The Truth in Both Extremes: Paradox in Biblical Revelation

By Robert S. Rayburn

A phenomenon of biblical revelation that has provoked unending confusion and controversy is the penchant of the biblical writers to make assertions, clear and intelligible in themselves, that seem inconsistent with, if not the virtual contradiction of, assertions made elsewhere in the same Bible. What is more, the Bible essentially never acknowledges the paradoxes and never seeks to explain or resolve them. Readers of the Bible encounter such "contradictions" at every turn: in its theology, its description of Christian experience, and its ethical teaching. These unreconciled emphases lie beneath the theological disagreements that have long separated Christians from one another. Therefore, coming to terms with this feature of biblical communication is of great importance.
While the existence of these many paradoxes in the Bible has long been recognized, rarely have Christians been taught to expect them or what to do when confronted with them. This brilliant feature of the biblical pedagogy is an accommodation to the limitations of the human intellect, serves to grant us access to the truth so far as we can comprehend it, forces us to face facts we would otherwise prefer to ignore, and makes of Christians themselves a unique complex of opposites.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jan 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666725360

Book preview

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Paradox in Holy Scripture

The truth is not in the middle, and not in one extreme, but in both extremes.

—Charles Simeon

This is a book about how to read the Bible. I want especially to help you appreciate a remarkable feature of Holy Scripture, a mark of its genius and an important reason for its enthralling power. And by doing so I hope to help you account for one of the most significant challenges the Word of God poses to those who seek to understand its teaching. People disagree, sometimes seriously, about what the Bible actually teaches. We know that. Even people who revere Holy Scripture, who sincerely desire to understand it correctly, and who both confess and appreciate the divine authority of the Bible do not understand its teaching in the same way. To be sure, much of what we are taught in the Bible all Christians understand in much the same way. This is especially true of its historical narrative, but it is also true of the majority of its imperatives, from Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ to Love one another. But the Bible’s exposition of that narrative—its theology, if you will—and its explanation of those imperatives—its ethics—are something else altogether. In regard to that, as we know all too well and as every thoughtful Christian must regret, there has always been and remains today substantial disagreement. Indeed, there exist entire parties or traditions in Christendom that are isolated from one another in some large part due to those disagreements. I am going to argue that one reason, if not the principal reason, for such disagreement is to be found in the Bible’s characteristic way of communicating its truth.

When I was a young pastor I learned from several wise and experienced ministers the importance of reading the entire Bible right through again and again. Through the years I have noticed how often the men whose understanding of the Bible and skill in teaching and preaching it I came most to admire, both past and present, are men who made a habit of the comprehensive and systematic reading of the entire Bible. Representative of the English and Scottish Puritans, important mentors of my Christian life, I will mention William Gouge, who read fifteen chapters of the Bible every day. T. C. Hammond, the twentieth-century Anglican who conducted a wonderfully fruitful ministry as a teacher, preacher, and writer, read the Bible through every three months. A. W. Pink, fiercely independent in his ecclesiology, in the twenty-four years following his conversion read through the Bible more than fifty times. But many more, such as the late influential London preachers Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Stott, made a habit of reading the Bible through at least once a year. They thought that familiarity with the whole of Holy Scripture was essential to a right understanding of any part of the Bible; that to understand the Bible aright and to have it exercise its proper influence upon one’s heart and life one needed to absorb it—all of it—and hold its teaching, as it were, in permanent solution in the mind. Charles Spurgeon, the great London preacher of Victorian England, famously said of John Bunyan that he had absorbed the Scripture in just this way: Why, this man is a living Bible! Prick him anywhere; and you will find that his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him.

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These men wanted everything the Bible taught to be weighing on their minds and hearts all the time.

Convinced by their example, for the past thirty-eight years I have made it my practice to read the Bible through each year and, I believe, that practice has made a real difference in the way I understand the Word of God. What is more, I have preached the Bible for more than forty years and a great deal of my preaching—different sermons morning and evening every Lord’s Day—has been the consecutive exposition of books of the Bible paragraph by paragraph. In this way I have preached through almost all of the Bible and much of it twice. This intimate engagement with Holy Scripture over many years and, especially, this constant exposure to the entire Bible have wonderfully served to increase my love for the Word of God, taught me to appreciate its literary genius, convinced me that it contains the same message from beginning to end, have piqued my fascination with the uniqueness of the extraordinary gift God has given us in his Word, and have only further strengthened my conviction that the Bible, this magnificent library of canonical literature, is nothing less than the oracles of God. But they have also confirmed for me an observation that has been made by others regarding how the Bible teaches us the truth about God, about ourselves, and the way of faith and salvation.

