that we can take with radical seriousness and maintain without qualifications the simple statement which is at once so very incomprehensible and so very self-evident, namely that God himself as the abiding and Holy Mystery, as the incomprehensible ground of man’s transcendent existence is not only the God of infinite distance, but also wants to be the God of absolute closeness in a true self- communication, and he is present in this way in the spiritual depths of our existence as well as in the concreteness of our corporeal history. Here lies the real meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 137.

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 159

Conclusion In recent times, the Principles of Non-Contradiction, which since the time of Aristotle was taken to be a dogma in logic, is now been contested. The dialetheists are in the forefront of the push to revise inferential reasoning so as to accommodate some difficult problems in the theory of truth. It is difficult for a religious believer who sees reason in the dialetheists argument not to want to extend their suggestion to the religious realm. Is the religious realm not the realm where contradictions have been acknowledged as pathological? Religion is a realm of difficult truths. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation of the Son of God is a realm in which the contradictory and the “absurd” are taken to be true. The logical outcome of the “absurdity” of the Incarnation is another compelling “absurdity” of the Trinitarian doctrine that Lonergan humorously characterized with the formula 5-4-3-2-1-0. The formula means that in the Godhead are to be found 5 characteristics or notions, 4 relations, 3 persons, 2 processions, 1 God, and 0 proof.153 The paradoxicality of this belief shows that in the very least, the notion that no contradictions can be true is a problem of logic, not of reality. Dietrich Bonhoeffer could not have expressed the paradox any better when he stated that God lets Himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which He is with us and helps us. For, only the weak God can help us.154

Notes 1 For social and political import of the play, see Jonathan Gill Harris, “The Smell of Macbeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 58 (2007), 465–86. 2 See C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 3 Evans, “Kierkegaard and the Limits of Reason,” 1023. 4 Ibid., 1035. 5 Beall, “True and False – As If,” 197. 6 See Werner Jaeger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). 7 Patrick Grim, “What is a Contradiction?” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 49–72. 8 Michael D. Resnik, “Revising Logic,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 178–94. 9 Bryson Brown, “Knowledge and Non-Contradiction,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 126–55. 10 Michael L. Ross, “Aristotle On ‘Signifying One’ at Metaphysics I.4,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 25 (1995), 375–94. 11 See Jan Lukasiewicz, “Aristotle on the Law of Contradiction,” in Articles on Aristotle, Metaphysics, Vol. III, edited by J. Barnes, M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji (London: Duckworth, 1979), 50–62, 12 See R. Sylvan, “What is that Term Designated Negation?” In What is Negation? Edited by D.M. Gabby and H. Wansing (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 316. 13 Laurence Goldstein, “The Barber, Russell’s Paradox, Catch-22, God and More: A Defense of a Wittgensteinian Conception of Contradiction,” in The Law of NonContradiction, 295–313.

160

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

14 See Graham Priest, “The Logic of Paradox,” Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8 (1979), 219–41. 15 See J.C. Beall, “Introduction: At The Intersection of Truth and Falsity,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Graham Priest, J. C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 1–19. 16 See Graham Priest, In Contradiction:] A Study of the Transconsistent (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987). 17 Priest, “The Logic of Paradox,” 219. 18 Ibid., 220. 19 See R.M. Dancy, Sense and Contradiction in Aristotle (Reidel: Dordrecht, 1975) and Lukasiewicz, “Aristotle on the Law of Contradiction,” 50–62. 20 Beal, “At The Intersection of Truth and Falsity,” 2. 21 Ibid., 3. 22 Ibid. 23 See Priest, In Contradiction. 24 Neil Tennant, “An Anti-Realist Critique of Dialetheism,” in The Law of NonContradiction, 355–84. 25 Donald L. Gelpi, The Gracing of Human Experience: Rethinking the Relationship Between Nature and Grace (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), vii. 26 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 14, Method in Theology, edited by Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 221. 27 Ibid., 221–22. 28 See Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 3, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, eds, Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 1992. 29 The origin of these phrases is far from clear. There are some who trace them to two American psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–95) who in 1955 used these phrases in their quest to develop a technique for helping people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. The phrase is now popularly used within National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, used the phrase in February 2002 in a news briefing when asked to give evidence linking the Iraqi government to weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups. 30 The origin of these phrases has been traced to two American psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–95) who in 1955 used the phrase in their effort to develop a technique to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. The phrase is now popularly used within National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, used the phrase in February 2002 in a news briefing when asked to give evidence linking the Iraqi government to weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups. 31 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 10, Topics in Education: The Cincinnati Lectures of 1959 on the Philosophy of Education, edited by Robert M. Doran, et.al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 89. 32 See Joseph A. Komonchak, “Horizon,” Commonweal (April 10, 2014), online: www.commonwealmagazine.org/horizons; accessed December 27, 2021. 33 Ibid. 34 Lonergan, Insight, 555. 35 See John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, revised edition (London: SCM, 1977). 36 See John Macquarrie, In Search of Deity: An Essay in Dialectical Theism [The Gifford Lectures 1983–84] (London: SCM, 2014). 37 Tim Bradshaw, “Macquarrie’s Doctrine of God,” Tyndale Bulletin, 44 (1993), 1–32.

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 161 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63

64 65

Macquarrie, In Search of Deity, 31. Bradshaw, “Macquarrie’s Doctrine of God,” 5. Macquarrie, In Search of Deity, 31. Bogger, The Uses of Paradox, 33. Pseudo Dionysius, The Complete Works, translated by Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 264. See Brown, “Knowledge and Non-Contradiction,” 126. Ibid., 129–30. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Renascence editions, online: https://scholarsbank.uore gon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/748/leviathan.pdf; accessed December 1, 2021. See David Hume, Natural History of Religion, with an introduction by John M. Robertson (London: A. and H. Bradlaugh Bonner, 1889). See David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited with an introduction by H.E. Root (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1957). See Anton Thomsen, “David Hume’s Natural History of Religion,” The Monist, 19 (1909), 269–88. Ibid. Matthew Bagger, The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 25. See Otavio Bueno and Mark Colyvan, “Logical Non-Apriorism and the ‘Law of non-Contradiction,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 156–75. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 157. See A. Tarski, “On The Concept of Logical Consequence,” in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers From 1923–1938, 2nd edition (Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 1983), 409–20. See W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 20–46. See H. Putnam, “The Logic of Quantum Mechanics,” in Mathematics, Matter, and Method: Philosophical Papers, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 174–97. See Harry Field, Science Without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1980); Harry Field, “The A Prioricity of Logic,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96 (1996), 359–79; Harry Field, “Epistemological Nonfactualism and the A Prioricity of Logic,” Philosophical Studies, 92 (1998), 1–24; and Harry Field, “A Priority As an Evaluative Notion,” in Truth and the Absence of Fact (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 361–69. Bueno and Colyvan, “Logical Non-Apriorism and the ‘Law’ of Non-Contradiction,” 158. Ibid. Brown, “Knowledge and Non-Contradiction,” 128. Ibid. Richard Bernstein, “Charles Sanders Peirce and the Nation,” in Charles Sanders Peirce Contribution to the Nation Part One: 1869–1893, compiled and annotated by Kenneth Laine and James Edward Cook (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech Press, 1975), 18. Resnik, “Revising Logic,” i181. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes I-VI, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1935) and The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes VIIVIII, edited by Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). See CP 6.466; 496; 499 (citation is reference to volume and paragraph number).

162

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

66 Phillip P. Wiener, ed., Charles S. Peirce Selected Writings: Values in a Universe of Chance, with an Introduction by Phillip P. Wiener (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 345. 67 CP 6.173. 68 Wiener, Charles S. Peirce Selected Writings, 345. 69 Greg Littmann and Keith Simmons, “A Critique of Dialetheism,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 314–35. 70 Priest, In Contradiction, 11. 71 Michael Gorman, Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) ,4. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 49. 74 C.F.J. Williams, “A Program for Christology,” Religious Studies, 3 (1968), 513–24. 75 Ibid. 76 R.T. Herbert, Paradox and Identity in Theology (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press. 1979), 88. 77 Ibid., 80. 78 Gorman, Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union, 101. 79 Ibid., 103. 80 Ibid., 104. 81 Gorman, Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union, 116–17. 82 Ibid., 162. 83 Ibid., 66. 84 Ibid., 127. 85 Ibid., 57. 86 See Greg Restall, “Laws on Non-Contradiction, Laws of the Excluded Middle, and Logics,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 73–84. 87 Vann, McGee, “Ramsey’s Dialetheism,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 276–91. 88 Ibid. 89 See Everette Ferguson, “Tertullian,” Expository Times, 120 (2009), 313–21. 90 Ibid., 313. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 314. 94 Ibid. 95 Bernard Williams, “Tertullian Paradox,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Anthony Flew and Alasdair McIntyre (London: SCM Press, 1955), 3–21. 96 Ibid., 4. 97 Ferguson, “Tertullian,” 315. 98 Ibid. 99 See Peter Harrison, “I Believe Because It is Absurd: The Enlightenment Invention of Tertullian’s Credo,” Church History, 86 (2017), 339–64. 100 Ibid., 340. 101 James Anderson, Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 1. 102 Anthony F. Buzzard and Charles F. Hunting, The Doctrine of the Trinity: Christianity’s Self-Inflicted Wound (Lanham, MD: International Scholars Publications, 1998), 82. 103 See Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ; online: www.tertullian.org/articles/evans_ca rn/evans_carn_04eng.htm; accessed November 21, 2021. 104 Williams, “Tertullian Paradox,” 4. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid., 5.

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 163 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 16. See Ronald E. Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox: Critical Studies in Twentieth Century Theology (London: Watts, 1966), 2. Ramsey’s Dialetheism,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 276–91. See Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 2nd edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 211. Evans, “Kierkegaard and the Limits of Reason,” 1027. Ibid., 1029. Ibid., 1030. Ibid. Ibid., 1029. Ibid., 1031. Ibid., 1033. Herbert, Paradox and Identity in Theology, 80. Ibid. Ibid., 81. John Stewart, Soren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 129. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 611. Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 26. Ibid. Ibid., 27. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol.1, 299. See Karl Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Crossroad, 1999). Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 263. See Lain Taylor, Pannenberg on the Triune God (New York: T. and T. Clark, 2007), 23–24. See Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, translated by Catherine Jones (London: Hogarth Press, 1939). For more, see Donald Capps, “The Oedipus Complex and the Role of Religion in the Neurosis of Father Hunger,” Pastoral Psychology, 49 (2000), 105–119. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, Standard edition (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 31–32. Capps, “The Oedipus Complex and the Role of Religion in the Neurosis of Father Hunger,” 108. Ibid. See Herbert Braun, Jesus der Mann aus Nazareth und seine Zeit, 2nd edition (Berlin: Kreuz Verlag Stuttgart, 1969). Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol.1, 262. Wolfhart Pannenberg, The Apostles’ Creed in the Light of Today’s Questions (London: SCM, 1972), 31. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 262. See Anthony F. Buzzard and Charles F. Hunting, The Doctrine of the Trinity: Christianity’s Self-Inflicted Wound (Lanham, MD: International Scholars Publications, 1998). Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, ix. As cited in R. M. Sainsbury, “Option Negation and Dialetheias,” in The Law of Non-Contradiction, 85–92, 91. Ibid.

164

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

147 See Grim, “What is a Contradiction?” 49–72. 148 See Graham Priest, “What’s So Bad About Contradictions?” in The Law of NonContradiction, 23–38. 149 Resnik, “Revising Logic,” 193. 150 Priest, In Contradiction, 124. 151 Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1966), 169. 152 Ibid., 170. 153 See Cyril Orji, A Semiotic Christology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021), 166. 154 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone Publishing, 1997).

Bibliography Anderson, James. Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007. Bagger, Matthew. The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Beall, J.C. “Introduction: At The Intersection of Truth and Falsity.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 1–19. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Beall, J.C. “True and False – As If.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 197–216. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Bernstein, Richard. “Charles Sanders Peirce and the Nation.” In Charles Sanders Peirce Contribution to the Nation Part One: 1869–1893. Compiled and annotated by Kenneth Laine and James Edward Cook. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech Press, 1975. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. New York: Touchstone Publishing, 1997. Bradshaw, Tim. “Macquarrie’s Doctrine of God.” Tyndale Bulletin, 44 (1993), 1–32. Braun, Herbert. Jesus der Mann aus Nazareth und seine Zeit. 2nd edition. Berlin: Kreuz Verlag Stuttgart, 1969. Brown, Bryson. “Knowledge and Non-Contradiction.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 126–155. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Bueno, Otavio and Mark Colyvan. “Logical Non-Apriorism and the ‘Law of non-Contradiction.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 156–175. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Buzzard, Anthony F. and Charles F. Hunting. The Doctrine of the Trinity: Christianity’s Self-Inflicted Wound. Lanham, MD: International Scholars Publications, 1998. Capps, Donald. “The Oedipus Complex and the Role of Religion in the Neurosis of Father Hunger.” Pastoral Psychology, 49 (2000), 105–119. Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Dancy, R.M. Sense and Contradiction in Aristotle. Reidel: Dordrecht, 1975. Dionysius, Pseudo. The Complete Works, translated by Paul Rorem New York: Paulist Press, 1987.

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 165 Evans, C. Stephen. C. Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Evans, C. Stephen. C. “Kierkegaard and the Limits of Reason: Can There Be a Responsible Fideism?” Revista Portuguessa de Filosofia, 64 (2008), 1021–1035, Ferguson, Everette. “Tertullian.” Expository Times, 120 (2009), 313–321. Field, Hartry. Science Without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1980. Field, Hartry. “The A Prioricity of Logic.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96 (1996), 359–379. Field, Hartry. “Epistemological Nonfactualism and the A Prioricity of Logic.” Philosophical Studies, 92 (1998), 1–24. Field, Hartry. “A Priority As an Evaluative Notion.” In Truth and the Absence of Fact, 361–369. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Standard edition. London: Hogarth Press, 1961. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. Translated by Catherine Jones. London: Hogarth Press, 1939. Gelpi, Donald L. The Gracing of Human Experience: Rethinking the Relationship Between Nature and Grace. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001. Goldstein, Laurence. “The Barber, Russell’s Paradox, Catch-22, God and More: A Defense of a Wittgensteinian Conception of Contradiction.” In The Law of NonContradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 295–313. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Gorman, Michael. Aquinas On the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Grim, Patrick. “What is a Contradiction?” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 49–72. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Harris, Jonathan Gill. “The Smell of Macbeth.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 58 (2007), 465–486. Harrison, Peter. “I Believe Because It is Absurd: The Enlightenment Invention of Tertullian’s Credo.” Church History, 86 (2017), 339–364. Hepburn, Ronald E. Christianity and Paradox: Critical Studies in Twentieth Century Theology. London: Watts, 1966. Herbert, R.T. Paradox and Identity in Theology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, Renascence editions. Online: https://scholarsbank.uoregon. edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/748/leviathan.pdf; accessed December 1, 2021. Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Edited with an introduction by H.E. Root. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1957. Hume, David. Natural History of Religion, with an introduction by John M. Robertson. London: A. and H. Bradlaugh Bonner, 1889. Jaeger, Werner. Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957. Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Kierkegaard, Soren. Philosophical Fragments, 2nd edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. Littmann, Greg and Keith Simmons. “A Critique of Dialetheism.” In The Law of NonContradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 314–335. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.

