"One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity." – Soren Kierkegaard
The first several times I read it, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the meaning of this quote. After a discussion with a friend tonight, I think I finally had a glimpse into its meaning.
We were discussing several things, but above all much of it came down to faith. Faith is, in itself, a contradiction and a paradox. Faith in God means we have supreme confidence in the sovereignty of the actions of God, and yet by that very acceptance of His sovereignty, we have complete uncertainty about the path He will choose for us. In brief: if we perfectly submit our lives and actions to God, we have no idea what will happen.
As an aside for the science buffs, this is nicely paralleled by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which is simply stated as: if you perfectly know your position, your momentum has infinite uncertainty. In our example, position is your relationship with God (your complete and perfect submission), and momentum is your life (what happens to you).
The natural question that follows is: how does this play out in our lives, day to day? Practically, how can we take any action, since if we fully accept the idea of an infinite God, we have to recognize that our knowledge of Him is infinitely lacking?
This problem of action in the midst of paralyzing uncertainty about the morality or “correctness” of an action is a reoccurring topic of existentialism known as “angst” or “anxiety”. Kierkegaard sums it up by saying that “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” If we are to maintain that God is in complete control and we will never understand His ways, how are we ever supposed to even start to act in a way that He would approve of?
In my life, this often takes the form of a “it just doesn’t matter” philosophy. Since God is sovereign, everything that plays out happens because He said it should play out that way. Now, we are told in the Bible that “all things work out for the good of those who love Him, who are called according to His purpose.” Yet we are told that in this world we “see through a glass, darkly”, so our view of the world and God’s actions in it is obscured by a layer of misunderstanding about who God is and what His plan is for redeeming His creation. We just don’t know what God’s plan is or how it’s working out, and it would seem that our actions matter so little that it really shouldn’t matter what we do.
But I feel like if we fully embrace this ideology, we miss out on something very important. If we stop concerning ourselves with the outcomes of our actions (because, for example, even if we act correctly we are not guaranteed a "good" outcome), and if we see everything that happens as occurring “just because” and we don’t fight to understand the meaning behind all this, we stop caring. If we don’t care, we can’t love.
I feel like that’s often where I end. I come to feel that any actions on this earth have so little eternal meaning (and I have so limited understanding of them) that I stop concerning myself with life in general. If I saw somebody drowning, I would not hesitate to jump in to try to save them, even at the expense of my own life. This sounds great and virtuous, because we are told that the greatest love is for a man to “lay his life down for his friends.” The problem is this: I would be acting because I value my life so little, not because I value their life so much.
I think this distinction is really non-trivial, and it brings us back to the idea of how to act in faith – in the way God wants us to. The answer is, as Kierkegaard hints, a paradox. We must both have perfect love for people (which means having compassion and genuinely caring about them) and have perfect submission to God (which means we are o.k. with the outcome no matter what it is). I think if we lean too much toward having compassion and caring we become can become depressed because we feel hopeless to help these people who are suffering. If we lean too far toward submission to God we can become cold and uncaring. The correct position seems to be not somewhere in the middle (e.g., God is fairly sovereign but perhaps if I care enough I can change things), but at both ends at once.
These kinds of paradoxes are what compel us to stay close to God. When we are honest in our study of God’s word, we realize the teachings there are very hard, and we realize living in this way is not possible without Christ directly interceding with us at every step. One of my favorite verses is the following: “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” Here we see that even when we cannot even pray correctly, the spirit corrects our prayers.
In the same way, I believe the spirit can guide and correct our actions. One of my constant prayers is that God will make me miserable when I am off the path He has set for me, and that He would not give me rest or solace until I get back on that path. I personally find that such prayers of self-chastisement are nearly always honored by God.
So, what have we covered here? God is complicated and cannot be understood. We are asked to have perfect faith in God. We are asked to love others. This is an impossible task. God send us the spirit to guide us on this task, and He sent His son to repair the relationship between us that has been severed so severely by our complete inability to follow these "simple" commands.
Personally, I reach the same conclusion I usually come to when I really dig deep: God is awesome, and He has a heck of a great plan to work things out between us.
No comments:
Post a Comment