I have found this insight into the Bible’s pedagogy, its way of teaching, expressed occasionally in the sermons or books of Christian preachers and theologians. But, in my experience, more often than not such references to this feature of the biblical form of communication have the nature of obiter dicta, passing comments or observations. I have come to believe this characteristic of the Bible’s pedagogy deserves a much more careful and thorough demonstration and the implications of it need to be identified in a more explicit and comprehensive way. Its ramifications are too significant for it not to be a major principle of the interpretation of Holy Scripture self-consciously held and intentionally applied. But I have never found it worked out in a thoroughgoing fashion in any work of biblical hermeneutics or homiletics, that is, in books about how to interpret the Bible or books about how to preach it. And in my reading I have yet to find the evidence that most preachers and most biblical interpreters and theologians as a rule regard this insight into the biblical pedagogy as fundamental to their way of understanding the Word of God.

The Thesis: Truth in Its Polarities

I am speaking of the Bible’s characteristic way of presenting truth in its polarities. By polarity I mean the characteristic of a system that exhibits opposing or contrasting principles or tendencies. The Bible not only constantly makes assertions that on their face seem virtually the contradiction of one another, but then seems studiously to avoid any effort to reconcile or harmonize them. It never, or almost never, makes any attempt to resolve the tension created by seemingly antithetical assertions, assertions sometimes found in the writing of the same biblical author, sometimes in the same book, sometimes even on the same page. Examples abound of every kind. We have, famously, in consecutive verses in Proverbs:

Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.

Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes. (

26

:

4

–

5

).

In 1 Samuel we read, over the course of a single chapter, these statements from the mouth of the Lord himself or from the mouth of Samuel on the Lord’s behalf:

I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments. (

1

Sam

15

:

10

–

11

)

The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you. And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret. (vv.

28

–

29

)

And the Lord regretted that he had made Saul king over Israel. (v.

35

)

But in speaking of the biblical penchant for polarities I do not mean to refer only to discordant or seemingly contradictory declarations made in the same immediate context. Throughout the Bible, in one place then in another, we are taught to believe something that seems, at least to us, impossible or certainly very difficult to harmonize or reconcile with something we are taught elsewhere. In some places, for example, God is said to be or shown to be in absolute control of events and outcomes in this world, down to the very thoughts of our heart and the hairs of our head. It is the teaching of Holy Scripture that God does what pleases him in heaven and on earth and that no one can shorten his hand. Everything happens in this world according to the counsel of his omnipotent will. Statements to this effect and illustrations of his sovereign rule are found everywhere in the Bible.

However, we also find in Holy Scripture that at many other times and in other circumstances the Almighty appears to stand helpless to effect his will before the intransigent rebellion of mankind or of his people. He is said to be frustrated, to grieve, even to be brokenhearted over man’s unbelief and disobedience (Gen 6:6; Isa 1:14; Jer 23:7; Ezek 6:8–9). Moreover, the way both these descriptions of God are presented in the Bible—simply, frequently, artlessly, and emphatically—renders it impossible for an honest reader to treat one or the other assertion, one or the other description, as simply an artifice or affectation, a way of speaking we are obviously intended to take less seriously, as if the biblical author were winking at us as he wrote. If this were the only case in which we encounter such a contradiction, it would be a problem. But the fact is we encounter them at every turn.