166

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol.3, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 3, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 14, Method in Theology. Edited by Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 3, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 10, Topics in Education: The Cincinnati Lectures of 1959 on the Philosophy of Education. Edited by Robert M. Doran et.al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Lukasiewicz, Jan. “Aristotle on the Law of Contradiction.” In Articles on Aristotle, Metaphysics, Vol. III, Edited by J. Barnes, M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji, 50–62. London: Duckworth, 1979. Macquarrie, John. Principles of Christian Theology. Revised edition. London: SCM, 1977. Macquarrie, John. In Search of Deity: An Essay in Dialectical Theism. The Gifford Lectures 1983–1984. London: SCM, 2014. McGee, Vann. “Ramsey’s Dialetheism.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays, 276–291. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley ArmourGarb. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Orji, Cyril. A Semiotic Christology. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. The Apostles’ Creed in the Light of Today’s Questions. London: SCM, 1972. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology, 3 vols. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1988–97. Peirce, Charles Sanders. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, volumes I–VI. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–35. Peirce, Charles Sanders. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, volumes VII– VIII. Edited by Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Charles S. Peirce Selected Writings: Values in a Universe of Chance. Edited with an Introduction by Phillip P. Wiener. New York: Dover Publications, 1958. Priest, Graham. “The Logic of Paradox.” Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8 (1979), 219–241. Priest, Graham. In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987. Priest, Graham. “What’s So Bad About Contradictions?” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays, 23–38. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Putnam, H. “The Logic of Quantum Mechanics.” In Mathematics, Matter, and Method: Philosophical Papers, 2nd edition, 174–197. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Quine, W.V. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View, 20–46. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953. Rahner, Karl. Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. New York: Crossroad, 1997. Rahner, Karl. The Trinity. New York: Crossroad, 1999. Resnik, Michael D. “Revising Logic.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 178–194. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.

The Incarnation and the Logical Principle of (Non)-Contradiction 167 Restall, Greg. “Laws on Non-Contradiction, Laws of the Excluded Middle, and Logics.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 73–84. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Ross, Michael L. “Aristotle On ‘Signifying One’ at Metaphysics I.4.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 25 (1995), 375–394. Sainsbury, R.M. “Option Negation and Dialetheias.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley ArmourGarb, 85–92. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Stewart, John. Soren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Sylvan, R. “What is that Term Designated Negation?” In What is Negation? Edited by D.M. Gabby and H. Wansing. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999. Tarski, A. “On The Concept of Logical Consequence.” In Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers From 1923–1938, 2nd edition, 409–420. Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 1983. Taylor, Lain. Pannenberg on the Triune God. New York: T. and T. Clark, 2007. Tennant, Neil. “An Anti-Realist Critique of Dialetheism.” In The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, 355–384. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Tertullian. On the Flesh of Christ. Online: www.tertullian.org/articles/evans_carn/eva ns_carn_04eng.htm; accessed November 21, 2021. Thomsen, Anton. “David Hume’s Natural History of Religion.” The Monist, 19 (1909), 269–288. Williams, Bernard. “Tertullian Paradox.” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology. Edited by Anthony Flew and Alasdair McIntyre, 3–21. London: SCM Press, 1955. Williams, C.F.J. “A Program for Christology.” Religious Studies, 3 (1968), 513–524.

7

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma, Dialogue, and the Search for A Metalanguage of Discourse

The human response to transcendent mystery is adoration. Adoration finds expression in worship.1 Adoration and worship can be performed in many ways and often involve words. Words have their meanings within in a theological and cultural context. Cultural contexts do not come hardwired or fixed. They are always ongoing and developing. When different cultural contexts come together, they often collide and clash. The clash creates a problem regarding the meaning of words used in worship. Now we are left with an ambivalent situation in which what started as a mystery becomes a problem. “While mystery is very different from the problem of common sense, of science, of scholarship of much philosophy” Lonergan writes, “still the worship of God and, more generally, the religions of mankind stand within a social, cultural, historical contexts and by that involvement, generate the problems with which theologians attempt to deal.”2 The mystery-problem polarity inevitably creates a situation in which what was in earlier times taken for granted has to be rethought and re-articulated anew to accommodate a new way of understanding, making dialogue inevitable. The term “dialogue” has become a ubiquitous theoretical concept and is now often used as a synonym of intersubjective encounter.3 It is in fact often undervalued and often misrepresented in some quarters. The goal here is to put it in context. There is an inevitable tension in the religious quest. It is primarily an ineluctable tension between self-transcendence and a refusal to transcend (self as immobilized). In the latter, i.e., self as refusing to transcend or immobilized, can be situated some Enlightenment thinkers with polemical agenda against religion. Among these are David Hume (1711–76), George Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), and the 19th-century atheist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Hume thought all religions exhibit “appetite for absurdity and contradiction.”4 Herein lies a key difference between the self-transcendent person whose response to transcendent mystery is adoration and the self-immobilized person whose response is doubt or skepticism. The former grasps the logic of paradox in religious systems – how religion is an encounter with merciless beauty. The latter is caught in the Kantian world – attempting to relate moral reasoning to historical religion. Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion noted what he thought was das Ungeheure – the monstrosity of God’s appearance in DOI: 10.4324/9781003299820-8

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

169

human flesh in the man Jesus. Hegel’s “monstrosity of God” has since found expressions in the various forms of “Death of God” theology, viz, Nietzsche, atheism, secularism, de-transcendentalism, and even disenchantment with modernity.6 All these can immobilize a person and inhibit one’s quest for transcendence. There is also the original sin of religion – violence. In his work on the sociological work on the nature of religion, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) posits that religious beliefs and practices are socially constructed and intimately bound up with social institutions. By that he meant that religious beliefs are intrinsically bound up with social organizations such that a people’s proclamation of their belief system is a simultaneous proclamation of their solidarity with a social group.7 It is this coupling of religious beliefs and rituals with social institutions that breeds violence and intolerance. Violence finds expressions in various ways, including hate speech, physical and moral harm, and religious wars. Even religious enthusiasts would agree that these unfortunate events have not helped their cause. The rise and fall of civilizations have often hinged on religion. The ambivalence of religion in this respect seems like it will forever remain with us. Religion can and do play positive roles in promoting democratic principles and fostering peace in society. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission remains a good example of how religion can be used to foster peace and harmony. There are also the classic examples of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. who used religion as a political strategy for non-violent movements. But religion can and do also play a negative role in decline of society. The religious conflicts in Africa are a good case in point of the role of religion in promoting intolerance, hatred, conflicts, and wars leading to a demise of society.8 Scott Appleby has aptly captured the ambivalence of religion in his work, The Ambivalence of the Sacred. 9 In this work, Appleby details how the ambivalence of religion has led to the development and institutionalization of the “public” vs. the “private” realms of life as separate cultural and social spaces in the modern West. The polarity came about as a response to “the vicious hatred” of religiously inspired wars that plagued Europe from the 1560s to the 1650s. Appleby castigates the Spanish Catholic conquistadors and the English Puritan theocrats for carrying their crusading mentality to the New World. He also implicates religion in the imperial project of the colonial expansion of the British and French Empires that controlled at the time the modern territories of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, North and South America, the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East.10 Appleby argues that the litany of religion’s offenses inspired and sustained Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideologies that targeted religion in the 20th-century Russia, Eastern Europe, and China. In several other places religion was also used as “the cultural prop of oppressive regimes that exploited workers made passive by promises of a heavenly reward for injustices meekly borne.”11 In the United States of America where religion was not used as a cultural prop of oppressive regimes, it was the reaction against religion that led to the public-private polarity that informs much of the United States’ attitude to religion as modes of social behavior, Appleby argues. The prevailing assumption being that religion is private affair, not 5

170

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

a public matter, an assumption that is enshrined in the US Constitution on the separation of Church and State. There is also the disconcerting fact of oppressive religious attitudes towards women by the major religions of the world, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. In these religions can be found “innumerable instances of religiously legitimated discrimination against women.”12 There is a further irony that Appleby notes. Despite the efforts of the West to contain religion and limit its sphere of influence in the public sector, in nonWestern countries, such as the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, billions of people structure their daily routines and traditional practices around religion. Their dressing attitudes, eating habits, gender relations, and negotiations of time and space “all unfold beneath a sacred canopy.”13 Even their politics and civil society are suffused with religion. Appleby observes that it is not uncommon in these societies for political leaders to demonstrate and even exaggerate the depth of their religious commitment. Thus, Appleby concludes from all these that as it turns out, public religion is neither the bane of society nor its victim. For, the religious resurgence in most of the Southern Hemisphere helps to prove this. Even in the West where the Enlightenment wall of separation between Church and state has been erected, “religious institutions increasingly assume prominent roles, and religion and politics keep forming symbiotic relations: ‘The New Christian Right,’ ‘political Islam,’ ‘Jewish fundamentalism,’ and ‘Hindu nationalism’ are among noteworthy hybrids.”14 Appleby infers from this that religion in many cultures have largely been unaffected by the public-private distinction and that even in places that religion has been significantly deprivatized, it “could hardly be said to be in decline.”15

Are Nones Caught in a Buridan Dilemma? Despite Appleby’s optimism that religion is not in decline, in the West where the wall of separation between church and state, sacred and secular, is well distinguished, many find religion off putting for some of the reasons outlined already. Religion, generally speaking, is one of the five basic social institutions all societies possess. The other four collaborating institutions are marriage (helps in reproduction), family (helps in assimilation), education (helps in socialization of members into society), economy (helps in basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing), and the political system (meets the need for law and order and governance). These five are considered basic institutions because they meet the fundamental needs of humans in social groups or society.16 The last four answer questions that have to do with material needs. Only religion answers questions pertaining to the mysteries of life: suffering, death, and afterlife, etc. In the United States, as in most of the industrial West, religion is not static, it is increasingly becoming fluid. Not only are religions changing, individual Europeans and Americans are also frequently undergoing religious changes. They are either finding religion, dropping out of religion, or switching from one religion to another.17 Sociologists have noted a plummeting religious

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

171

affiliation among Christians in the past three or four decades. It got to a crescendo at the turn of the century to the point that the decade 2000–10 was branded the horrible decade for religion. Secularism aside, many other factors, all bothering on various forms of violence, have been responsible for the decline. Factors ranging from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States to the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church, and even to cultural wars, such as homosexuality and abortion, have all been adduced as reasons for this “religious recession.”18 The recession, brought about by distrust of organized religion, at least in United States and Europe, has created a buffer zone for those who have disavowed religion. In this buffer zone are a collection of people, particularly young people who have come to be called nones. They are so-called because they report no religious affiliation. In another twist of irony, the nones have become the third largest “religious” group in the United States (after Protestants and Catholics). The United States was built on Protestant ethic or principles. Ironically, the mainline Protestants in the United States today are now only about 14 percent of the population, compared to the nones who make up 17 percent. It means that the ranks of nones have been growing while the mainline Protestants are shrinking.19 There is a legitimate diversity within the nones. A sizeable population describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” By spiritual they might mean a range of things that include the fact that they are “seekers.” By “not religious,” they simply mean to affirm their disdain for conventional religion. They espouse a Kantian-like idea that one can be morally good without adhering to a particular religion and that one, in fact, does not miss anything without religion. Regardless of how one understands the logic they use to justify their position, the antinomy here is difficult to miss. Religion and spirituality are traditionally linked. It is difficult to be religious without being spiritual and vice versa. Spirituality is a profound aspect of religion.20 What sociologists and demographers have yet to do adequately with this data is uncover how these two groups are a legitimate criticism of religion, notwithstanding that it veers towards cynicism. Cynicism does not give the truth about the human condition.21 Thus, the nones and/or the “spiritual but not religious” seem to find themselves in a Buridan dilemma: remain in religion and be a critical force or opt for an alternative and end in cynicism. “Criticism of what in faith is inevitably impure,” observes Henri de Lubac, “can only be done from within and in the form of faith. To be healthy, such criticism can only be a demand of faith.”22 As a comparison by contrast, in the history of ideas, the nones are like the English poet of the Elizabethan era, William Shakespeare (1564–1616), while the “spiritual but not religious” are like the English philosopher and critic, popularly referred to as the “prince of paradox,” Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936). Both Shakespeare and Chesterton, as do the nones and the “spiritual but not religious,” experienced religion in difficult ways. Shakespeare emerged from a Catholic world in an age that had too much interest in religion and became what some would call a pseudo-Protestant. Chesterton emerged a Catholic from a world with little interest in religion. To be Catholic in a Protestant world of Chesterton was akin to

172

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

being religious in an agnostic era–both a contradiction in terms.23 Here is another fascinating paradox: the name Chesterton today is invoked as a metaphor for Christian orthodoxy. Chesterton’s claim that on the cross God himself became an atheist is an ironic use of a term that Chesterton devoted his whole adult life combating. Perhaps Edward Oakes was on to something in his remark regarding “death of God” theology when he insisted that atheism is far more ideologically unstable than many people think and that intellectually serious atheism cannot merrily trash religion.24 In other words, historicists who verge towards atheism are ironically not as historicist as they purport to be. Thus, the dilemma nones and “spiritual but not religious” find themselves in is a metaphor for living a life with little interest in religion. At issue here is not religion. At issue rather is a basic form of ideology that justifies human alienation in the guise of religion. In the Buridan’s Ass paradox, the ass, finding itself between two identical bales of hay, is caught between choosing the bales of hay on the left and the bales of hay on the right. If the ass chooses to starve to death, it is because it finds no reason for moving one way rather than the other. Either way, the ass starves to death. Are the Nones the new Buridan Ass? Moral Vision and Dilemma of Religious Language Eric Voegelin notes something peculiar about technical language. He observes that in order to be intelligible, the language of discourse takes one of the several ethnic, imperial, and national languages that have developed since antiquity, “although it does not seem to be identical with any of them.”25 While it is not identical with anyone of these ancient and modern languages, it still leaves specific traces of meaning in the language used.26 The quest for truth has developed and is still developing a language of its own, Voegelin continues. In this process of development, we are left with equivocal use of language. “The equivocation is induced by the paradoxical structure of consciousness and its relation to reality.”27 Throughout the history of ideas, especially in the Renaissance when Paradox flourished in the arts and paintings, equivocation has been used by the paradoxists as a protection against detractors. In the Praise of Folly, for example, “Erasmus could answer that it was not he who had made rude remarks about monks, bishops, cardinals, and popes, but Folly who had spoken the words.”28 Paradox requires a language that can penetrate the depth of ironies, double meanings, ambiguities, ambivalence, and deceptions of a linguistic utterance. Even if we do not acknowledge it, most us have been brought up in a linguistic tradition that values ironies, double meanings, ambiguities, ambivalence, and paradox, although some more so than others. However, there is no autonomous, non-paradoxical language available anywhere to communicate the paradoxical structures of reality and consciousness. “Language participates in the paradox of a quest that lets reality become luminous for its truth as a thing intended.”29 Perhaps this is why paradox demands of the paradoxer a total control over expression and thought, which the paradoxists can manipulate with ease.30 For paradox is outside of the realms of what can be paraphrased. “If it can, it is flat and dull; if it is flat and dull, then it is not a paradox.”31

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

173

Paradox is an intellectual construct that is self-critical in its technique. “Though paradoxes are in one sense entirely self-sufficient in their self-reference, in another (and paradoxical) sense, they are also unalterably dependent upon society.”32 Society (assuming the role of an audience) is trained to expect the unexpected and desires to be surprised by the use of language. A successful paradox is one that satisfies by surprise, by its twist, and by its gimmick.33 For these and other reasons, broadly speaking, paradox is a vital characteristic of much of religious language.34 Religious language can have some disruptive effects on society. There are different kinds of religious utterances. There are commands as “Thou shall not use the name of thy Lord in vain” (Exodus 20:7). There are promises, such as “destroy this temple and in three days’ time I will raise it up” (John 2:19). There are reprimands, “For whom the Lord loves He chastens” (Hebrews 12:6). It is particularly disastrous to ignore religious language.35 In religious constructs, almost any insight deemed important is either couched in poetic form or is stated in paradoxical terms.36 The audience of religious language are trained to expect to be surprised. They are trained to expect the unexpected. There is a plethora of examples in the Wisdom literature of both Jewish and Christian Bible in which paradoxes are used in the way we have described here. They often carry double meaning and are used to delight and surprise. The 13th-century Persian poet and Islamic (Sufi) mystic, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, equally has many sayings attributed to him about the paradoxical nature of human freedom, which is found in acceptance of suffering and death. The lines from Sufi mystic in Table 7.1 have resonances in the Buddhist use of koan. Buddhists are masters of koan – a succinct paradoxical statement, anecdote, or question. Koans are unsolvable riddles that Zen masters employ to this day to aid the meditation and discipline of their students. These paradoxical statements or koan are also in the mystical tradition of the 13th-century Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart who employed paradox in a similar manner. Eckhart insists that only one who is empty can transform nature. “The poorer the man is in spirit, the more he is detached, … [and] the more truly he possesses all things.”37 In general, mystics postulate paranormal cognitive states – that human intellect is capable of grasping, no matter how obscurely, religious truths that are formulated paradoxically.38 They “celebrate paradox as the opening or gateway that affords a glimpse of a higher cognitive plane.”39 Table 7.1 Rumi’s Paradoxes Rumi’s Paradoxical Statements These pains you feel are messengers, listen to them. We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us. The moment you accept what troubles you have been given, the door will open. Keep silent because the world of silence is a vast universe. Lose your life, if you seek eternity.

