The Legitimacy of Paradox as a Device in Christian Theology?

My last post surveyed the consequences of attempting to eliminate paradox from Christian belief. As a follow-up to that post, I want to revisit Romans 9:14-20 in response to the claim that there is no logical tension in Paul’s comments in this particular periscope. I understand Paul to be dealing with more than God’s sovereignty in this text. I believe Paul is dealing with three very specific issues: God’s sovereignty, God’s justice, and man’s actions. (The main thrust of Paul’s concern is the fidelity of God’s Word.) The simple question is this: how can God be absolutely free and absolutely just in light of the fact that evil behavior exists. Either God is absolutely free or God is absolutely just, but if human beings are subjected to God’s punishment, God cannot possibly be absolutely free and absolutely just, at least not in any meaningful way. If God is absolutely free, man is not free. If man is not free, he should not be punished. Therefore, if God is absolutely free, man should not be punished. For those of you that have studied predicate logic, you recognize the hypothetical syllogism.

G --> M

M --> P

/ G --> P

Anderson tells us that the cogency of the Rational Affirmation of Paradoxical Theology model depends crucially on the distinction between real contradiction and apparent contradiction. There are several objections to the idea that Scripture includes paradox, or is even thoroughly paradoxical in nature. One such objection rests on the ground that such a state of affairs would mean that Scripture is irrational. But that objection is patently false. Only if Scripture contained actual contradictions could it be the case that Scripture is irrational. However, I want to make it clear that we do not begin with the idea that Scripture could be irrational in the first place, and then set out it to see if in fact it is. We begin with the presupposition that Scripture, by its very nature is thoroughly rational. And because Scripture is rational, any apparent contradictions are just that, apparent. Anderson says, “Not only must this distinction be formally coherent, it must also be plausibly instantiated; which is to say, it must be reasonable to suppose that there are, or could be, instances of merely apparent contradiction.” When we begin with the view that Scripture cannot contain any actual contradictions, we are claiming that Scripture is our epistemic authority, our final standard, and that Scripture is, beginning to end and top to bottom, self-attesting. If a person is threatened by the possibility that Scripture contains apparent contradiction, I would be tempted to think it possible that that person does not in fact begin with Scripture, or place Scripture at the beginning of their reasoning process even if such is their outright claim. The psychological clues in such a scenario seem to me to be that the person who find paradox so perplexing may be placing reason above Scripture and judging Scripture by the criteria of autonomous human reason. Now, let’s get back to Moses, Pharaoh, Paul, and God.

Prior to v. 14, Paul points us to God’s sovereign choice of Isaac over Ismael. Paul pushes the argument up a level as he attempts to point us up to the sovereign election of God. He tells us that Rebekah brought forth two men of the very same substance, equal in every way. Yet, God chose one and rejected the other. And God’s choice took place even prior to their birth. There was nothing in either man’s physical make-up, their intellectual acumen, their race, nothing whatsoever to which we could point that would commend one to God more than the other. Was God’s choice of Jacob arbitrary? Was his choice to hate Esau capricious? We may say that it was God’s plan that served as the basis for these choices. But couldn’t we just as easily say that God’s plan was arbitrary? Well, the answer would be that God’s plan exists for His own glory. So if this plan glorifies God, couldn’t it have been the case that a different plan where both the twins were elected, and where Pharaoh was not predestined to wrath, could have glorified God just the same? If the choices are what they are just because God made them, I don’t see why such an indictment couldn’t be made. But something seems to be terribly wrong with this scenario. I will share why I think this perspective misses the target toward the end of the post.

As Paul shifts from the twins to Pharaoh in his next example, he asks a very important question: Ti oun eroumen? mē adikia para tō theō? mē genoito. What shall we say? Is there injustice with God? May it never be! Why would Paul ask such a question? The only scenario in which this question makes any sense whatsoever is the scenario in which we are attempting to understand how God could be perceived as just when He is engaging in such actions of election previously described by Paul. How is it just for God to choose Jacob over Esau since there are no material differences in the men? And with this question, Paul answers with an emphatic negative. The Greek word genoito is very probably a constative aorist which views the action of the verb as a whole. God forbid that it has been, is, or ever would be the case that there would be injustice with or in God. Add to this that the dative here could still be understood as a locative which carries a sense of in God. So we could read the Paul to be asking, “is there injustice in God?” Once again, if there is no tension here in what Paul is revealing, then there is hardly a good reason for why he should raise the question to begin with.