The Wisdom of Charles Simeon

My first encounter with an explicit recognition that this penchant for polarity is a phenomenon of biblical revelation, and so of the importance of reckoning with its consequences, was in reading Charles Simeon, the great Cambridge preacher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is no accident that it was a great preacher who took careful notice of the Bible’s characteristic pedagogy. It is thoughtful preachers, after all, working over paragraphs of Holy Scripture, one after another, week after week and year after year, who are most likely to notice the polarities, to notice the lack of qualification or harmonization, and so to feel the constant tension polarities create. What is more, as pastors of the Lord’s people, they must face the difficult existential questions provoked by such polarities when brought to them by their confused or brokenhearted parishioners. Nothing has so sharpened my own sense of the tension created by the Bible’s assertion of seemingly contrary facts or of the importance of acknowledging it than conversations with earnest Christians struggling to know what to think. It is thoughtful preachers of the Word of God who, expounding text after text to their congregations, must Lord’s Day after Lord’s Day answer the question of whether the powerful emphasis of this text should be allowed to stand undiminished or, instead, be qualified by the introduction of another biblical emphasis from some other text. Simeon’s immense influence was no doubt a result of his sterling character, but it was also due to the power of his preaching. That power, I have come to believe, derived in some large part from the approach he took to the biblical text, an approach firmly grounded in his recognition that it is polarities that we encounter in Holy Scripture, not a nicely systematized unity of truth. I was subsequently to learn that Simeon’s observation on the nature of biblical revelation had been influential in the thinking of others whose teaching or preaching I had come to admire.

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Simeon was a man who had crept through the Bible, was extraordinarily familiar with it, and so a man whose observations carry impressive authority. He took so seriously the Bible’s characteristic method of revealing the truth in its polarities that he made that method of revelation vital to his theory and practice of preaching the Word of God. What is more, Simeon was one of the first to realize the importance of teaching other men how to preach more effectively. In the preface to the first volume of his celebrated Horae Homileticae, his twenty-one volumes of notes on the biblical text for the use of preachers, Simeon described an approach to preaching the Bible that self-consciously acknowledged its characteristic polarities. Speaking of himself in the third person, Simeon laid out a plan for the preacher based on the fact that the Bible typically asserts without qualification certain facts that are, on their face, difficult to harmonize with other facts asserted elsewhere.

He has no desire to be wise above what is written, nor any conceit that he can teach the Apostles to speak with more propriety and correctness than they have spoken. It may be asked perhaps, how do you reconcile these doctrines, which you believe to be of equal authority and equal importance? But what right has any man to impose this task on the preachers of God’s word? God has not required it of them; nor is the truth or falsehood of any doctrine to be determined absolutely by this criterion.

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While too many set these passages at variance, and espouse the one in opposition to the other, he dwells with equal pleasure on them both; and thinks it, on the whole, better to state these apparently opposite truths in the plain and unsophisticated manner of the Scriptures, than to enter into scholastic subtleties, that have been invented for the upholding of human systems. He is aware, that they who are warm advocates for this or that system of religion, will be ready to condemn him as inconsistent: but, if he speak in exact conformity with the Scriptures, he shall rest the vindication of his conduct simply on the authority and example of the Inspired Writers.

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On other occasions Simeon would again emphasize these same convictions regarding the interpretation and preaching of the Bible.

I love the simplicity of the Scriptures; and I wish to receive and inculcate every truth precisely in the way, and to the extent, that it is set forth in the inspired volume. Were this the habit of all divines, there would soon be an end of most of the controversies that have agitated and divided the Church of Christ.

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My endeavor is to bring out of Scripture what is there, and not to thrust in what I think might be there. I have a great jealousy on this head; never to speak more or less than I believe to be the mind of the Spirit in the passage I am expounding.

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In a letter to a friend in 1825 Simeon wrote, . . . to you I can say in words what these thirty years I have proclaimed in deeds, that the truth is not in the middle, and not in one extreme, but in both extremes.

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What Simeon was referring to is precisely this fact: that the Bible concentrates almost exclusively on the polarities of any continuum of truth, what he calls the extremes. In his view it was the preacher’s task to proclaim the message in the text before him, not to weaken, still less to undo that message by qualifying it with a message found in some other text, especially with another message that is virtually, if only seemingly, the reverse of what is found in the text being preached.