174

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Religious responses to paradox inform religious practices.40 They also inform the religious people’s understanding of and acceptance of suffering. All the major religions of the world recognize that the key to a well-fulfilled life is acceptance of suffering and death. These at times pose a problem – theodicy. There are several examples in Jewish wisdom literature: “Be gracious to me, Lord,” (Psalm 6); “I am languishing; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror.” “Why do you stand far off, O Lord?” (Psalm 10); “Why do you hide yourself in time of trouble?” And so it goes on: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13); “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22). Psalm 89 begins with a celebration of God’s goodness and promises and suddenly switches and declares that it has all gone horribly wrong. Psalm 88 starts in misery and ends in darkness: “You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me; my companions are in darkness.” Religions also employ different ways of codifying rules of behavior. Some are stated in propositions that are positively couched, others are stated in propositions that are negative. Even the rules of behavior that are stated in negative propositions are geared towards producing positive outcomes. One of the issues in discourse on paradoxical statements involve negation – that a fact cannot have positive and negative possibilities. How, for example, does a person who has never smoked cigarette answer the question: when did you stop smoking? But ethical rules of behavior that are stated in negative propositions are quite different. There are no appositional terms or contradictions implied in them. However, a paradox is built into these rules to tell the believer, not only what to do, but also what not to do. The Christian Golden Rule, for example, tells the believer what to do: “Do onto others as you would want them to do unto you” (Matt. 7:12, Luke 6:31). A negative rendition, which tells believers what not to do, is found in the Old Testament: “What you do not want done to yourself, you should not do to others” (Tobias 4:16). This also appears in the Confucian ethic, known to the Western world as the Silver Rule: “Do not do to others what you would not like yourself (Analects 12:2).41 Christian theological tradition connects the Golden Rule to the principles of natural law. An anonymous disciple of St. Jerome’s purportedly was the first to make the connection. After him, another commentator, a 9th-century German Benedictine Bishop, Haymo of Halberstadt (778 CE–853 CE), proposed that natural law consists of two precepts: “Do onto others as would you have them do onto you” (Matt. 7:12; Luke 6:31) and “What you do not want done to yourself, you should not do to others” (Tobias 4:16).42 The fact that the Golden Rule is found in different forms in all of the major religions, and the Silver Rule, explicitly stated at least in the Confucian ethic and in the Old Testament, solidifies the claim that these rules appear to the religious believer as precepts of the natural law. Lonergan writes, regarding both of these precepts of the natural law and the paradox in finite wisdom, “No matter how stout-hearted a conceptualist one may be, one cannot as a philosopher escape paradox in the existing world order; one may deny the possibility of a natural desire to see God; but one cannot deny that man by nature can demonstrate the precepts of

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

175

43

the natural moral law.” He also notes that a person observes the precepts of the natural law essentially by the aid of grace.44 Thus, we can summarily make the following deductions regarding religious language: i Religious statements are often paradoxical in that they can seem contradictory or self-defeating. Judaism is defined by its dealing with Torah and mitzvot (divine demands)– faith and works.45 The tension between faith and works is also everywhere present in Christianity. This tension or paradox is an indication that what we are dealing with here is more profound than the double intentionality of religious language.46 The Christian doctrine of creation, salvation, Incarnation, providence, and grace,47 are good instances of how this is more than the multivalent character or double-intentionality of language. Luther must have known something about these. He claimed that the Christian is simul iustus et peccator (at once sinful and justified), an idea that places faith and works, flesh and spirit, Law and Gospel in apposition. Luther’s reformation writings are characterized, among other things, by his creative employment of paradoxical statements, which he uses to stimulate theological ideas. Far more than any other Protestant reformer, Luther thought not only in terms of paradoxical propositions, but also made binary dialectical oppositions that depend on each other for their meaning, not minding their apparent contradictions.48 Even the Heidelberg Disputation (April 1518) of Luther uses varieties of paradoxes to explain and contrast his position from the Catholic view.49 ii Not all paradoxical statements in religious language are obvious. Quite often propositions that appear to be logically incompatible go undetected. This is in part because they can be so subtle that they go recognized. Take, for example, Aquinas’s statement that the human person is “ordered to an end that exceeds reason.”50 There is also Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033– 1109) Ontological argument – that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Kant was alluding to the contradiction in Anselm’s argument when he insisted that existence is not a predicate and that no inference can be made about the existence of something from nothing. Anselm’s argument possibly succumbs to Russell’s paradox, i.e., the assumption that there is “a greater than” generates Russell’s paradox because it purports to prove that all members of the class of most perfect Beings exist and that this class cannot have more than one member.51 iii There are also times that paradoxical expressions are implicit in a metaphorical or other figurative statement. Sometimes they are expressed “within the language that governs role-changes in narrative or ritual.”52 Take the American Emily Dickinson’s (1830–86) poems for example, when she uses the phrase “Burglar! Banker – Father!” it is difficult to tell if she is referring to God or her father.53 Or take example of the Nuer religious discourse that has expressions like, “The twin is a bird,” and “The cucumber is an ox.”54 Explaining these metaphors, Evans Pritchard writes:

176

Exploring Theological Paradoxes When a cucumber is used as a sacrificial victim Nuer speak of it as an ox. In doing so they are asserting something rather more than that it takes the place of an ox. They do not, of course, say that cucumbers are oxen, and in speaking of a particular cucumber as an ox in a sacrificial situation they are only indicating that it may be thought of as an ox in that particular situation; and they act accordingly by performing the sacrificial rites as closely as possible to what happens when the victim is an ox. The resemblance is conceptual, not perceptual. The “is” rests on qualitative analogy. And the expression is asymmetrical, a cucumber is an ox, but an ox is not a cucumber. A rather different example of this way of speaking is the Nuer assertion that twins are one person and that they are birds.55

These are all to say that paradox is everywhere present in religious language. Religious discourse arises from the claim that there is something to be talked about which is at once spatio-temporal and more than spatio-temporal, for religion deals with something which is both real and yet to be realized, something whose possession is final good and yet beyond reach.56 The German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) writes that “the person who takes his religion seriously and cannot tolerate that it gets into contradiction with his knowledge (Wissen), is facing the question whether in conscience he can still honestly consider himself to be a member of a religious community which in its confession (Bekenntnis) contains belief in miracles.”57 The Proper Name for God and the Paradox of Virtue In many respects, the language of religious discourse is engulfed in paradox, very much like the language of philosophy. If there is any difference between the way philosophers and religious believers deal with paradox, it is in this fact – that whereas philosophers think about paradox, religious believers somehow think with paradox.58 This means that truth inevitably confronts us with paradoxes. A world without paradoxes will be a world in which God and humans cannot communicate.59 Since the transcendent deity (an impossibilium) deals in impossibilia, tautology becomes an appropriate way to express our grasp of transcendent deity.60 God reveals God’s self to Moses as “I am Who Am” (Exodus 3:14). In other places the essence of God is known by some negative affirmations about God’s infinity or incomprehensibility, which are by definition paradoxical.61 Infinity, by definition, means “without bounds or limits.” Orthodox Judaism refers to it as the Tetragrammaton, for God is nameless. Medieval Christians were preoccupied with the problem of identifying the most appropriate name for God. Aquinas, following a tradition that was bequeathed to him by the Latin and Greek Fathers, said of all the divine names, the most suitable is “He Who Is” (Exodus 3:14).62 He thought this suitable divine name involves at least two interpretations: it is either more rightly God’s own proper name (as an abstract definition) or the name of a concrete individual who is “Supreme Someone.”63 Thus, there are two ways of avoiding contamination of the divine essence. One way is to use the terms

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

177

of totality regarding divinity: Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Omnipresence. The other way is to use negative or ablative terms: Infinity, Eternity, and Immutability.64 The Greek-Christian theologian of the 5th-to-6th-century CE, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the German theologian and Renaissancehumanist thinker, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), were two good proponents of apophatic (negative theology) and ablative thinking about God. The idea that God should not and cannot be described in positive terms goes back to the Greek philosopher Parmenides (born c. 515 BCE) before its subsequent development in Christian tradition.65 As two of the famous people to develop this Parmenidean idea for Christian theology, both Pseudo Dionysius and Cusa “traveled the via negativa to its logical and rhetorical extremes.”66 They employed the ablative method to avoid lying about what God is and stressed what God is not. Acknowledging that we do not know God’s “superessential, and inconceivable, and unalterable” essence, Dionysius prefers to speak only of God’s “non-relationship to things created.”67 Cusa’s insistence on logico-mathematical identification of anything and everything in God and of the minimum with the maximum in God is within the tradition of paradoxical thinking stemming from Parmenides that seeks “to elicit an idea of God’s transcendent greatness and glory by means of the radical dialectic implied in metaphors of extreme contrast.”68 Cusa, a skilled logician and mystic, wrote two books on learned ignorance. The first is De Docta Ignorantia (1440), in which he suggests that since we cannot grasp the infinity of deity through rational knowledge we should bypass the limits of science through speculation.69 The second is Idiota de Mente [Ignorance About Mind] (1464), a series of four dialogues in which Cusa rejects the humanistic amalgam of secular wisdom and eloquence, as well as the method of pursuing wisdom prescribed by the scholastic method and their fundamental assumptions.70 Some interpreters of Cusa think De Docta Ignorantia should be understood along the lines of “dialectical Christian Platonism” that was inaugurated by Pseudo Dionysius. The latter drew from Plato’s Parmenides to “explore the logic of mutually opposed predications as a way to find an appropriate language to express the mystery of God and the God-world relationship.”71 Cusa’s own work expresses his fundamental attitude towards the mind. “He is at once profoundly rational and profoundly anti-rational, profoundly intellectual and profoundly anti-intellectual. His preoccupation with infinity combines with an insistence upon unity; his idiots, like Socrates and like Folly, know they know nothing.”72 At the time of Pseudo Dionysius and Cusa, the via negativa was a mixed bag. While it might have proven to be a safe path to speak of God, it also came with some difficulties – “its necessary paradoxicality endangered the substance and communicability of every utterance about Deity.”73 Ancient classical texts, particularly in the Hindu and Chinese traditions, understood paradoxes as hinting at limitations of language, i.e., that language cannot go beyond conceptuality. The Tao-Te-Ching opens with a classical apophatic language and from there cascades into a list of paradoxes:

178

Exploring Theological Paradoxes The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.74

For Daoists, the Tao (or Dao) is ineffable and therefore stands outside the realm of language. Since the Dao is ineffable, any attempt to speak of the Dao gives rise to paradoxicality. The legendary Lao Tzu says of the incomprehensible Dao that it is “infinite, boundless, and unnamable” and that if one tries to name it or know it then one has to stop because the Dao is unnamable and unknowable.75 Yet that which cannot be named is the ultimate source of all things with names; to transcend the ream of things with names, it paradoxically inheres in things with names, including human beings.76 The ineffable naming of the unnamable and the ineffable knowing of the non-knowing can only be expressed in a paradox.77 Similarly, Vedic literature uses apophatic language and apparent contradictions or paradoxes to speak of Vedic deities: “There was neither being nor non-being” or “There indeed existed non-being from the beginning.”78 Consider the following paradoxical statements from an ancient text, The Rig Veda (10:129), which raises a good cosmological question, but fails to answer to it: “Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?”79 Classical Eastern way of thinking thought in terms of paradox. For the Eastern mind, the world, at least in the way it appears, is paradoxical. Paradox, for them, is a tool by which language carries out a specified semantic Table 7.2 A Comparison of Daoist-Classical Indian Texts Daoist Text

Classical Indian Sophistry

The south has no limit and has a limit I go to the state of Yue today and arrived there yesterday I know the left of the world; it is north of Yan and south of Yue Love all things equally; the universe is one

A white dog is black Fire is not hot Eyes do not see The shadow of a flying bird never moves

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma 80

179

function. The Hindu philosophical text, the Upanishad, contains paradoxical statements like “It is both far and near; It is within all this and It is outside all this.” The paradoxical statements fulfill “a number of functions that by understanding the gist of them one can penetrate to the heart of the philosophy of religion.”81 There is also the claim that the Self is Brahman. For the Hindu, “it is not self-contradictory to identify that which lies ‘within’ and is discovered in inner mystical insight with the Power out there (so to speak), sustaining the cosmos.”82 The legendary Daoist sage, Laozi, puts forward a view now known as the “paradox of virtue.” This is the view that a conscious pursuit of virtue can lead to a diminishing of virtue.83 The idea that the pursuit of virtue or goodness by itself can produce an opposite effect, i.e., lack of virtue, is comparable to what some modern interpreters of hedonism call the paradox of hedonism. It is a situation in which a person’s conscious attempt to obtain pleasure actually reduces pleasure or even produces displeasure.84 Utilitarianism, another ethical system that tries to maximize happiness, also suggests that if a moral agent always acts just to maximize happiness, it would most actually lead to the failure to maximize happiness. A related paradox of virtue is also found in Confucianism, as well as in Aristotle and Kant. Aristotle held that an important element of arête (virtue) is that one acts virtuously for virtue sake, not for ulterior motive, like acting virtuously to earn good reputation or accolade. Kant also held that one should adopt the moral law as a maxim and act out of duty and that acting from inclination or for the sake of self interest in itself constitutes no moral worth.85 Thus, the irony in these ancient religious systems and the ethical systems that sprang from them is that moral degradation occurs when virtue is pursued as a means to some end outside of virtue itself. This paradox of virtue is more embedded in Eastern religions. There is near unanimity among scholars who study religion that “paradoxical and near-paradoxical language is the staple of accounts of God’s nature and is not confined to rhetorical extravaganza.”86 Nearly everyone agrees that to use propositions based on experience to refer to something transcendent is not without difficulties. Lonergan accepts the thesis that goes back to Aquinas – that we cannot think without concepts. Yet concepts proceed from acts of understanding and to reach acts of understanding one must think.87 One cannot justifiably hold that it is self-contradictory to rely on what is observable to speak about what lies in the world beyond. But one can be justified in thinking of them as unintelligible.88 As N. Smart writes, “because it tends to possess a capacity appropriate to the numinous, because one of its chief functions is expression and thus must be loosely molded to fit the expressive utterance of diverse people, because there is an intrusive ineffability in religion, and because many key religious expressions are used in an analogical rather than a literal sense, spiritual discourse tends to be somewhat imprecise.”89 Thus, religious discourse is involved in all kinds of paradox, revels in them, and considers them illuminating.90 This is because paradox can do what the ordinarily language cannot do or specify. While it is axiomatic that religious discourses revel in paradox, we still need to distinguish mere contradictions