Paul opens his next point with the Greek gar, which is epexegetical, or an explanatory conjunction. Paul is not going to explain in greater detail what he is getting at. And this takes us beyond v. 20 and all the way through v.29 and actually chapter 11 if you want to get technical. He immediately points the audience to God’s dealing with Moses and Pharaoh to reinforce his revelation. He begins by reminding the audience that God has mercy on whom He pleases. In other words, this is nothing new. God has revealed the truth of his sovereignty previously. Paul provides the reason God is not unjust. There is something in God that gives Him the express right to have mercy on whom He desires and to have compassion on whom He desires. Paul begins with the presupposition that God is perfectly just in all that He does. But the very fact that the question of justice has been raised at all points to the seemingly undeniable tension that God’s sovereignty creates current in the state of affairs. Why would Paul even think to use such language in the text unless the tension is present. Not only is the tension present in what some commentators think is a hypothetical, there are a few commentators that have argued that Paul is dealing with a real objection being posed by a real objector. Either way, the only reason to bring up the question is if there is something to the fact that Paul’s perspective on God’s actions over the course of the history of redemptive pose something of a challenge to God’s justice. Are these sovereign acts of God also just?

Paul makes a preliminary conclusion, “So then.” Paul tells us that “it” does not depend on the will of man or the works of man, but on God who has mercy. What is the “it?” The “it” refers back to vv. 1-5 for this is the entire point of Romans 9-11. The objects of salvation, the called, the elect of God does not depend on man’s behavior nor man’s will. It depends entirely on God. And if this is true, then how can God find fault with those whom He has not elected since we are all the same. If God chooses not based on us, then why do some of us suffer His wrath and others not? How does that square with what we know and experience to be true about justice? The example of Pharaoh is even more emphatic. Paul reminds us that God raised Pharaoh up for this very purpose: to demonstrate His power in Pharaoh and that His name would be proclaimed through the world. From this Paul concludes again that God has mercy on whom he desires and He hardens whom he desires. This is another absolute statement in defense of God’s sovereign control of everything that comes to pass in His creation.

In v. 14, Paul rejects any suggestion that the way God does things in creation could be considered unjust. And here in v. 19, we have the same question being asked in a different way. If God chooses and does not choose based only on His own purpose, if it has nothing to do with the wills or the works of men, ti [oun] eti memphetai? tō? Why does he still find fault? Concerning the variant, oun, while it is omitted in Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, it is in P46 and in Vaticanus. The word shows that Paul is drawing a logical inference from what has just been said. The flow of the discourse seems to make the logical inference impossible to miss as well. The Greek word, memphetai, has the sense of blame. It means to bring an accusation against against someone on the basis that the person in question is clearly to blame. It is the same word used in Heb. 8:8 where the writer tells us that God found fault with the old covenant making the way for a new covenant in Christ. The other interesting thing to note is that the voice of this verb is either middle or passive. This means that God did not just fix the blame on men. The blame was found passively or reflexively. This eliminates the possibility that they were to blame because God had simply declared it to be so. The blame was real, and it arose from within God’s nature.

The next question demonstrates that if you feel the tension in Paul’s argument, then you are reading Paul correctly; tō gar boulēmati autou tis anthestēken? Once more, this sentence begins with the post-positive epexegetical gar which is an explanation for what was just said. Literally, the clause reads, “for the will of Him who has resisted?” In other words, the idea is that God should not find fault with men who are simply doing His will since God’s choice for them to do the things He has decreed they do, has nothing to do with their will, their works, or anything else that might in them and everything to do with God’s plan. Now, the reason God should not find fault with men, if Paul’s account of God’s actions in the history of redemption is correct, is because no one has ever been able to resist God’s will. And under these circumstances, it feels as though God could be called unjust.

How does Paul solve the tension? To the disappointment of some, Paul does not solve the tension. He reasserts God’s sovereign right to do as He pleases in creation. And the real lesson here is that he rebukes the man who demands that there should be some solution to the tension. The idea of that God is unjust should never even be raised. Why? Because we begin with the view that God is absolutely and perfectly just and we are not open to the possibility that He could be otherwise. That is how Scripture reveals God and whatever Scripture reveals God to be, then that is how God is. Paul spends vv. 21-29 reinforcing the fact that God is sovereign and that we are the objects of His rich mercy. No man should dare place God in the dock and proceed to judge God’s actions based on some finite human morality or some finite human system of reason or logic. We begin with God and all that God is and from there we shape our system based on the revelation that God has given of Himself in Scripture. Clearly, the human mind has difficulty reconciling how God could be just given that He is absolutely free to carry out His plan which includes inflicting wrath of men for doing what He planned they do. When we encounter such difficulties, we can either allow human reason to judge Scripture, or we can make the decision to trust what Scripture clearly teaches elsewhere about God and accept the difficulty as something to be consistent with what we would expect from a finite mind attempting to understand plans that flow from an infinite one.