According to Simeon, one must embrace both poles of any biblical continuum of truth in order to have embraced the truth. And the Bible’s way of forcing those polarities upon us is to teach us without qualification each pole, one here, one there. One typically—not always, but typically—finds only one pole in any particular passage, even in some cases only one pole in large tracts of biblical material. In this way the reader of the Bible is schooled in the truth of God with all of its simplicity and all of its power. That was Charles Simeon’s conviction: the Bible ought to be preached in the way in which the Bible reads: one emphasis here, another there, with each getting its day! According to Simeon the preacher should preach one extreme at a time in the same way that the Bible reveals one extreme at a time. Since this is the way God chose to reveal his truth, this is the way the preacher should proclaim and teach it. Otherwise, the truth, or more typically one truth or the other, dies in our hearts either from constant qualification or, just as often, from simply being ignored in favor of the truth at the opposite end of that continuum.

Any reader of the Bible has encountered this distinctive pedagogy repeatedly, whether or not it has occurred to him or her that it is characteristic of the Bible’s way of teaching its theology, its ethics, and the experience of the life of faith. In one place an absolute sovereignty of divine grace; in another every person’s responsibility for his or her own salvation and the salvation of others. In one place an immutable divine will; in another God changing his mind (2 Sam 24:16; Ezek 16:42; Hos 9:15). In one place God desiring the salvation of everyone; in another choosing to save some and reject others. In one place God promising lavish blessing for those who prove themselves faithful to him; in another faithful saints crying out to God in confusion for want of that blessing. In one place through union with Jesus Christ we have been delivered from the power of sin; in another we remain, even as Christians, its groveling slaves. In one place an exemplar of the life of faith is found bemoaning his many and serious sins and crying out to God for mercy; in another that same godly man confidently proclaims not only that he had kept the ways of the Lord and was blameless before him and kept himself from guilt, but that the Lord had rewarded him according to his righteousness and the cleanness of his hands (2 Sam 22:21–25). In one place we are told that the Lord Christ is coming soon; in another place we are taught to prepare for a long wait. In one place we are warned that the punishment of hell is a lake of fire prepared for the devil and his angels, where the worm does not die and the fire does not go out; in another we read that some in hell will receive a light beating (Luke 12:47–48). In one place we are commanded to tell the truth even when it hurts; in another we find the godly telling lies with God’s active encouragement or approval. In one place we are told to bend every effort to preserve the unity of the church; in another to exert equal effort to preserve the fidelity of the church. In one place we are taught to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and leave the provision of food, clothing, and shelter to our faithful Heavenly Father. In other words, we are to exhibit a cheerful unconcern about income, possessions, and worldly security. But in another place we are sternly warned that a person who does not provide for his or her family—which, one would think, absolutely requires attention to income, possessions, and security—is worse than an infidel.

But what we do not find in the Bible is any explanation as to how we are to believe both or do both at one and the same time. Indeed, the Bible almost never even acknowledges the tension created by these seemingly discordant assertions or commandments. Who can deny that Christians have found it all too easy to wrap themselves around one pole at the expense of the other, confidently to assert one biblical truth while virtually ignoring the other, to practice one obligation while almost entirely forgetting the other! It is not a simple matter to believe truths that seem opposed to one another or to meet obligations that seem to be the reverse of one another! Who can deny that many of our disagreements and much of our disunity originate here?

Is it not here, in this penchant for revealing the truth in its polarities, that we find an explanation for the fact that the Bible so regularly surprises us, even confuses us, with its statements or form of words? We do not expect to read this or that in Holy Scripture because we are sure that Scripture, given what we have read in its pages, would not say such a thing. We do not expect to hear that God incited David to commit a sinful act (2 Sam 24:1; cf. 1 Sam 18:10–11), all the more when we read in the other version of the same episode that it was the devil who incited David (1 Chr 21:1). But this troubles us primarily because we are taught elsewhere in the Bible that God tempts no one to sin (Jas 1:13). We do not expect Paul, in laying the foundation for his exposition of justification by faith, to say that God will render to each one according to his works or that it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified (Rom 2:6, 13).

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Still less do we expect the great champion of justification by faith alone to speak of anyone being worthy of salvation, as the apostle does—worthy of death certainly (Rom 1:32), but worthy of salvation (2 Thess 1:5)? And the Lord Jesus spoke in the same way (Matt 10:13; Luke 20:35; cf. Ezek 14:14, 20). John jars us still further when in Rev 3:4 he speaks of those who will walk with the Lord in white for they are worthy and then uses the same word in the next chapter to say that the Lord God Almighty is worthy to receive glory, and honor, and power. Would any evangelical nowadays speak in such a way of a sinner saved by grace: that a Christian may be said to be worthy of salvation because of his or her obedience to and service for God? What evangelical with sola gratia in his or her bones would say, as David did, Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity, and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering (Ps 26:1; 2 Sam 22:21–25), all the more when in the previous psalm David pled with the Lord not to remember the sins of his youth (Ps 25:7)? Paul said something similar: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day. . . ."