180

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

from sublime paradoxes. In other words, “when is contradiction not a mere contradiction, but a sublime paradox, a mystery?”91 We have indeed answered this question in the previous chapters on Christology (Chapter 5) and the Incarnation (Chapter 6). For it is in the God-man Jesus that we have a paradox that preserves (contradiction) and reveals something (sublime). Beyond Christianity, there are also hints of answer to the question. Consider the following paradoxical statements attributed to Laozi and Zhuangzi. in Table 7.3. They have generated interest because of their intellectual appeal.92 These paradoxes suggest why we should distinguish between what Smart and Ramsey call avoidable paradoxes and unavoidable paradoxes. Avoidable paradox, according to this distinction, occurs when a blunder in an argument leads to a confusion or an obvious self-contradiction. For the most part, the muddle in the argument can be cleared up by retracing the steps of the argument and instead of stating it in negative terms, the argument can be restated in positive terms, which might be in the form of two assertions. Kantian antinomy and the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which in turn generates another paradox waiting to be resolved, are good examples of avoidable paradoxes.93 There is also the famous example cited by Gilbert Ryle concerning a child who finds it paradoxical that “the equator can be crossed but not seen,” since anything that can be crossed, say bridges, roads, hills, etc., must be seen before they are crossed. As Ryle explains it, paradox arises here because of the failure “to distinguish cartographical language and physical object language,” including how to relate them even after distinguishing these two languages.94 Religious discourse has several

Table 7.3 A Comparison of Laozi and Zhuangzi Laozi

Zhuangzi

The brightest way seems dark The way that leads forward seems to lead backward The smoothest way seems uneven

The greatest way does not designate The greatest disputation is speechless

The highest virtue is like a valley The greatest white seems stained The broadest virtue seems insufficient The most solid virtue seems weak The purest authenticity seems soiled The greatest square does not have corners The greatest vessel takes a long time to complete The greatest tone makes little sound The greatest image is without shape

The greatest benevolence is not benevolent The greatest honesty is not humble The greatest hero is not cruel

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

181

95

examples of such negative and resolvable paradoxes. Unavoidable paradox, for its part, “arises from and is bound up with its permanence and unavoidability.”96 Physicists who work in wave and particle theories assert that certain physical phenomena are best treated “in terms of particle mechanics which presupposes that matter is discontinuous; at the same time, other physical phenomena are best treated in terms of wave mechanics which supposes that matter is continuous.”97 The paradox of “matter” and “world” are logically unavoidable in this assertion. A religious example would be doctrine of communicatio idiomatum offered by Cyril of Alexandria (378 CE–444 CE) regarding the two natures of Christ. Cyril insisted “that while the human and the divine natures of Jesus Christ were separate, the attributes of the one could be predicated of the other because of their union in the one person of Christ.”98 Cyril’s view received a seal of approval by the Tome of Pope Leo I (known as Leo the Great and ruled from 440 CE–461 CE) – a letter written by Leo to Flavian, Patriarch of Constantinople, explaining that Cyril’s view was the papal position on the matter. It received conciliar approval at the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE). The paradox here is unavoidable: two natures that are separate are found to be united. While the paradox might need further elucidation, it is by no means a sheer muddle.99 Thus, unavoidable paradox has a justification, i.e., that religious discourse must continue to talk about what is seen and unseen in terms of the language that is available and suited for this discourse.100 Unavoidable paradox willy-nilly makes way for genuine mystery – a sublime paradox.

Supersessionism and Dialogue Jews and Christians share a common ancestry and to some extent the same scripture, i.e., Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament. Christianity and Judaism are also related in both history and logic.101 But by a strange twist, the kinship both religions share has been at one and the same time a basis for mutual understanding, sympathy, and acrimony. Historically, Christianity began within Judaism. Before Christianity, Jews claimed their uniqueness in a Roman dominated world of plurality of religions. This Jewish exceptionalism earned them the right of religious toleration in the Old Roman Empire. They were exempted from the worship of Roman gods and also exempted from the cult of the emperor when later Roman emperors deified themselves. Orthodox Jews spend a whole life quest expecting the Messiah, something Christians claim has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Thus, Christianity takes a stand on the uniqueness of Jesus. Now we have two religious systems in collision with each other, each one laying a prior claim to uniqueness. If “unique” is a term that “forbids comparison by its very assertion,” then for Christians and Jews to claim exclusive possession of uniqueness is a self-contradiction.102 On the basis of the claim to uniqueness, within Christianity itself the early Christian community was fragmented, a problem the apostle Paul raised in his letters. Jewish Christians wanted Gentile Christians to go through the Jewish rite of circumcision. Paul thought the problem was peculiar with the Christian

182

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

community at Antioch. He denounced the Judaizers who were intent on creating a super-ethnic community and schism (Gal. 2:11–14). Some Jewish Christians even went as far as refusing table fellowship with Gentile Christians (Acts 9:27; 11:22ff). While Peter was not guilty of any of these, Paul publicly challenged Peter (and Barnabas) for their tacit approval of Jewish Christian’s practice of avoiding table fellowship with Gentile Christians. No doubt, this was a problem of inter-ethnic tension. By refusing to eat with Gentile Christians, Jewish Christians were affirming their superiority over the Gentile Christians, something that caused a rupture within the community. It meant there no longer was a common table for all to share the Lord’s Supper.103 The inter-ethnic tension that nearly crippled the early Christian community did not take long to resurface in a new form. In the PostConstantine era, when Christianity was solidified in the Roman Empire, some early Christians subjected Jews to conversion because they thought the Jewish faith was inadequate for salvation. A theology of Supersessionism emerged from this (flawed) logic that Christians have replaced Jews as God’s chosen people and that the Mosaic Law had been abolished. Kierkegaard remains a good example of a modern Christian thinker who tenaciously held to the claim of absolute superiority of Christianity over all religions, including Judaism. Steeped in Lutheran theology, Kierkegaard developed a tripartite view of a religious person. For him, a person is either a pagan, a Jew, or a Christian. As if there was an evolutionary movement in his tripartite scheme, he subordinated Judaism to Christianity, irrespective of the fact that the two religions share aspects of the same Scripture. The Supersessionism constitutes an avoidable paradox.104 The antinomy will play out more fully in religious exclusivism, which will be discussed later. Let us tentatively surmise here that the problem with religious exclusivism is that it tends to treat faiths other than one’s own as “a challenge or even a threat.”105 To be clear, there is no suggestion here of any explicit or conscious antiSemitism in Christian doctrine, even if some Christians were guilty of faulty interpretation that lends itself to anti-Semitism. After all, during the Nazi occupation of France, for example, many Christians, including the Jesuit Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), wrote several tracts expressing the incompatibility of Christianity with the anti-Semitism that the Nazis were promoting among French Catholics. The Christian Church today is also increasingly becoming more nuanced in its interpretation of the ancient doctrine, which means it no longer holds a Supersessionism doctrine (if ever it held one) and is moving gradually in the direction of a two-covenant theology. The official two-covenant theology, theoretically at least, has been a basis for appreciation and collaboration. But that is not to say there are no pockets of more conservative groups who still hold to the old position that Jews must be converted before they can gain salvation. A supersessionist view can be a basis for distrust and antipathy.106 Sadly, even up till the last century, some Christian theologians have tenaciously held that “the cross of Jesus means the end of Judaism as a religion.”107 Even Vatican II document, Nostra Aetate, which has been commended for its positive attitude towards Jews who, according to the document, “should not be represented as rejected or accursed by God,” in

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

183

the same paragraph declares that the Christian church “is the new people of God” (NA 4).108 Here another paradox hits us in the face. The basis of Jewish uniqueness is the covenant with God. When Christianity emerged out of Judaism, in the 1st century CE, the basis of its legitimacy was the covenant with God – a covenant that finds its fulfillment in the promised Messiah. Thus, what we see is that many of those Jews and Christians who employ the covenant-language to speak of the divine-human relations firmly believe there could not be two or three or more covenants, but one, and that this one covenant is not divisible into two. What we have then is a situation where the idea of Covenant connects Christians with Jews, while the claim to the same covenant divides them.109 There is yet another irony, this time one of paradoxical duality. The Covenant is universal in that it is God’s blessing to all nations. The Covenant is also particular, since it is by means of one nation (Jews, or Jewish-Christian, depending on whether you subscribe to one or two-covenant theology) that God seeks to realize God’s universal salvific will. Through the Covenant we understand that the mission of God has a universal horizon that is carried out by a particular historical method.110 The covenant theology conundrum is a semantic dilemma for Jews and Christians. Both are caught in a self-referential paradox. Logic has many paradoxes of self-reference. All paradoxes of self-reference or semantic paradoxes either share or are involved in a notion of vicious circularity. They consist of communications that involve conflicting messages, as in the example of this self-defeating statement: “I am lying.” If the statement is true, i.e., that the person who utters it is lying, then objectively the statement is false. But if the person is not telling the truth by claiming he/she is lying, then the statement is false. Paradox of self-reference is, to say the least, a self-refuting utterance that can be shown to be false. Imagine a person who utters the words, “I am now asleep” or “words have no meaning.” The mere fact of making the utterance involves the person in a contradiction.111 Jews and Christians talk much about the Covenant. They use a language defined by them. They also use a set of terms specified by other set of terms specific to their own faith tradition. In paradox of self-reference, a phrase refers to something defined by a set of phrases of which is itself one.112 So even when Christians admit that the Old Covenant has never been revoked, it belongs to the nature of self-referential statements to be benign. Semantic paradox, like the one the language of covenant theology is caught in, is an unresolvable contradiction. Tarski held that no language can define its own truth predicate. His solution to semantic paradox is that no language can be semantically complete as to be capable of saying everything there is to say. Jews and Christians face this dilemma. Could a solution lie not just in a metalanguage that is semantically complete and in a language that has a “metaleptic character?”113 The need for dialogue cannot be more imperative. Such a dialogue must be two-pronged in that it can at one at the same time address inter-religious dialogue and dialogue between religion and science.

184

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Many have contributed to the dialogical turn.114 The scholars who influenced the dialogical turn also see human encounter as essentially interpersonal115 and intersubjective.116 But it is to Martin Buber’s (1878–1965) credit that he made the term “dialogue” more specific, referring to it as a second-person-ness.117 For Buber, human life is essentially an “encounter.” The “encounter” Buber speaks of is not just a human encounter. It can also be an “encounter” with the environment, whether with sentients or non-sentient beings. A faith perspective, for Buber, becomes a distortion, if it does not become a moment of a genuine “encounter.” Buber also insists that a genuine dialogue cannot begin with a commitment of faith because a commitment of faith does no more than steep one into the very religious system one is already commited to. He thinks a genuine dialogue should rather begin with a commitment to “encountering” the other, i.e., seeing the face of the neighbor. This call to put relationship before faith, however, is not Buber-specific in the sense that the idea is not original to him. Buber has many influences and he is quick to acknowledge them too. In addition to the 18th-century Jewish movement, Hasidism, Buber was influenced by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky. Hasidism, led by Jewish mystics, was a movement away from excessive emphasis on law to an emphasis on shared lived experience. Buber does not mince words about his distrust for philosophical systems and always cautions against the dualities that are captured in these systems: good vs evil, love vs justice. Hence, he speaks of dialogue as a phenomenon in which “two persons simultaneously and reciprocally [are] attuned to each other in a second-person mode.”118 Some of the terms Buber uses to refer to this secondperson mode (dialogue) include “relations” or “relationship” (Beziehung), “encounter” (Begegnung) and “reciprocity” or “mutuality” (Gegenseitigkeit).119 The most frequently used, however, is “relation” (Beziehung).120 Although he does not offer a clear definition of what he means by “relation,” Buber’s tendency is to contrast it with other terms and phenomenologically apply it to different contexts, hinting at the idea that it has the attributes of “immediacy,” “presence,” “action,” and “reciprocity” (by which he means mutuality of relation) and allows the reader to pick up the meaning intuitively.121 Later, Buber will identify the two basic concepts in his notion of dialogue as the dialogical principles of I-It and I-Thou, making it clear that I-It conveys a monologue and I-Thou conveys a dialogue.122 The I-It pertains to one’s relations with a thing or the world of objects. The I-Thou pertains to one’s “encounter” with persons and with whomever one desires a genuine relationship. The latter entails dialogue and entry into a world mediated by meaning. This insistence has led one scholar to argue that “throughout the various formulations of Buber’s dialogical thought, one finds a strong linkage between the notions of action and dialogue.”123 This is to say that in Buber’s characterization, “dialogue as action is designed to claim that action – in its perfected form – is necessarily dialogical; that is, performed vis-à-vis a You.”124 Buber’s contribution to the dialogical turn notwithstanding, the AustrianJewish existentialist philosopher is not without his critics. While it is good to

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

185

acknowledge that there are some who have some serious objections to Buber’s thought,125 the objections need not detain us here. Since our goal is to accentuate the paradoxical, it is hard not to see the merit of Buber’s dialogical thought and its contribution to our understanding of paradox, especially the IThou relations, which he intended to be an alternative to the I-It relations and Either-Or relations of secular culture. In the face of duality, what Buber seeks is a paradoxical unity of what one usually understands only as alternatives: love or justice, dependence/freedom, love of God/ fear of God, and unity/duality. Buber writes, “According to the logical conception of truth only one of two contraries can be true, but in the reality of life as one lives it they are inseparable. The person who makes a decision knows that his deciding is no selfdelusion; the person who has acted knows that he was and is in the hand of God. The unity of the contraries is the mystery at the innermost core of the dialogue.”126 Buber often describes his own standpoint as the “narrow ridge.” It was his own way of making it clear “that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed.”127 Thus, Buber’s notion of dialogue and his approach to dealing with dualities are what I advocate when I speak of dialogue in the sections that follow.

