Salvation and Paradox

In commenting on a post from the illustrious blog of Joel Kurtz, I've taken a deeper than usual tour into the philsophical depths of paradox. In my tour, I encounter all sorts of fairly mundane observations about salvation, but always from the unique perspective of paradox resolution (at least the attempt at resolution).

I found the tour to be exhilerating, perplexing, and satisfying--also a bit rediculous and extremely long.

Here tis

Joel Said (excerpt from blog post)

I'm not feeling alive in Christ. Somehow during the day, between my attempts to instill good behavior in my campers, the few witnessing moments I catch, and fights I stop, the relentless striving to be a competent staff member, the advice I give, I'm losing the little bit of the Lifewater I managed to scoop up in the morning. Dr. Clouzet shared a thought from an article by John Ortberg that I just recently recalled. It goes something like this, "One of the best things you can do to improve your spiritual life is to ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life."

I said

Good post. Ruthless is the right word, but you can't grit your teeth either, and that's a classic paradox. We can't find God by searching, yet we must seek first the kingdom of God. Obviously, transcending the paradox is the key, provided we don't see transcendence as a third option in itself--like Buddhism. Paradox in general all goes back to the central paradox: the mystery of iniquity. It's sure nice to have arguments for why God allowed evil, but its existence in the first place remains the ultimate, paradoxical sore point.Luckily, this great paradox can be resolved on a personal level, because in a relationship with the Infinite Being, there cannot be an option between good and evil, or even the meaningless third option of transcendence. There can only be God. He's the only option, the only focus. Seeing things this way is equivalent to denying the realities from which the paradox arose. It would be just a senseless mental exercise except there's a Creator who's interested in the exercise. So much so, in fact, that He creates the reality concomitant with the exercise. Paul was probably getting at this idea when he talked about the law of freedom taking on the law of sin and death in Romans 8. Clearly, redemption is much more than meets the eye. How else could it solve the most vexing practical and philosophical question we face?

Joel said
Barry, I had to read your comment twice before I figured out what you were saying;) But it's true--a complete paradigm shift can resolve the most perplexing paradoxes--provided it's absolute, and that's the clincher. It's not that staying God-focused is effortless--it takes a decided effort of will--it's just that the effort required is so completely different from what we're used to. It's not easy to free fall in boundless love. I want so much to be in control! Anyway, good thought.

I said
Joel, you're quite considerate of my rambling, which more successfully suffocated the central question than resolved it.

The Christian walk seems both easy and hard because of another more fundamental paradox: original sin. There's no way to see around the original sin paradox, but if we deny reality, we can destroy the paradox completely. However, if we really destroy the paradox, we destroy the concepts of paradox-resolution, such as transcendence, "the third option" and even paradigm shift.

Yet how can we express salvation without these concepts? After all, destroying reality unburdens us of both the paradox and our descriptive abilities.

How, indeed. How can we express something totally new in terms of the old?

Perhaps we describe the new in terms of the new, which is circular reasoning, and why creative people are sometimes neither logical nor very coherent.

Try this grammatical nightmare for instance: the new reality is that God is. "is that God is"? God might say "I am that I AM".

But this crazy sentence is precisely where I see a way out of the whole conundrum. We must accept the simple premise that God is, and make it our primary and totally definitive truth. Then, our focus will simply be on God (there's nothing else).

Having accepted this truth, there's no sense in saying our focus shifted away from the paradox of original sin. Nothing has shifted anywhere. When God makes a new man, He does it like usual--ex nihilo. After all, a makeover isn't a true creative act.

In everyday life, however, we're all painfully aware that the Christian walk really is both easy and hard. When we succumb to temptation, reality hits hard.

The key distinction is that our walk with God begins on this earth, where we've been saturated with the reality of sin. The realities of a sinful world make us think our walk with God is both easy and hard. In reality...

Who's reality? Yours or God's?

In God's reality, even the good connotations we have with easy and hard are obsolete. When even a drop of God's reality seeps inside us, there's a paradigm explosion--none of this paradigm shift foolishness.

But now, I've argued myself into a corner, because I'm just a complacent sin man. I want to be new man, and no makeover, paradigm shifted man for me.

Rats in the cellar

I like a certain analogy of C.S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity, where he talks about who you really are inside. It's been brought home to me again over the past couple weeks that it doesn't matter what veneer you put on for society, even your family. It's how you act when you're off your guard that shows who you really are. And who I really am is not a nice person. So, with apologies to Mr. Lewis, here is one of my favorite passages of his:

"[When we begin to try to be like Christ] We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are. This may sound rather difficult, so I will try to make it clear from my own case. When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed. And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected; I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself. Now that may be an extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts: they would obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated. On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth?
If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.
Apparently the rats of resentment and vindictiveness are always there in the cellar of my soul. Now that cellar is out of reach of my conscious will. I can to some extent control my acts: I have not direct control over my temperament. And if (as I said before) what we are matters even more than what we do--if, indeed, what we do matters chiefly as evidence of what we are--then it follows that the change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring about.
And this applies to my good actions too. How many of them were done for the right motive? How many for fear of public opinion, or a desire to show off? How many from a sort of obstinacy or sense of superiority which, in different circumstances, might equally have led to some very bad act?
But I cannot, by direct moral effort, give myself new motives. After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God."

One reason I like C.S. Lewis is that he gets to the heart of things that are difficult to say, and then says them so clearly you wonder why you thought they were difficult. I'm reminded of this quote nearly every day. I am constantly telling my students that they need to control their actions and not just lash out if they are mad. But being in control of your actions is one thing; truly being undisturbed is another. I may take a lot of stressful happenings during the day at school and not react, but then if I go home and blow up over a small thing, like a towel left out or a dish in the sink, then I have not truly changed myself. I've only put a thin veneer over a bubbling volcano. Or, in the words of Lewis, I've only frightened the rats, not killed them. I think to myself at the end of the day how "good" I was. But "good" only goes as far, usually, as I can do what I want at home. When something doesn't go my way, I unleash the dragon that has been muzzled at work, and woe be unto the hapless one who gets in my way! Sometimes it's only a few sharp words or tone, but sometimes it's a full-out firestorm for no reason at all. The more stress I have, the more I need to pray that God will truly change me, not just give me the light to frighten the rats, but storm the cellar and kill the rats.