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This is the same Paul who with great discouragement admitted his continuing captivity to sin in Rom 7:14–25. That statement in 2 Tim 4:7–8 has been taken by some commentators as proof that Paul could not have written 2 Timothy, since the champion of justification by faith would never have said such a thing!

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Make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! in Ezek 18:31 grates on our ears precisely because the Bible teaches us, even in Ezekiel, and one would have thought unmistakably, that God alone can transform a heart of stone into a heart of flesh. I could multiply such examples at great length. But why do such statements jolt us as they do? Why have commentators and preachers searched for other ways to read such statements except for the fact that we find them at odds with what we take to be the Bible’s own teaching elsewhere? The polarities make for tension and often for nearly unbearable tension. We are inclined to remove or relax tension, not to preserve it, still less to highlight or emphasize it!

Dialectics, Antinomies, and Paradoxes

For want of more helpful and illuminating terminology I have come to describe this phenomenon as the Bible’s dialectical pedagogy. Dialectic is a term with a long history in philosophy and theology and has been used in quite different ways. But one of its approved definitions is the juxtaposition of or setting side by side apparently conflicting ideas.

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This, without question, is what we find everywhere in the Bible. In some historical instances of the use of the term dialectic the juxtaposition of the conflicting ideas is intended to lead to a resolution, an integration or harmony of truth; either a golden mean between the two truths or a new synthesis of them. Either the truth is thought to be found in the coalescence or fusion of the two ideas or principles, or the conflict between them will cause a new idea or principle to appear. But not so in the Bible. There the poles remain distinct and unmixed and the tension between them remains unrelaxed and unresolved. No solution is sought or proposed. Discordant truths are maintained and preserved in their entirety in the Bible’s description of reality.

A term that has been employed to describe these seemingly contradictory assertions is antinomy, a word that can mean either an actual or an apparent contradiction between equally valid conclusions or assertions. J. I. Packer, for example, used the term to describe the relationship between the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man in his early masterpiece Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God.

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He characterized the relationship between those two biblical teachings—salvation as the gift of God to the helpless and salvation as the blessing God bestows on those and only those who choose to confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior—as an antinomy, an apparent contradiction. God holds man responsible for making a choice that we are taught he is incapable of making apart from God’s gracious working in his heart. To believe one or the other is not difficult. We have no difficulty believing that we are free to choose and responsible for the choices we make. Similarly, we have no difficulty believing that salvation is God’s gift to the helpless and his achievement from beginning to end. But believing both at the same time is another matter. The history of Christian theology has proved that believing both at the same time is more than many Christians have been willing to do!

Or we might describe the Bible’s practice of asserting seemingly antithetical ideas with the term paradox. Again, the word paradox is used in different ways, but it has regularly been used to describe the relationship of statements or principles that are both true but appear to contradict or undermine one another.

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I am going to argue that the Bible is throughout artlessly paradoxical; that is, it asserts simply, innocently, and unaffectedly, without explanation or evident self-consciousness, two truths, each perfectly understandable by itself but seemingly the contradiction of the other. The late Vernon Grounds, in a fine article published more than half a century ago, reminds us that paradox, as a feature of biblical revelation, is ubiquitous. We encounter it in many more places than the Bible’s teaching of the causes of salvation.

In Christianity, as I see it, paradox is not a concession; it is an indispensable category, a sheer necessity—a logical necessity!—if our faith is to be unswervingly biblical.

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And with a nod to Charles Simeon he concludes,

Let us do as Simeon does. Let us emphatically assert apparently opposite truths, remembering as a sort of criterion that very likely we are being loyal to the Bible as long as we feel upon our minds the tug of logical tension. Let us as evangelicals unhesitatingly postulate paradox.

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And Dr. Packer, in speaking of the seeming contradiction between divine foreordination and human freedom and accountability, goes on