The Buridan Dilemma of the Interreligious Other We suggested earlier that the covenant theology discourse is plagued by semantic paradox. In the preceding section, we saw how the semantic paradox rears its head in the truth-claims of Judaism and Christians. But there is also the unresolved issue of the truth-claims of religions other than Christianity and Judaism. This is to say that the truth-claims of religious orthodoxy inevitably includes semantic paradox. “Monotheism’s jealous exclusion of other gods, secured in a covenant that binds together a community, may well abet the violent exclusion of those outside its limits.”128 A great deal of civilizations, both ancient and modern, have been built on religious orthodoxy. The German sociologist and philosopher, Jürgen Habermas (1929–), despite his professed atheism, claimed more recently that without Christianity European civilization will collapse.129 Be that as it may, the moral norms of civilizations are severely threatened by violence stemming from truth-claims of religious orthodoxy. The major religions of the world still have to address the perplexing questions of religious violence. Faith and bloodshed are unhappily intertwined.130 Hindus are persecuting Muslims in Hindu dominated country like India. Muslims are persecuting Christians in countries like Nigeria. Christians are persecuting Muslims in places like Angola, and the list unendingly continues. The Spanish Dominican, Bartholomew De Las Casas (1484–1566) was so appalled by what the Spanish Christian missionaries were doing to the natives in the New World that he called it “the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind.” It is not just that acts of violence are troubling, more troubling

186

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

are their scriptural sanctions. There is also the interpenetration of violence to the religions’ hermeneutics, theology, morality, and other practical matters.131 It is one thing to make a claim regarding a religion’s civilizing function, it is another thing to see the practical evidence of how poisonous religious conflicts are and how they undercut the moral norms of civilizations.132 Religiously inspired violence is not a problem that is peculiar to any one religion. People of all religions kill in the name of their faith. The scriptural sanction of violence comes in many forms. It is not only people of other religions that are objects of scriptural sanction of violence, there are also scriptural sanctions of violence against people of the same religion. “The boundaries within religions, separating orthodoxy from heterodoxy, have also been flashpoints of hostility that often explode into violence.”133 Then there is the other related paradoxical structure of language that has, since antiquity, caused terminological difficulties and controversies, raising questions in philosophical and religious discourses that are yet to be satisfactorily resolved.134 The biblical scholar, John Collins, has done a helpful study of how the Bible has been used to legitimize such violence.135 His study specifically focusses on the problem of herem (the practice in which the defeated enemy was subjected to destruction on God’s orders). He shows that the violence associated with the worship of YHWH very early in Jewish history was most vividly illustrated by the herem, or ban.136 One of the songs of Moses in Exodus explicitly proclaims, “The Lord is a warrior” (Exodus 15:3). Many old hymns celebrate “the triumph of the Lord” (Exodus 5:11). There are far too many scriptural depictions of God’s people, in obedience to God’s command supposedly, carrying out violent actions against people of other faiths or no faith . There is the ancient Israelite slaughter of the Canaanites as divinely mandated, (Deut. 7:1–6 and Joshua).137 Collins carefully points out that the problem is not peculiar to Israel alone. Ancient Israelite neighbors, such as the Moabites, have similar practices. In every religion, not only zealots, but fervent adherents as well, have all invoked their respective scriptures as both inspiration and mandate for violent action. Let us note here, parenthetically at least, since we are dealing with paradox, that in the context of Deuteronomy, “the command to slaughter the Canaanites is not without a certain irony.”138 Deuteronomy is hortatory book that repeatedly reminds the Israelites to show compassion to slaves and aliens because they themselves were once slaves and aliens in Egypt. But the compassion that Deuteronomy exhorts Israel to show to others does not extend to the Canaanites. Also, “the liberation of the Israelites and the subjugation of the Canaanites are two sides of the same coin. Without a land of their own, the liberated Israelites would have nowhere to go, but the land promised to them was not empty and had its own inhabitants. Read from the Canaanite perspective, this is not a liberating story at all.”139 To return to the boundaries separating orthodoxy from heterodoxy with respect to violence that Collins’ study delineates, Collins also carefully exegetes the biblical story of Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the high priest. Phinehas is represented as killing Zimri and his Midianite lover (Numbers 25). This violent killing is set up as a precedent for the violent uprising of

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

187

Mattathias (I Maccabees 1:26) under the notorious Antiochus Epiphanes. These two biblical stories would later become precedents that Western civilization would follow. According to the story in Numbers 25, in Baal-Peor, the Israelites incurred the wrath of Yahweh because they had sexual relations with Midianite women and participated in the sacrifices of these pagan gods. A man named Zimri brought his Midianite lover into his family. Enraged by Zimri’s action, Phinehas took his spear and pierced Zimri and his Midianite woman to death. The action of Phinehas was approved by an oracle proclaimed by Moses. His zeal was approved by the Lord who, as a reward, consolidates the priesthood of the descendants of Aaron, making it “a covenant of perpetual priesthood, because he was zealous for his God, and made atonement for the Israelites” (see Numbers 25:10–15).140 Similarly, the action of Mattathias was approved because he was adjudged to have been “burned with the zeal of the law, just as Phinehas did against Zimri the son of Salu” (I Maccabees 1:26). Phinehas’ zeal, as troubling as it is, has been taken as an exemplary action of how to enforce conformity in the household of God. Christian attempt to dismiss a literal interpretation of these texts have yet to succeed. The patristic attempts to allegorize the violent texts are also no longer viable. Collins could not have said it better: even if we allegorize “that the Canaanites that we should root out are vice and sinfulness, but we still have texts that speak rather clearly of slaughtering human beings.”141 Granted, Collins’ study deals mainly with the O.T., the import of his research speaks to the general stigmatizing violence of organized religion in general. There are violent stories in the N.T. as well. “Even within the fabric of traditions emanating from Jesus, texts of violence stain the whole.”142 Collins sheds light on to how the crusaders, Puritans, colonialists, slave traders and abolitionists alike all used the Bible to justify “the most obvious, even crude forms of violence – the killing of others without the benefit of judicial procedure.”143 The logical question arises: Is the God of scriptural tradition violent? This is an oxymoron. The Bible is supposed to be a book of peace, yet it sanctions violence; a reason for which all through the ages people have used the Bible to justify different acts of violence. Granted, the biblical depictions of a violent God are incongruent with the notion of an all-loving and peaceful God, we still cannot escape the texts and the disciplinary practices resulting from the texts. Are religions then involved in a Buridan’s Ass quandary? Is it a case that we either seek “a mutuality of relations” (Buber’s term for dialogue) or we face the Buridan dilemma? Different hermeneutical strategies have been employed in the dialogue of religions in the attempt to bridge the divide that at times causes violence. In The Principles of Psychology, William James (1842–1910) gives an apt description of the splinter world of the religious divide,144 noting how individuals and groups inhabit their own “sub-universes.” He suggests that the mind simultaneously conceives these sub-universes as more or less disconnected. The sub-universes include the world of sense, the world of science, the world of abstract truths, the world of illusions or prejudice common to a race, the worlds of individual opinions, and world of sheer madness and vagaries, etc.145 The problem is, when dealing with

188

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

one of these worlds, the mind seems to forget its relations with the rest. James goes on to observe that the complete philosopher is one who not only understands how to assign every given object of thought its rightful place in one or other of these sub-worlds, but also knows how to determine the relation of each sub-world to the totality of worlds that make a whole.146 The distance we have created between the self and others, as well as the sub-universes we have generated to separate ourselves –be it by in religion, ethnicity, race, nationality and gender – are perhaps vestiges of postmodernism. Postmodernism requires the balkanization of selfidentity.147 These dichotomous relations have proven to be toxic to religious attitudes. Unless a concerted effort is made to show an appreciation for Buber’s “mutuality of relations” or what Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) calls “the face of the other,”148 we will remain transfixed in our respective sub-universes and religions will be trapped in the Buridan dilemma. In other words, unless we take the “face of the other” as the original locus of the meaningful,149 religious believers face a situation similar, if not more difficult, than the Buridan dilemma.150 In the classic dilemma, the ass is caught between two identical bales of hay. But the ass opts to starve to death rather than move in either direction. If common sense is properly brought to bear with rationality, the religious ass does not have to starve to death. Of little relevance is why the ass opts to eat, say from the left bale, and not from the right bale. But can anyone fault the ass for opting to stay alive? We know that it is contrary both to the well-being of the ass and the law of self-preservation for the ass to choose to starve to death. Therefore, it is not irrational for the ass to eat from either side of the bale.151 The ass, in this case, is religion. The dilemma facing the religions of the world is whether they want to embrace “mutuality of relations,” i.e., “the face of the other” or not. A correct theory of rationality, which is required for this engagement, will not require the religious-ass to tarry for long and remain in a state of indecision.152

The Absurdity of the Text We have shown thus far that religion in its ambivalence can both express and contain violence. Religiously sanctioned violence can be within the religion and outside of the religion. With respect to the former, we saw an “absurdity” (to use Kierkegaardian language) in the story of Abraham who was willing to shed the innocent blood of his son in order to cement Yahweh’s favor. Here one cannot but recall T. S. Eliot’s ironic line, “All cases are unique, and very similar to others.” How is Abraham’s action different from those of some religiously misguided individuals who do the absurd in the name of religion? On November 4, 1995, an Israeli law student, Yigal Amir, led by his religious conviction, executed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. No doubt Amir was an errant fellow who espoused a monocultural or extreme view of what Judaism might or might not permit. But we also need not forget Collins’s admonition that we can no longer accept violent scriptural texts as a simple presentation of what happened in the past. Scriptural texts “are not naive reflections of primitive practice but programmatic ideological statements from the late 7th century BCE

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

189

or later.” Violent scriptural texts incite violence not only against “outsiders” but “insiders” as well. Unfortunately, the violence they incite are beyond time. Ironically in religious discourse, religious diversity is at times seen as both a problem and a solution. Whether as in Oliver Cromwell’s persecution of Catholics in Ireland or the Puritan persecution of Native Americans in the 17th century or in the wars of religion in Europe that pitted Catholics against Protestants and Protestants against Reformed or the never-ending religious skirmishes in Africa and other parts of world, religious conflicts are a biological weapon. They undercut the moral norms of society. Ironically, dialogue partners might have more in common than they are ready to accept. Their worlds might even coincide, even if only partly. A mutual attunement is needed to recognize the extent to which “other people’s world is now my own and my world is now their own” and to recognize that we have passed over to the world of the other.154 An attempt to resolve the Buridan- religious dilemma ought to begin with a de-problematizing of religious diversity. The thinness of mutual tolerance between the religions represents the thinness of the piles of hay on each side of the ass in the classical story. Collins noted in his work that it is not the explicit language of violence in the biblical text that is the problem, but the appeal to divine authority in the use of these texts to give “an aura of certitude” to whatever position we support that is the real problem.155 In inter-religious dialogue, where religious diversity can at times seem like a problem, unfortunately, “God-like certainty” of the dialogue partners stops all discussion.156 God-like certainty is analogues to the ass making a firm decision to starve to death rather than move in either direction of the piles of hay. There are already some meaningful examples of how to avoid the Buridan dilemma. During the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, Germany, like many countries that came up with laws about how to contain the virus and prevent it from spreading, had guidelines about the number of people who could gather in public settings. Germany limited public gatherings to no more than 50 people at a time. During the Ramadan fast in May of that year, some Christian churches in Berlin offered their churches to Muslims for worship. Many Muslim worshipers split themselves into groups of fifties and used Christian churches for worship. That way they did not violate the public ordinance law that limited public gathering to 50 people. This show of goodwill on the part of German Christians is a good instance of “mutuality of relations.”. The “mutuality of relations” needs to be extended to other avenues of life. In sum, one of the enduring insights of Collins’ work is the paradox of violence of the text that he has uncovered. His recommendation is that we read these troubling texts with compassion, repentance, reconciliation, and appreciation. Dialogue partners sometimes become victims of captivity of certitude on matters of which they have incomplete information and insufficient research. “The Bible has contributed to violence in the world precisely because it has been taken to confer a degree of certitude that transcends human discussion and argumentation. Perhaps the most constructive thing a biblical critic can do toward lessening the contribution of the Bible to violence in the world is to show that certitude is an illusion.”157 153

190

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Religion and Science Dialogue The human response to transcendent mystery, which we have identified as adoration, implies a divine-human communication. All involved in this unique event have a vital role to play in making the divine-human communication coherent. From the time of Anselm of Canterbury up to the 12th century, when theology became an academic discipline and when theological discipline moved from the monasteries to universities, like Oxford, Paris, Naples, Rome, and Bologna, theology was an exclusive preserve of priests and bishops who were considered by all account academic theologians. Even among the ancients too who took the study of religion seriously, the study of human-God encounter was left to professionals, gurus, and philosophers who in their various ways developed methods of uncovering the truth-value of religious discourse. Despite the claim of theologians and religious elites to have mastered and preserved the methods of theological inquiry, non-theological disciplines (economics, history, and biology) and the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, psychology), and even the natural and physical sciences, have all also contributed to our understanding of religion.158 It is ironic that theology for a long time considered these other spheres to be off limits in the study of God. In turn, these sciences also considered theology to be irrelevant to their own methods and goals of inquiry. Yet both theology and the sciences make reasonable assumptions about God and the world at large. It is relatively more recent that these disciplines have started to come together again to resolve their discordant engagement with the other in a world that irrefutably needs both spheres of activities. Christianity, Catholic Christianity at least, has long maintained that truth should be pursued freely, since all knowledge points towards God who is the Supreme Truth. Since any coercion regarding understanding stands to defeat this objective, we can say, in principle at least, that the Church has always been on the side of free scientific inquiry.159 But the principle was somehow lost along the way. The Anglican theologian and founder of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, John Milbank (1952–), suggests that the trend had been gaining momentum since the Counter-Reformation – that it was from this point that the Catholic Christianity began to lose sight of the Thomistic paradox of the natural desire for the supernatural that was well articulated by Cardinal Cajetan. Since then, he argues, Catholic support for science has waned and have instead been moving along the lines of duality of the realms of reason and faith.160 Milbank who was himself influenced by Thomas Aquinas, is working out of the tradition of Henri de Lubac, a tradition that seeks solution to the nature-grace dialectic in the paradox that creation is a free gift of God, which in turn paradoxically means that grace in its strict sense is “a gift to the gift.”161 Markus Locker’s work on the many ways that paradox fosters dialogue between religion and science reminds us of Aristotle’s idea in the Metaphysics that truth is the knowledge of the essence of things. There Aristotle asserts that essences are fundamentally singular.162 Locker reasons from it that if truth is the knowledge of the essence of things and essences are singular as Aristotle

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

191

asserts, then we can infer that it is “not possible to say or hold two fundamentally different ‘truths’ concerning the essence of a single object or being at the same time”163 Both science and religion aim at communicating the fundamental and elementary truths about the world and the human person’s place in it. Yet both disciplines are convinced of their methods and the truths of their findings. Locker raises the question whether we should assume that the epistemic “truth systems” of science and religion are quintessentially incommensurable. He thinks this is where dialogue, as “a special form of communication that rests on the possibility of the mutual acceptance of assertions with regard to a common object” becomes imperative.164 First and foremost, if either or both disciplines think they are communicating the ultimate truth of the object in question, he argues, “then all that can be said about it is already uttered by only one, or the other partner of the dialogue.”165 But dialogue is a “dynamic exchange of partially ‘true’ statements;” it fosters understanding and generates more knowledge until progressively the real essence of the object is revealed.166 Human existence is full of paradoxes and idiosyncrasies. “Paradoxes permeate the world with endless possibilities of thought and meaning. They invigorate the mind and allow the soul to breathe.”167 Locker argues convincingly that contrary to what the analytic mind of the modern person might think, it is paradoxes that make life more meaningful. He sees paradoxes as a phenomenon that emerges in both scientific systems and religious discourses because all truth systems show glimpses of the primal truth in the form of paradoxes. Therefore, paradoxes “provide what neither the sciences nor religion can produce at will: the lapsi philosophicum that, while not turning metal into gold, embeds scientific and religious truths in their common origin: the paradox as the main domain where contradicting truths do not contradict each other, but form a higher form of truth from which all truths flow and to which all truths converge.”168 A world without paradoxes, he tells us, “is a world in which God and man cannot communicate.”169 I interpret this to mean that a world without paradoxes will be a world in which religion (science of God) and science (study of cosmos and human place in it) cannot engage each other. The heuristic value of paradox in science-religion dialogue, which both disciplines recognize, makes it imperative that the dialogue remains inherently open, such that “what, in truth, is true can and must never be settled, decided or proven.”170 The sheer recognition of paradoxes requires the dialogue partners to be open and to accept and invite new and creative ways of conceiving and communicating their ideas.