There are three very broad possibilities where paradox and Christian doctrine is concerned. One, it is always irrational to affirm paradox; Christian belief is unavoidably paradoxical; therefore, it is irrational to affirm Christian belief. Two, it is always irrational to affirm paradox; no central doctrines of Christian belief contain paradox; therefore, it is not irrational to affirm Christian belief. Three, it is not always irrational to affirm paradox; Christian belief involves paradox; therefore, it is not irrational to affirm Christian belief. One and two places reason over faith as magistrate. One indicts faith while two exonerates it, but judges it nonetheless. Three places faith over reason as magistrate and judges human reason according to the final standard of divine revelation in Scripture.

The Ontological Trinity in Van Til's Apologetic

An important point in Van Til’s theory of epistemic justification is that Christ’s Word in Scripture is self-validating in the sense that all of reality testifies to it when interpreted through its lens.[1] This is not to be confused with the process of beginning with reality and from there, moving to Scripture or perhaps other intermediary steps along the way. It is to say that every interpretation of reality apart from Scripture sooner or later culminates in an inescapable skepticism.

The prickly problem with which philosophy must contend and satisfactorily solve if human predication can be defended in any rational way is the problem of the one and the many. Centuries of work has gone into putting an end to this monster, that has been relentlessly lurking in the shadows, almost mocking every vain attempt to seal his fate. The challenge is to provide for the intelligibility around the relationship between particulars and the unifying principle that brings them together without destroying either the particular or the principle of unity. What is it that makes me, me, while at the same time unifies me with other humans, or even more specifically, other male humans? If we emphasize plurality we run the risk of ending in an infinite regress. The reason for this is that we must ask how the particulars are related to each other and how this relationship itself is related to the particulars and then by what principle that relationship is related and so forth. We cannot help but feel the infinite regress looming in the background. On the other hand, if we place too much emphasis on the prominence of unity, we end up without any distinguishing characteristics by which we may know the particulars. But once again, nothing can be known in principle about such a thing, because there can be nothing from which to distinguish it.[2] The stakes in this game are higher than most apologists appreciate. The very idea of human knowledge rides on our ability to work through the problem of the one and the many. The Christian apologist must bring this demand to bear on the discussion in order to demonstrate that philosophy apart from God is futile and that true knowledge in any scheme where man as independent from God is basically impossible.

The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to our frame of reference.[3] The aspiration of philosophy is to provide for a comprehensive view of the world in which the diversity of human experience is intelligible. Every worldview operates within a system, or frame of reference. But one has to ask the question of Wittgenstein’s own proposition whether or not it is itself operating within a particular system and, if outside that system, it can be accepted as valid. The point is that worldviews are systems and every claim to knowledge operates within that system. Every test for every claim to knowledge takes place within that system and rests upon certain presuppositions that are part of that system. Hence, apologetics must operate at the level of systems if it is to operate effectively. We do not take the tree down one leaf or twig at a time. We go to the base and take it down with one pass of the chainsaw.

Nothing is more fundamental to human knowledge than the question of the one and the many and nothing is more basic to Christian theism than the self-contained ontological Triune God revealed in Scripture. It was the genius of Cornelius Van Til’s apologetic to demonstrate how the latter helps us deal with the former. Our view of reality or being involves our view of knowledge and ethics even as our view of knowledge and ethics involves and is based on our view of being.[4] To argue for such hard dichotomies between the three major branches of philosophy is more than a little naïve. How we know is indelibly bound up in what we are and vice versa. The question then becomes how does Christian theism, in contradistinction to secular philosophy think about the problem of the one and the many?

Human knowledge ultimately rests upon the internal coherence within the Godhead; our knowledge rests upon the ontological Trinity as its presupposition.^[5] All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are deposited in Christ (Col. 2:3). Christ is the true knowledge that all humanity should strive to know (Col. 2:2). It is the regenerate Christian who is being renewed to true knowledge (Col. 3:10). That true knowledge is according to the image of the One Who created him. True knowledge is measure by the degree to which man is a reflection of the image of the ontological Trinity revealed in Scripture. Only if one presupposes the God of Scripture is knowledge possible. Bosserman reminds us, “To recap the dilemma but one more time: abstract principles and brute facts prove to shed all definition when divorced from a concrete system.”[6] When man operates on the presupposition that he is autonomous, and reasons abstractly about so-called brute facts, knowledge becomes impossible. Moreover, it is this system that charges Christian theism with contradiction and abhors the presence of paradox as if such a phenomenon weakens the system. But Christian theism is only weakened by the presence of theological paradox if the secular philosopher’s system is superior in some way. In what world could it ever be rational to subject divine logic, eternal, uncreated, infinite logic to the created logic of the finite? And that is exactly what the non-Christian worldview insists on. Hence we see the importance of operating, proclaiming, and defending the faith at the level of worldview.