Conclusion The human response to mystery is paradoxical. The divine-human interactions willy-nilly unfold in paradoxical ways, since paradox is God’s default way of acting.171 Paradoxes might not be synonymous with reality, but they are essential to human conceptions and communications of those assurances that are native and original within faith.172 As in the literary tradition, some theological paradoxes are more effective and more adequate than others. This means that

192

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

there are situations in which paradoxes are always provisional, not ultimate version of reality. No paradox is to be assumed to be final or assumed to encompass everything to be said in the divine-human encounter.173 The religions of the world have been mired in ideological constraints. It shows in the uncertainty of how to approach paradox as avenues of truth. There is no evidence that Bible or the scriptures of any of the major world religions, offer a clear-cut, definitive template on the question of divine violence and how it should inform the believer’s faith and practice. The Bible, like any other scripture, can shape the believer’s thinking and actions most effectively only when the believer allows the sacred text to inform how they see and respond redemptively to the violence that saturates our world.174 Buber who always insisted on the “unity of contraries” saw it as a virtue to be adopted when confronted with religious paradox. This basic insight should not be missed. We lose to our imperil his basic insight: that while the logical conception of truth might hold that only one of two contraries can be true, in the reality of life we find ourselves in, the two contraries are inseparable. “The person who makes a decision knows that his deciding is no self-delusion; the person who has acted knows that he was and is in the hand of God. The unity of the contraries is the mystery at the innermost core of the dialogue.”175 Buber’s affirmation is “a locus classicus for the confrontation and resolution of religious paradox.”176 People on different sides of the religious question and those on different sides of the religious divide have a lot to gain from the “unity of the contraries.” But that can only be reached when concerted efforts are made to free one’s self from ideological constraints, coupled with a commitment to encounter the world of one’s dialogue partner with a spirit of mutual exploration.177 Thus, paradox can be used as a tool for dialogue. This will help to build bridges and strengthen confidence in our mutual capacity for understanding and respect.178

Notes 1 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 14, Method in Theology, edited by Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 318. 2 Ibid. 3 Asaf Ziderman, “Martin Buber’s Dialogical Thought as a Philosophy of Action,” The Journal of Religion, 101 (2021), 371–87, 373 (see footnote 6). 4 Matthew Bagger, The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1; quoting David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), 54. 5 See G.F.W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion; The Lectures of 1827, edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 6 See Austin Harrington’s review in Max Weber Studies, 10 (2010), 121–25. 7 Lester R. Kurtz, “Gulen’s Paradox: Combining Commitment and Tolerance,” The Muslim World, 95 (July 2005), 373–84. 8 See Cyril Orji, Ethnic and Religious Conflicts in Africa: An Analysis of Bias, Decline, and Conversion Based on the Works of Bernard Lonergan (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2008).

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

193

9 See R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 10 Ibid., 2. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 3. 14 Ibid., 4. 15 Ibid. 16 See M.D. Litonjua, “Spiritual, But Not Religious: Untangling a Seeming Paradox,” International Review of Modern Sociology, 42 (2016), 21–55. 17 See Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and United Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 550. 18 Litonjua, “Spiritual, But Not Religious,” 32. 19 Ibid., 24. 20 Ibid., 21. 21 Henri de Lubac, Further Paradoxes, translated from the French by Ernest Beaumont (London: Longmans, 1958), 30. 22 Ibid., 111. 23 Peter Murphy, “‘I Am Not What I Am’: Paradox and Indirect Communication – the Case of the Comic God and the Dramaturgical Self,” Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 1 (2009), 225–35. 24 Edward T. Oakes, “Atheists and Christians Together,” First Things (July 2009), 56–58. 25 Charles R. Embry and Glenn Hughes, eds, The Eric Voegelin Reader: Politics, History, Consciousness (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017), 355. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1966), 38. 29 Embry and Hughes, The Voegelin Reader, 317. 30 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 34. 31 Ibid., 35. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Daniel Gold, “The Paradox in Writing on Religion,” Harvard Theological Review, 83 (1990), 321–32. 35 Bernard Williams, “Tertullian Paradox,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Anthony Flew and Alasdair McIntyre (London: SCM Press, 1955), 3–21. 36 Gold, “The Paradox in Writing on Religion,” 323. 37 As cited in Brian J. Davis, “‘Emptiness Makes Water Flow Uphill’: Eckhart, Justice, and Mercy in the Dominican Tradition,” Medieval Mystical Theology, 25 (2016), 121–36. 38 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 40. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 41. 41 See Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius, translated (New York Vintage Books, 1938). 42 See George Klosoko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 533. 43 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, Collection, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 86. 44 Ibid.

194

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

45 Arthur J. Lelyveld, The Unity of Contraries: Paradox as a Characteristic of Normative Jewish Thought (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1984), 17. 46 Ibid. 47 See Donald M. Baillie, God Was In Christ: An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement, 2nd edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 111–14. 48 Carlos Eire, A Brief History of Eternity (Princeton, MJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 129. 49 For a good study of Luther’s use of paradoxes, see an unpublished paper by Trevor O’Reggio, “Martin Luther: Master of Paradoxes” (2019), online: https://digita lcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2011&context=pubs; accessed May 20, 2020. 50 Summa Theologiae 1, q. 1, a.1. 51 See Christopher Viger, “St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument Succumbs to Russell’s Paradox,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 52 (2002), 123–28. 52 Tony Edwards, “Play, Ritual, and the Rationality of Religious Paradox,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 5 (1993), 7–25. 53 See Emily Dickinson, “I Never Lost as Much But Twice,” in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little Brown, 1960), 27. 54 I. T. Ramsey and N. Smart, “Paradox in Religion,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 33 (1959), 195–232. 55 Ibid; quoting Evans Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 128. 56 Ramsey and Smart, “Paradox in Religion,” 205. 57 As cited in Markus E. Locker, “And who shaves God? Nature and role of paradoxes in ‘science and religion’ communications: ‘A case of foolish virgins,’” Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 1 (2009), 187–201. 58 Edwards, “Play, Ritual, and the Rationality of Religious Paradox,” 9. 59 Locker, “And who shaves God?” 189. 60 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 24. 61 Ibid. 62 See Armand Maurer, “St. Thomas on the Sacred Name Tetragrammaton,” Medieval Studies, 14 (1972), 275–86. 63 See Heather M. Erb, “Being and Mystic: The Metaphysical Foundations of Thomas Aquinas’ Mystical Thought,” Verbum VI (2004), 135–59; referencing Thomas Aquinas S.T. I q.13. a.11. 64 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 24. 65 Ibid., 145. 66 Ibid. 67 See Part II of Dionysius the Areopagite, Works: On the Heavenly Hierarchy, translated by John Parker (London: James Parker, 1987), 7–8; online: www.docum entacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/0450-0525,_Dionysius_Areopagita,_Works,_EN.pdf; accessed November 14, 2021. 68 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 25–26. 69 See Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia [On Learned Ignorance], edited by Paul Wilpert (Minneapolis, MN: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1981); online: https://jasp er-hopkins.info/DI-I-12-2000.pdf; accessed November 14, 2021. 70 See Nicholas of Cusa, The Idiot in Four Books; online: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/ cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=eebo2;idno=A87710.0001.001; accessed November 14, 2021; Eugene. F. Rice, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958); Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); M. L. Fuehrer, “Wisdom and Eloquence in Nicholas of Cusa’s ‘Idiota de Sapientia and de Menta,’” Virarium, 16 (1978), 142–55. 71 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 34.

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

195

72 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 27. 73 Ibid., 145. 74 Lao-Tzu, Tao-Te-Ching, translated by S. Mitchell; online: http://thetaoteching. com/taoteching1.html; accessed December 3, 2021. 75 Sthaneshwar Timaisina, “Bharthari and the Daoist on Paradoxical Statements,” Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion, 23 (2018), 5–24. 76 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 62. 77 See Keiji Nishtani, Religion and Nothingness, translated by Jan van Bragt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982). 78 Timaisina, “Bharthari and the Daoist on Paradoxical Statements,” 10. 79 Bagger, The Uses of Paradox, 59. 80 Timaisina, “Bharthari and the Daoist on Paradoxical Statements,” 15. 81 Ninian Smart, Reasons and Faith: An Investigation of Religious Discourse, Christian and Non-Christian (London: Routledge, 1965), 20. 82 Ibid., 221. 83 Hektor K. T. Yan, “A Paradox of Virtue: The Daodejing on Virtue and Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy East and West, 59 (2009), 173–87. 84 Ibid., 175. 85 Ibid. 86 As cited by Ramsey and Smart, “Paradox in Religion,” 195; quoting Ronald W. Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox: Critical Studies in Twentieth Century Theology (Winnipeg: Pegasus, 1968). 87 Lonergan, Collection, 146; see footnote 7. 88 See R. N. Smart, “The Criteria of Religious Identity,” Philosophical Quarterly, 8 (1958), 328–41. 89 Ibid., 334. 90 Ramsey and Smart, “Paradox in Religion,” 195. 91 Ibid. 92 See Wim De Reu “Right Words Seem Wrong: Neglected Paradoxes in Early Chinese Philosophical Texts,” Philosophy East and West, 56 (2006), 281–300. 93 Ramsey and Smart, “Paradox in Religion,” 196. 94 Ibid., 197. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid., 196. 97 Ibid., 199. 98 Ibid., 200. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., 217. 101 Gabriel Moran, Uniqueness: Problem or Paradox in Jewish and Christian Traditions (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1992), 6. 102 Ibid., 7. 103 Christos Karakolis, “Church and Nation in the New Testament: The Formation of the Pauline Communities,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 57 (2013), 361–80. 104 See George B. Cornell, Kierkegaard and the Paradox of Religious Diversity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 29. 105 Ibid., 90. 106 See Paul H. Vieth, “Protestant Churches and Intercultural Relations,” The Journal of Educational Psychology, 16 (1943), 390–94. 107 See Henri Blocher, “Two Covenant Theology and its Implications for Jewish Missions,” in Jesus, Salvation and the Jewish People: The Uniqueness of Jesus and Jewish Evangelism, edited by Paul Parker (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 184–208. 108 See Nostra Aetate, online: www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_coun cil/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html; accessed April 9, 2020.

196

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

109 Moran, Uniqueness, 63. 110 See Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, ILL: IVP Academic, 2006). 111 Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford Paperback Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 345. 112 Ibid., 346. 113 Embry and Hughes, The Eric Voegelin Reader, 382. 114 see Dmitri Nikulin, On Dialogue (New York: Lexington Books, 2005). 115 See John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (Glasgow: Williams and Collins, 1976), 459. 116 See Lonergan, Method in Theology (see the last chapter on the functional specialty Communications. 117 See Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Israel Koren, The Mystery of the Earth: Mysticism and Hasidism in the Thought of Martin Buber (Boston: Brill, 2010).; Alexander Kohanski, Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Interhuman Relations: A Response to the Human Problematic of Our Time (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982). 118 Ziderman, “Martin Buber’s Dialogical Thought as a Philosophy of Action,” 373. 119 See Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937). 120 Ziderman, “Martin Buber’s Dialogical Thought as a Philosophy of Action,” 374. 121 Ibid., 375. 122 See Martin Buber, “Dialogue” in Between Man and Man (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1–45; see also Martin Buber, “Distance and Relation” (1950), in Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 59–71. 123 Ziderman, “Martin Buber’s Dialogical Thought as a Philosophy of Action,” 380. 124 Ibid., 381. 125 See Nathan Rotenstreich, “The Right and the Limitations of Buber’s Dialogical Thought,” in Paul Schlipp and Maurice Friedman, eds, The Philosophy of Martin Buber (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967), 130–32; Nathan Rotenstreich, Immediacy and Its Limits: A Study in Martin Buber’s Thought (Chur: Hardwood, 1991). 126 Martin Buber, Israel and the World, Essays in a Time of Crisis (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 17. 127 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Kegan Paul, 1947), 184. 128 Jay Martin, “The Paradoxes of Religious Violence,” Salmagundi, 130 (2001), 31–38. 129 Edward T. Oakes, “Atheists and Christians Together,” First Things (July 2009), 56–58. 130 Martin, “The Paradoxes of Religious Violence,” 34. 131 David J. Neville, “Moral Vision and Eschatology in Mark’s Gospel: Coherence or Conflict?” The Journal of Biblical Literature, 127 (2008), 359–84. 132 Martin, “The Paradoxes of Religious Violence,” 31. 133 Martin, “The Paradoxes of Religious Violence,” 34. 134 Embry and Hughes, The Voegelin Reader, 357. 135 See John J. Collins, Does the Bible Justify Violence? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004). This book, which was a short address Collins delivered to the Society of Biblical Literature, was previously published as “The Zeal of Phinehas: The Bible and the Legitimation of Violence,” The Journal of Biblical Literature, 122 (2003), 3–21. I shall be citing from the two texts. 136 Collins, “The Zeal of Phinehas,” 5. 137 See Collins, Does the Bible Justify Violence? 138 Collins, “The Zeal of Phinehas,” 9. 139 Ibid. 140 Ibid., 12.

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150

151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175

197

Ibid., 19. Neville, “Moral Vision and Eschatology,” 360. Collins, Does the Bible Justify Violence? 4. See Louis Roy, “Principles of Fruitful Interreligious Dialogue: A Few Suggestions,” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue, 29 (2019), 158–83. See also William James, The Principles of Psychology Vols I and II (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1950). Roy, “Principles of Fruitful Interreligious Dialogue,” 161. Ibid; referencing James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, 291. See Michel C. Johnson, “Towards a Metamodern Academic Study of Religion and a More Religiously Informed Metamodernism,” Hervormde Teologiese Studies, 73 (2017), 1–11, 6. As cited in Collins, “The Zeal of Phinehas,” 9; quoting Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 23. Collins, “The Zeal of Phinehas,” 9 (see footnote 28). Jonathan L. Kvangig, “Religious Pluralism and the Buridan’s Ass Paradox,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 1 (2009), 1–26, 1. Although I use aspects of Jonathan Kvangig’s work, my argument is essentially different from that of Kvagig. Kvagig takes issue with religious pluralists for taking soteriological significance to all religions. I calling for dialogue, regardless of the deficiencies in the usual classification schemes of inclusivism, exclusivism, and pluralism. Kvangig, “Religious Pluralism and the Buridan’s Ass Paradox,” 8. Ibid., 8. Collins, “The Zeal of Phinehas,” 11. Roy, “Principles of Fruitful Interreligious Dialogue,” 182. Collins, “The Zeal of Phinehas,” 20. Ibid; quoting Hannah Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time,” in Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, edited by Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 181–82. Collins, “The Zeal of Phinehas,” 21. Jay R. Feierman, “The Image of God to Whom We Pray: An Evolutionary Psychobiological Perspective,” Pensamiento, 67 (2011), 817–29. John Milbank, “The Last of the Last: Theology, Authority, and Democracy,” Revista Portuguessa de Filosofia, 58 (2002), 271–98. Ibid. Oakes, “Atheists and Christians Together,” 56. See Aristotle, The Metaphysics: Books I-IX, ed. By H. Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Locker, “And Who Shaves God?” 188. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 189. Ibid., Ibid. Ibid., 194. Cephas T.A. Tushima, “The Paradox of the New Testament Concept of unmerited Grace and Conditional Forgiveness in Mathew’s Gospel,” Africa Journal of Evangelical Theology, 30 (2011), 3–13. Roger Hazelton, “The Nature of Christian Paradox,” Theology Today, 6 (1949), 323–35. Ibid. Daniel L. Hawk, The Violence of the Biblical God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019) [eBook; no page numbers]. Buber, Israel and the World, 17.

198

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

176 Lelyveld, The Unity of Contraries, 1. 177 Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 87. 178 Ibid.

Bibliography Appleby Scott, R. The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000. Arendt, Hannah. “To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time.” In Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age. Edited by Ron H. Feldman, 181–182. New York: Grove Press, 1978. Aristotle. The Metaphysics: Books I-IX. Edited by H. Tredennick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Online: www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/home.html; accessed December 14, 2021. Bagger, Matthew. The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Baillie, Donald M. God Was In Christ: An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement, 2nd edition. London: Faber and Faber, 1961. Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Blocher, Henri. “Two Covenant Theology and its Implications for Jewish Missions.” In Jesus, Salvation and the Jewish People: The Uniqueness of Jesus and Jewish Evangelism. Edited by Paul Parker, 184–208. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011. Buber, Martin. “Dialogue” in Between Man and Man, 1–45. New York: Routledge, 2002. Buber, Martin. Between Man and Man. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. London: Kegan Paul, 1947. Buber, Martin. “Distance and Relation” (1950), in Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays, 59–71. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. York: Harper & Row, I and Thou, trans by Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937). York: Harper & Row, Israel and the World, Essays in a Time of Crisis. New York: Schocken Books, 1948. Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Collins, John J. Does the Bible Justify Violence?Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004. Collins, John J. “The Zeal of Phinehas: The Bible and the Legitimation of Violence,” The Journal of Biblical Literature, 122 (2003), 3–21. Cornell, George B. Kierkegaard and the Paradox of Religious Diversity. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016. Cusa, Nicholas. De Docta Ignorantia [On Learned Ignorance]. Edited by Paul Wilpert. Minneapolis, MN: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1981. Online: https://jasper-hopkins.info/ DI-I-12-2000.pdf; accessed November 14, 2021. Cusa, Nicholas. The Idiot in Four Books. Online: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/ text-idx?c=eebo2;idno=A87710.0001.001; accessed November 14, 2021. Davis, Brian J. “‘Emptiness Makes Water Flow Uphill’: Eckhart, Justice, and Mercy in the Dominican Tradition.” Medieval Mystical Theology, 25 (2016), 121–136.

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

199

Dickinson, Emily. “I Never Lost as Much But Twice.” In The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little Brown, 1960. Dionysius, Pseudo. Works: On the Heavenly Hierarchy, translated by John Parker. London: James Parker, 1987. Online: www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/ 0450-0525,_Dionysius_Areopagita,_Works,_EN.pdf; accessed November 14, 2021. Edwards, Tony. “Play, Ritual, and the Rationality of Religious Paradox.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 5 (1993), 7–25. Eire, Carlos. A Brief History of Eternity. Princeton, MJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Embry, Charles R. and Glenn Hughes, eds. The Eric Voegelin Reader: Politics, History, Consciousness. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017. Erb, Heather M. “Being and Mystic: The Metaphysical Foundations of Thomas Aquinas’ Mystical Thought.” Verbum VI (2004), 135–159. Feierman, Jay R. “The Image of God to Whom We Pray: An Evolutionary Psychobiological Perspective.” Pensamiento, 67 (2011), 817–829. Friedman, Maurice. Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956. Fuehrer, M.L. “Wisdom and Eloquence in Nicholas of Cusa’s ‘Idiota de Sapientia and de Menta.’” Virarium, 16 (1978), 142–155. Gold, Daniel. “The Paradox in Writing on Religion.” Harvard Theological Review, 83 (1990), 321–332. Harrington, Austin. “Review.” Max Weber Studies, 10 (2010), 121–125. Hawk, Daniel L. The Violence of the Biblical God. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019. Hazelton, Roger. “The Nature of Christian Paradox.” Theology Today, 6 (1949), 323–335. Hegel, G.F.W. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion; The Lectures of 1827. Edited by Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hepburn, Ronald W. Christianity and Paradox: Critical Studies in Twentieth Century Theology. Winnipeg: Pegasus, 1968. Hick, John. Death and Eternal Life. Glasgow: Williams and Collins, 1976. Hume, David. The Natural History of Religion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956. James, William. The Principles of Psychology Vols. I and II. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1950. Johnson, Michel C. “Towards a Metamodern Academic Study of Religion and a More Religiously Informed Metamodernism.” Hervormde Teologiese Studies, 73 (2017), 1–11. Karakolis, Christos. “Church and Nation in the New Testament: The Formation of the Pauline Communities.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 57 (2013), 361–380. Klosoko, George, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kohanski, Alexander. Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Interhuman Relations: A Response to the Human Problematic of Our Time. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Koren, Israel. The Mystery of the Earth: Mysticism and Hasidism in the Thought of Martin Buber. Boston: Brill, 2010. Kurtz, Lester R. “Gulen’s Paradox: Combining Commitment and Tolerance.” The Muslim World, 95 (July 2005), 373–384. Kvangig, Jonathan L. “Religious Pluralism and the Buridan’s Ass Paradox.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 1 (2009), 1–26. Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

200

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Litonjua, M.D. “Spiritual, But Not Religious: Untangling a Seeming Paradox.” International Review of Modern Sociology, 42 (2016), 21–55. Locker, Markus E. “And who shaves God? Nature and role of paradoxes in ‘science and religion’ communications: ‘A case of foolish virgins.’” Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 1 (2009), 187–201. Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol, 4: Collection. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Lonergan, Bernard. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol, 4: Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 14: Method in Theology. Edited by Robert M. Doran and John D.Dadosky. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Lubac, Henri De. Further Paradoxes. Translated from the French by Ernest Beaumont. London: Longmans, 1958. Nikulin, Dmitri. On Dialogue. New York: Lexington Books, 2005. Nishtani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Translated by Jan van Bragt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. Martin, Jay. “The Paradoxes of Religious Violence.” Salmagundi, 130 (2001), 31–38. Maurer, Armand. “St. Thomas on the Sacred Name Tetragrammaton.” Medieval Studies, 14 (1972), 275–286. Milbank, John. “The Last of the Last: Theology, Authority, and Democracy.” Revista Portuguessa De Filosofia, 58 (2002), 271–298. Moran, Gabriel. Uniqueness: Problem or Paradox in Jewish and Christian Traditions. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1992. Murphy, Peter. “‘I Am Not What I Am’: Paradox and Indirect Communication – the Case of the Comic God and the Dramaturgical Self.” Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 1 (2009), 225–235. Neville, David J. “Moral Vision and Eschatology in Mark’s Gospel: Coherence or Conflict?” The Journal of Biblical Literature, 127 (2008), 359–384. Oakes, Edward T. “Atheists and Christians Together.” First Things (July 2009), 56–58. O’Reggio, Trevor. Martin Luther: Master of Paradoxes (2019). Online: https://digita lcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2011&context=pubs; accessed May 20, 2020. Orji, Cyril. Ethnic and Religious Conflicts in Africa: An Analysis of Bias, Decline, and Conversion Based on the Works of Bernard Lonergan. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2008. Pritchard, Evans. Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Putnam, Robert D. and David E. Campbell. American Grace: How Religion Divides and United Us. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010. Ramsey, I.T. and N. Smart. “Paradox in Religion.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Supplementary Volumes, 33 (1959), 195–232. Reu, Wim De. “Right Words Seem Wrong: Neglected Paradoxes in Early Chinese Philosophical Texts.” Philosophy East and West, 56 (2006), 281–300. Rice, Eugene F. The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958. Rotenstreich, Nathan. Immediacy and Its Limits: A Study in Martin Buber’s Thought. Chur: Hardwood, 1991. Rotenstreich, Nathan. “The Right and the Limitations of Buber’s Dialogical Thought.” In Paul Schlipp and Maurice Friedman, eds. The Philosophy of Martin Buber, 130– 132. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967.

The Religion-Buridan Dilemma

201

Roy, Louis. “Principles of Fruitful Interreligious Dialogue: A Few Suggestions.” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue, 29 (2019), 158–183. Sanneh, Lamin. Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. Seigel, Jerrold E. Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Smart, Ninian. Reasons and Faith: An Investigation of Religious Discourse, Christian and Non-Christian. London: Routledge, 1965. Smart, R.N. “The Criteria of Religious Identity.” Philosophical Quarterly, 8 (1958), 328–341. Timaisina, Sthaneshwar. “Bharthari and the Daoist on Paradoxical Statements.” Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion, 23 (2018), 5–24. Tushima, Cephas T.A. “The Paradox of the New Testament Concept of unmerited Grace and Conditional Forgiveness in Mathew’s Gospel.” Africa Journal of Evangelical Theology, 30 (2011), 3–13. Tzu, Lao. Tao-Te-Ching. Translated by S. Mitchell. Online: http://thetaoteching.com/ta oteching1.html; accessed December 3, 2021.Vatican II. Nostra Aetate. Online: www. vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_ nostra-aetate_en.html; accessed April 9, 2020. Vieth, Paul H. “Protestant Churches and Intercultural Relations.” The Journal of Educational Psychology, 16 (1943), 390–394. Viger, Christopher. “St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument Succumbs to Russell’s Paradox.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 52 (2002), 123–128. Waley, Arthur. The Analects of Confucius. Translated. New York: Vintage Books, 1938. Williams, Bernard. “Tertullian Paradox.” In New Essays in Philosophical Theology. Edited by Anthony Flew and Alasdair McIntyre, 3–21. London: SCM Press, 1955. Wright, Christopher J.H. The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006. Yan, Hektor K.T. “A Paradox of Virtue: The Daodejing on Virtue and Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy East and West, 59 (2009), 173–187. Ziderman, Asaf. “Martin Buber’s Dialogical Thought as a Philosophy of Action.” The Journal of Religion, 101 (2021), 371–387.

Index

Abelard 142 Abraham 51, 53, 56, 60, 71, 74, 107, 141, 188; Abrahamic religion 49, 92 Alcibiades 43 Albert of Saxony 14 Alexander, James 43–44, 65 Analogy 54, 57, 176; analogues ix, 2, 12, 94, 110, 158, 179, 189 Analytic 1, 94, 147, 150, 191; analytic tradition/philosophy, 1, 3, 13, 27, 42, 91, 145; psycho-analytic theory, 92–93 Anselm, St. 31, 46, 141, 175, 190, 194n51, 201 antinomy 3, 5, 14–15, 23–4, 42–3, 53–4, 70–71, 75–7, 107, 131–32; antinomy between truth and falsehood 95; antinomy between continuity and discontinuity 97; antinomy and paradox of faith 122, 125, 171, 182; Kantian antinomy 180 antithesis 15, 31, 180; Law-Gospel antithesis 106–107 apophatic theology 97–98, 177–78 aporia 54–5 apostasy 5, 95 Appleby, S. 169–70, 198 Aquinas (Thomas) St. 10, 37, 43, 130, 139, 146, 154, 165, 175, 179, 190, 198–200; Aquinas’s paradox of omnipotence 10, 21; Pseudo-Dionysius influence on Aquinas 97; Aquinas and Luther 105; Aquinas’ synthesis of faith and reason 127–28, 175; Aquinas’ paradox of God-man 150–51; Aquinas and the divine names 176 Asceticism 45, 148 Arianism 122, 150 Aristotelianism 45; Aristotelian idea 4, 12, 17; Aristotelian union of matter and

form 134; Aristotelian principles of PNC 143, 151, 155 Aristotle 12, 15, 165, 179, 190, 198; Aristotle on Zeno paradox 17–18; Aristotle on PNC 4, 121, 142–43, 159, 166–67 Arouet, F.M (Voltaire) 14 audience x, 41, 43, 99, 102–103, 116, 120, 132, 140–41, 173 Augustine, St. 31, 33, 130 Autological 23, 30 Avilla, Theresa, St. 45 Aztec 50 Balthasar, H.U. 59, 65 Barth, K. 105, 131, 137–38 Bataille, G. 53, 56, 65 Baumgarten, A. 83, 89 Beall, J.C. 142, 164 belief 4, 8–9, 22, 27, 29–30, 49, 55, 57, 91. 93, 128, 153, 155, 159, 176; antinomy in religious belief 41–42; skeptics’ argument against belief, 46–7, 169 Berkeley, G. 46, 157 Berlin Circle 12 Betjeman, J. 125–26, 138 see also poets Blackburn Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy 4, 37, 138, 198 Bradwardine, T. 14 Browne, T. (Sir). 42 Boethius 142 Bonhoeffer, D. 98, 159, 164 Buber, M. 6, 41, 184–85, 187–88, 192, 198–201; I-It and I-Thou distinction 49 Buddhism 45–46, 50, 52, 173 Bultmann, R. 122 Buridan. J. 15 see also Buridan’s ass Buridan ass 6, 9–10, 15, 171–72, 185, 187–89, 199

Index Burke, K. 12, 37 Burkert, W. 53, 56, 65 Byzantine 28–29, 38 Cantor, G. 24 Carson, D.A. 95–6, 116 Catholicism 1, 109 Celsius 133 Chalcedon 135, 150, 156, 181 Chaucer, G. 52 Chesterton, G.K. 101, 129, 171–72 Christology 6; Christology as paradox 121, 124–25, 127, 129, 131–33, 135, 138–39, 166–67, 180; Christology from below v Christology from above 122–23 Clement of Alexandria 22 Cognitive 57, 98, 102, 173 Cohen, L.J. 15, 38 coincidentia oppositorium 57, 98, 147 Collins, J.J. 116, 186–89, 198 compass 43–44, 50, 52–53 Confucianism 52, 174, 179 Conscious/consciousness ix, x, xiii, 45, 48, 57, 65, 89, 102, 104, 172, 179, 182, 199; differentiation of consciousness 111, 146 conversion 53, 69, 152, 182, 200 coronavirus ix see also covid-19 covid-19 ix, xii-xiii, 189 Cretan 5, 22, 91, 94–5 see also Epimenides credulity 42, 153 Cullman, O. 121, 138 Cyril of Alexandria 134, 138, 181 Dao 178 Daoism (see also Taoism) 9, 40, 45, 178–79, 201 Darwinism 45 das Ungeheure 6, 129–30, 168 De docta ignorantia 177, 198 see also Nicholas of Cusa Derrida, J. 71–2, 89 Descartes, R. 46 Detachment 173 determinism 53, 70 dialetheia 150, 167; dialetheism 4, 6, 95, 117, 121, 138, 142–43, 145, 147–48, 150–51, 156, 158, 166–67; dialetheist 3–4, 6, 30, 56, 95, 121, 143, 147–50, 154–56, 158–59 dialectical character of religion 59, 175, 177; dialectical relationship /tension 72–4, 97, 103, 130; dialectical theism 145–47, 166 dialogue (see also Martin Buber) 6, 55, 131–32, 148, 165, 168, 177, 181, 183–85,

203

187, 189–92, 198–201; Plato’s dialogue 43, 52, 131 diaspora 5, 68–9, 83, 90 Dickens, C. 13 Dionysius Pseudo. 58, 97–9, 102, 116, 130, 146–47, 165, 177, 199 Discursive method 1 disputation 31, 129, 175, 180 divinity 42, 135, 150, 156, 177 doctrinal 2, 15, 53 dogma 11, 92, 131, 138, 142–43, 147, 149–50, 159, 166 doubt 43–7, 49–51, 91, 168, 188 doxastic practice 46 Durkheim, E. 169 Eckhart (Meister) 98, 173, 198 Ecumenical Councils 5–6, 150, Eliade, M. 8 Eliot, T.S. 188 Einstein, A. 44, 60, 65 empirical 18–20, 57, 91, 147, 149, 158 Empiricus, S 46, 65 Epimenides 22, 91, 94–95, 109 epistemology 123, 143, 149 English 1, 9, 14, 16, 23, 37, 41–2, 52, 93, 124–25, 129, 140, 147, 171, 198; English puritans 169 enlightenment 41, 68, 152–53, 165; rationalist enlightenment thinkers 51, 147; enlightenment polemic agenda against religion 168, 170 Erasmus, D. 120, 172 Exodus 68–9, 73–5, 80, 85n7, 90, 173, 176, 186 Euathlus 119 fallacy 27, 42, 133–34 fallibilism 143, 149 false 4, 13, 15, 17, 22–3, 78, 95, 108, 120, 129, 134, 140–41, 143, 148–51, 158, 164; falsehood 48, 95, 108, 131, 140, 158; false prophets 78; false statements 150, 158; falsidical paradox 133–34 Fathers of the Church 6, 96–7, 124, 176 see also patristics Fessard, G. 97, 116 fideism 66, 140, 152, 155, 165 Floyd, G ix Foreknowledge 1, 53, 71, 78 Foundationalism 143, 149 fragmentation 59 freedom 1, 15, 70, 73, 75, 104–105, 117, 173, 185