It is a well-known fact that all heresies in the history of the church have in some form or other taught subordinationism. Similarly, we believe all “heresies” in apologetic methodology spring from some sort of subordinationism.[7] The challenge before us is to solve the plurality of particulars while preserving the unifying principle of their relationships without destroying their particularity. Van Til says we need the notion of a concrete universal to help us better understand how the physical universe can operate the way it appears to operate. It is only in the Christian doctrine of the triune God, as we are bound to believe, that we really have a concrete universal. In God’s being there are no particulars not related to the universal and there is nothing universal that is not fully expressed in the particulars.[8] Hence, the term concrete universal does not signify the same thing in Van Til that it does in idealist philosophers. Functionally, they [idealists] treated their own intellects as if they were vested with the basic principles which govern the universe.[9] Unavoidably then, the idealist leads us into an in ever-increasing subjectivism that will ultimately end in skepticism and irrationalism. Once more, it seems we are back where we started. In Van Til’s estimation, a Trinitarian worldview is able to deliver where the absolute idealist systems come up dry. This claim turns on the fact that the Triune God represents a self-complete system over and above the temporal universe, and beyond the principles at work in the mind of man.[10]

In Van Til, creation must always mean fiat creation. In the beginning God spoke and the heavens and earth became. Being came from not just non-being, but from absolutely nothing. “Using the language of the One-and-Many question we contend that in God the one and the many are equally ultimate. Unity in God is no more fundamental than diversity, and diversity in God is no more fundamental than unity.”[11] This concept is the natural outworking of a biblical understanding of the nature of the ontological Trinity. And it is not difficult to see how such an understanding impacts one’s metaphysic and subsequently, apologetic methodology. The requirement that Christian theism subject itself to creaturely logic conflicts with this Christian metaphysic which itself creates serious issues in our understanding of the nature of God. The kind of logic we employ is related to our metaphysic, which is related to our understanding of God. At a minimum, if we employ poor logic in apologetic methodology, we find ourselves being inconsistent with the system that we are attempting to defend. Or worse, we elevate this poor use of logic to a place of prominence and end up allowing poor logic to shape our metaphysic as well as inform our doctrine of God. The latter must be avoided at all cost. After all, the former may not be ideal, but unlike the latter, it does not tend toward heresy. Hence, it follows that if one interprets reality through the lens that the reality is the fiat of the self-contained ontological Trinity, the one and the many problem evaporates.

Stated another way, the Trinity solves the one-many problem by being free from it himself, and then enabling believers to reason concretely on the basis of a systematic interpretation of reality so that they are effectively freed from it as well.[12] God exhibits ultimate unity and ultimate plurality: he is one is essence and three in person, as the traditional labels have it.[13] On this model we can understand that the one and the many isn’t really a problem for the Christian because the ontological Trinity serves as the paradigm by which we interpret reality. However, the unbeliever is in a precarious position. He is left without any justification whatsoever when he assigns certain qualities to empirical objects or claims a certain inferential relationship between ideas. The unbeliever cannot escape asserting, in practice, that reality is the very sort of place that, in theory, he denies it to be. Hence, to repeat Van Til’s conclusion, unbelieving thought is fundamentally self-defeating.[14]

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[1] B.A. Bosserman, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox:an Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius van Til (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 124.

[2] James Anderson, If Knowledge Then God. (Analogical Thoughts website)

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, harper Torchbooks ed, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 12e.

[4] Van Til, Cornelius. The Defense of the Faith. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co., 1985.

^[5] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979) 23.

[6] B.A. Bosserman, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox:an Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius van Til (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 92.

[7] Van Til, Cornelius. The Defense of the Faith. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co., 1985, 25.

[8] Ibid., 26.

[9] B.A. Bosserman, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox:an Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius van Til (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 78.

[10] Ibid., 79.

[11] Van Til, Cornelius. The Defense of the Faith. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co., 1985, 25.

[12] B.A. Bosserman, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox:an Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius van Til (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 78.

[13] Anderson, If Knowledge Then God.

[14] Bosserman.