204

Index

freewill 8, 15, 21 Frege, G. 24, 30, 40, 107–108, 135 French 1, 15, 52–3, 66, 97, 108–109, 117, 123, 139, 169, 182, 200 Freud, S. 5, 91–5, 108–109, 116–18, 156–57, 165; Freudism 45 Gandhi, M. 169 gaps (in human knowledge) 4, 44 genre x Girard, R. 53, 56, 66 Giere, R.20, 38 God’s impassability 98, 117, 146, 151; God’s immutability 98, 121, 177; God-man 47, 122, 140, 142, 150–52, 155, 180 Gödel, K. 40, 107–108, 135, 139 Goldingay, J. 72–3, 76, 89 Goldstein, L. 21, 38, 111, 116, 165 Gorgias 31, 46, 120 Greek 17, 43, 46, 48, 65, 124, 133, 152; Greek derivation of “paradox” 1, 8; Greek comedy 15; ancient Greek origins of religion 50–51; Greek aporia 54; Greek Septuagint 77; Greek ekklesia 96–7; Greek derivation of “Luther” 105; Greek poet Homer 140; Greek Fathers 176–77 Grelling, K. 12, 22–3, 27, 38–9 see also Grelling paradox Grim, P. 121, 139, 165 Hamann, J. 57 Habermas, J. 185 Haught, J. 44–5, 60, 66 Hebrew Bible 5, 58, 68, 71–6, 78, 181 Hegel, G.F.W. 6, 49, 54, 58, 146, 168–69, 180, 199; Hegelianism 45, 48; Hegelian dialectics 130–31 Heidegger, G. M. 145–46, 175 Hempel, C.G. 18–20 see also paradox of confirmation Heraclitus 133 heresy 5, 95, 133, 150, 152 hermeneutical strategies 71, 77, 187 hermeneutics 76–7, 186 Hesiod 140 heterodoxy 186 heterological 23 Hilbert, D. 30 Hindu 9, 46, 66, 177, 179, 185 Hinduism 45, 50, 52, 170 Hobbes, T. 147–48, 165 Homer 140

Hopkins, G.M. 124–26, 139 see also poets horizon 144–45, 183 Hume, D. 146–49, 168 hypocrisy 29–30, 39, 91 identity 5, 22, 47, 66, 72, 97, 116, 165; principle of identity 11; Jewish identity 5, 68–9, 83–4, 85n7, 90, 198, 201; Paul’s Jewish identity 104; paradox of knowledge and identity in Plato 131; balkanization of self-identity 188 immanence 155; religiousness of immanence 49; immanence v transcendence 5, 59, 68, 70, 75, 77, 79, 98, 146–47, 158; immanent Trinity 156 impenetrable xi, 3 Incarnation 1, 6, 121–22, 133–35, 175, 180, 198; incarnation as supreme paradox 96, 124–25,129, 140, 147, 151–55, 157, 159 incomprehensible x-xi, 3, 44–5, 79, 100, 155, 157–58, 178 ineffable 58, 133, 158, 179; ineffable Dao 178 inference 13, 46–7, 92, 129–30, 159, 175 infinity 20, 52, 124, 126, 139; Zeno’s paradoxes and nature of infinity 17–18; God’s infinity 176–77 intuition 24, 26–7, 132, 149 irony x, 3, 12, 42, 54–5, 67–8, 71–2, 109, 152, 167, 170–71, 179, 183, 186 Islam 48–9, 170, 173 James, W. 187 John of Damascus 29 John of the Cross, St. 45, 99 judgment 9–10, 31, 46, 70, 74–5, 144, 149; judgment of fact 48; judgment of value 48 Jung, C.G. 10, 39 Kafka, F. 30, 39, 71–2, 89, 99–100, 116 Kant, I. 15, 49, 51, 54, 66–7, 123, 168, 171, 175, 179–80 kataphatic theology 97–8 Kierkegaard, S. 4, 53–6, 58–60, 66, 102, 141–42, 149, 151, 154–55, 165, 182, 198; idea of shedding innocent blood 51; Kierkegaard paradox 6, 142, 151, 154; Religiousness A 54–6, 102; Religiousness B 54, 56, 102, 155 Lanham, R. 16; Lanham’s A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms 4, 16, 39

Index law of the excluded middle 10–11, 167 see law of non-contradiction) law of non-contradiction (LNC) 4, 6, 11, 67, 117–18, 121, 124, 138–40, 142, 149, 159, 164–67 Leibnitz, G.W. 14, 132, 146 Lelyveld, A. 66, 69–70, 75, 89 Lemke, W. 77–9, 89 Lessing. G. 51 Lewis, C.S. 53–4, 66, 102 liar paradox 5, 22–4, 27–8, 37–8, 91, 94–5, 108–109, 111 Littlewood, J.E. 31 Locke, J. 157 Locker, M. 101, 190–91 logic of confirmation 18, 38 see also Carl Hempel logic of paradox 7, 55, 58–9, 117, 166, 168 see also Graham Priest Lonergan, B. xii, 8, 10, 39, 66, 135, 139, 147, 166, 200; dialectical character of religion 59; differentiation of consciousness 111; difficulty with the notion of class 25; experience of mystery 45, 47, 168, 174; faith as knowledge and liberative 48, 50, 57; human knowledge is mediated 144–45, 179; orientation towards God 42; paradox of the barber as a contradictory exercise 28; characterization of Trinitarian doctrine 159 Luther, M. 73, 89, 104–105, 117, 120, 175, 200; Lutheran 40, 51, 157, 182 Luther, M.K, Jr. 169 Macquarrie, J. 145–47, 164, 166 Marcion 152–53 Matthews, G. 16, 39 see also Lanham’s A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms Maximus the Confessor 98 messiah 84–5, 97, 122, 181, 183 metalanguage 24, 168, 183 metaphysics/metaphysical 4, 15, 22, 40, 46–7, 53, 94, 130–31, 139, 142, 154, 165–67, 190, 198–99 method/methodological 1–3, 13, 20, 30, 43, 47, 65, 121, 143, 166, 183, 190–91, 199; method 177; dialectic as method 58; method of double account 122; methods of reasoning 92, 94; Socratic method 55 midrash 75, 82 Milbank, J. 6, 105, 117–18, 129–31, 135, 139, 190–200

205

Milton, J. 16, 53, 66 mitzvah 70, 175 mode 58, 74, 184 Moltmann, J. 98 monism 17, 148 see also Zeno’s paradox monotheism 57, 92–3, 116–17, 165, 185 Montaigne. M. 46 Moore, G.E. 9, 27, 29, 38 see also Moore’s paradox mysterium tremendum et fascinans 44, 50 mysticism 40, 99, 199 negation 2, 4, 11, 23, 25, 47, 55, 142, 167, 174; self-negation 41; self-abnegation 99, 101 Newman, J.H. 45, 66 Nicholas of Cusa 58, 98, 130, 146–47, 177, 198–99 nicod criterion (see also Hempel, C.G.) 19–20 Nietzsche, F. 107, 168–69, 184 nihilism 46, 129 Nyssa, Gregory of, St. 97 Oakes, E. 124, 133, 135, 139, 172, 200 Object 19–20, 54–5, 76, 180, 188, 191; object of faith 154; God is not an object in the world 146; subject-object dualism 107; objectivity 5, 8, 11, 42, 45, 68, 92 Ockham, W. 15, 131 O’Connor, D.J. 15, 38–9 Odysseus 22, 140 Oedipus 94, 132, 156–57, 164 Ogden, S. 45, 66 omnipotence 14, 53, 55, 92, 119, 125, 127, 131–32, 151, 177; paradox of omnipotence 6, 10–11, 21, 37–8 ontological 48, 121–22, 151, 155; ontological argument 46, 148, 175, 201; ontological theism 145 Origen 97–8, 134 Otto, R. 50, 66 oxymoron 16, 58, 94, 132, 187 Pagels, H. 44, 66 Paine, T. 41 Pannenberg, W. 139, 166–67; doctrine of Trinity 156–57; starting point of Christology 122–23 Pascal, B. 48, 84 parable 71–2, 99–101, 106, 179 paraconsistent logic 14, 43 paradox (types of); barber 25–6, 28, 38–9, 91, 116, 133, 165; condensed 6, 16–17,

206

Index

144–45, 147; confirmation 18–20, 38–40; Curry 22–4, 38–40; epistemological 18, 30; Grelling’s 12, 22–3, 27, 38–9; liar 5, 22–4, 27–8, 37–8, 91, 94–5, 108–109, 111; Epimenidean 22, 91, 94–5, 109; Eubulidean 91; logical 11, 13, 49; mathematical 2, 4–5, 30; Moore 9, 27, 29, 38; omnipotence 6, 10, 21, 37–8, 119, 127, 132; Paul (Apostle) 29; pragmatic 15–16, 38–9; red heifer 5, 68, 70–71, 79–85, 89–90; rhetorical 1, 24, 30, 120; Russell’s 23–5, 27, 37–40, 91, 107–108, 116, 133, 165, 175, 201; self-referential 5, 20, 27, 41, 43, 59, 91, 183; semantic 22, 24, 26–8, 91, 143, 183, 185; sorites 132; sovereignty 20–21, 38, 90; Tarski’s quotational 22, 24, 148, 167, 183; value 11, 25–6, 28, 38, 176, 179, 189, 201; veridical 131, 133–34; Yablo 26–7, 37, 40; Zeno 17–18, 132 paradoxographer x; paradoxer 2, 5–6, 51, 54, 91, 140, 172; paradoxists 41–2, 172; paradoxy x, xii, 9, 44 Parmenides 17, 177 Pascal, B. 48, 84 patristic 31, 97, 135, 187 see also Fathers of the Church Peirce, C.S. 47–8, 67, 143–44, 149, 164, 166 pharisee 84, 104 philosophical irrationalists 45, 92 see also theological irrationalists Plato 17, 22, 43, 52, 58, 119, 131, 152; Neo-Platonic 48, 97–8; Platonism 45, 177 Planck, M. 176 pluralism 14, 17, 39, 74, 84, 181, 199 poets x, 2, 16, 43, 52, 65–6, 120, 127, 129, 132, 140, 150, 171, 173; poetic imagination 6, 124–25 polarity 5, 41, 59, 72, 76, 106, 168–69 polymath 24, 42 polytheism 92–3 pragmatic 15–16, 29, 38–9, 144 Priest, G. 3–4, 30, 56, 95, 143, 148, 150, 158 Pritchard, E. 175, 200 principle of non-contradiction (PNC) see law of non-contradiction prosopopeia x Protagoras 119 Protestants 45, 123, 129–30, 171, 175, 189, 201 puzzles 3, 5, 12, 21, 26, 28, 42, 56, 77, 108–109, 129, 131; red heifer puzzle, 81

Pyrrho of Elis, 46; Pyrrhonian skeptics, 46; Pyrrhonian skepticism 46 Qumran 84 Quran 45, 49 Quine, W.v.O. 3, 7, 13, 18, 39, 42, 67, 95, 117, 139, 148, 166; on discovery of antinomies 15, 131; on liar paradox 95, 111; on standard definition of paradox 16, 132, 134; on the story of Fredrick 133 Quintilianus, M.F. 12 rabbinic 70 Rahner, K. 138, 156, 158, 166 Ramsey, F.P. 27, 117, 166 relativism 46 realism 19, 30, 99, 131 reductio ad absurdum 4, 47, 49 reductio ad contraditionem 4 Religiousness Asee Kierkegaard Religiousness Bsee Kierkegaard renaissance x, xiii, 2, 38, 65, 116, 138, 165, 172, 198, 200–201 ressourcement movement 6, 123 riddles 13, 1, 42–3, 70, 101, 125, 132, 173 Rig Veda 178 Romanticism 46 Rousseau, J.J. 20, 40 see also paradox of sovereignty Rumi’s paradoxes 173 Russell, B. 8, 13, 17, 22–4, 40, 45 see also paradox (Russell); set theory 9, 24 Ryle, G. 180 Sadducee 84, 89 Sanneh, L. 42, 67, 201 Santos, N. 40, 102–103, 117, 139 Schleiermacher, F. 122 science xiii, 8, 18, 37–9, 47, 54, 93–4, 101, 124, 132–33, 148–49, 165, 168, 177, 187; questions science is yet to solve 44; science and religion 5–6, 10–12, 117, 183, 190–91, 200 self-contradiction 9, 12, 14, 20–21, 24, 41, 47, 77, 99, 150–51, 179–81 self-negation 5, 41 self-referential see paradox self-transcendence see transcendence semantics 14–15, 22–4, 26–8, 53, 91, 121, 143, 151, 154, 167, 178, 185 see also paradox (semantic); semantic dilemma 183; semantics of vagueness 132; semantic approach to contradiction 150

Index set theory see Bertrand Russell Sextus (Empiricus) 46, 65 Shakespeare, W. 6, 16, 43, 140–41, 165, 171 skepticism 27, 29, 43–7, 49–50, 65, 92, 125, 168 Smart, C. 125 see also poets Smith, A. 11 Socrates 15, 17, 48, 124, 131, 155, 177; Socrates of Plato’s Symposium 42–3; religiousness of Socrates 54–6 sophist 17, 46, 120; sophistry 15, 153, 178 Sorensen, R. 121, 132, 134 soteriology 65, 104–105, 123 Spencer, H. 149 stoicism 22, 45, 140, 152 Stoppard, T. 28, 40 subject 30–31, 47, 54–6, 95, 104–105, 144–45, 149, 151; subjective approach to knowledge 51; subject-object 5, 73, 107; subjectivity, 56, 67–8, 79, 102, 167–68, 182, 184, 186 supersessionism 181–82 Symposium 42–3, 65, 67 see also Socrates Talmud 82, 84 Tao/Taoism (see also Daoism) 52, 178, 201 Tao-te-ching 177 Tarski, A. 22, 24, 148, 167, 183 see also Tarski’s paradox thaumazein 43, 48 tautology 16, 30, 48, 176 Tertullian 6, 49, 141–42, 165; Tertullian paradox xiii, 124, 151–54, 167, 201 Theaetetus 131 theological method 2–3 theological irrationalists 92, 95, 108 see also philosophical irrationalists Theresa of Avila 45 temple 57, 75, 78, 84, 107, 173 Temple, W. 5, 95 Tillich, P. 122 Torah 69–70, 75, 78–9, 82–4, 90, 92, 97, 175 transcendence 68, 79, 145, 199; self-transcendence 52, 59, 144, 168–69;

207

transcendence v immanence 55, 9, 70, 75, 77–8, 98, 146–47, 158 transcendent 44, 47, 130, 146–47, 155, 158, 168–69, 176–77, 179, 190 transcendental 48–9, 52–3, 102, 143 Trinity xiii, 11, 121, 131, 156–59 Trojan War 22, 31 union 121; Aristotelian union of matter and form 134; hypostatic union 139, 150, 165, 181; three mysterious unions 156 United States ix, xiii, 169–71 Upanishads 179 utilitarianism 179 validity 45, 76\, 105, 148 Vedas 178; vedic 50, 178 veridical 131, 133 via negativa 177 Vico, G. 12 violence 6, 50, 56–7, 59, 106, 148, 169, 185–89; violence induced by religious sacrifice 52–3, 66, 192, 199 Voegelin, E. 52, 65, 71, 89, 172, 199 Weir, A. 67, 92, 118 Wittgenstein, L. 21, 38, 45, 54, 67, 116, 165 wonder 43, 47, 53, 120, 128, 135, 141, 155 see also thaumazein Yablo, S.26–7, 37, 40 see also Yablo’s paradox Yahweh 49, 51, 53, 68–9, 71, 74–6, 78, 98, 107, 187–88 Yevtushenko, Y. 16 YHWH 70, 74–5, 79–80, 84, 96, 186 see also Yahweh Zermelo, E. 25, 40 Zeno of Elea 17–18, 28, 37, 40, 46, 132 Zeus 22 Zionism 69, 83–4, 90 Zizek, S. 6, 40, 118, 129–32, 135, 139 Zoroastrianism 52