“But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”
John 3:21 NRSV-CI
Humble Striving
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard used the term ‘sacred tension’ to refer to the tension binding together opposing forces in a paradox. Attempts to resolve or understand the underlying paradox, rather than resign oneself to it, result in releasing, thus losing, the sacred tension.
Instead of the tragic heroes with which we are all familiar (from Achilles to Iron Man), the ones who virtuously battle despite their flaws often to tragic defeat, Kierkegaard chose for his heroic archetype someone who embraced paradox–who maintained rather than resolved the sacred tension, and thus resided within it.
That hero was Abraham, the Biblical father of faith for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Whereas removing tension is the focus of the tragic hero, embracing paradox is what underlies and informs Abraham’s existence living within sacred tension.
While Abraham was Kierkegaard’s model for embracing paradox, God made incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ was paradox. If you can learn to live within the sacred tension of Christ the God-man, no paradox will defeat you.
By answering the call to imitate Christ’s example, which has been termed ‘humble striving,’ we recognize the paradox of Christ incarnate is not just one paradox, but two: (1) God becoming fully human while remaining fully divine; and (2) our call to do what we know is impossible, become like Christ.
“[E]mbracing the paradox of Jesus Christ represents a form of sacred tension characterized by passionate limitation, by holding on to security in insecurity as well as certainty in uncertainty, by the perpetual annulment of offense, and by imitation [which is] the fundamental underlying virtue of [humble striving].”
Matthew Thomas Nowachek, “Living within the Sacred Tension” (2016)
http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/680
Paradox is no wisp of smoke that disappears under the gentle breeze of cleverness or logic. Paradox is substantial, and when properly cultivated it persistently feeds and fosters the sacred tension to the point of evoking in us specific virtues, inviting deeper faith, and eliciting eternal truths.
By encouraging his readers to embrace paradox, Kierkegaard is not asking them to carry out specific moral actions or to perform specific religious practices, but rather to adopt a mindset of resignation to the infinite so that Christian faith and virtues can take root.
Embracing the paradox of faith rewards us with the virtues of courage, trust, humility, love, and joy; and embracing the dual paradox of self and our relation to God incarnate makes us well-practiced in dedicated patience, humble courage, and humble striving.
Spiritual Fitness
Living within the sacred tension has tangible benefits for Christian life and spiritual fitness. Paradox is the sinew that connects the muscles of faith and reason to the bones of our physical and spiritual bodies.
The sinewy tissue of paradox is the last remaining residue from the severing of our physical being from our spiritual being in the Fall, at the moment when Adam and Eve gave in to the original, prideful temptation of wanting to see with God’s eyes not for His glory but for their own.
We cannot rebuild those muscles and strengthen those connections without revitalizing the sinewy tissue so that it becomes fully elastic, able to stretch without breaking. This happens only by nurturing our relationship to paradox–not by ignoring it, bypassing it, or cutting away at it.
By humbly answering the call to imitate God every day, we strengthen in virtue slowly over time, building our spiritual muscle memory, as it were. Contrast this with the prideful desire for instant gratification, expecting to obtain God-like powers by simply eating an apple.
One way in which we are drawn to imitate God is through our creativity. The human mind yearns to create, and the act of creation attunes us to our eternal selves, provided our aim is properly and ultimately ordered to God.
Paradox assures that there will always be fuel for our creativity–that there will always be a reason to keep looking for new ways to understand. When Christ said, “Seek and ye shall find” (see Matthew 7:7), He made it clear that our job is to yearn for His truth unceasingly, and if we do then God will take care of the finding part.
Without constant seeking–if instead there was terminal point past which no new understanding can be expected–then we have stopped growing, and anything that has stopped growing is already dead. By dedicating ourselves to the search for His truth and not the acquisition of it, we become alive; and as we recall, “He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” (Mark 12:27)
This applies to growing in knowledge of Scripture as well. While Scripture is ‘set in stone,’ it remains alive because there is no end to our search for new understanding within it. The living Word will never cease to engage our creativity.
“The Scriptures are shallow enough for a babe to come and drink without fear of drowning and deep enough for theologians to swim in without ever touching the bottom”
Attributed to St. Jerome
Our creativity demands being able to look at things with fresh eyes, and paradox has the power to refresh like no other. The simple, solvable problems of life fail to truly capture the imagination and engage the mind. Instead, it is ambiguity that draws us in, like a moth to a flame.
Do you crave new understanding even though it may challenge your preconceptions, or are you looking for an answer that fits comfortably into the framework of what you already believe?
Expressing the Inexpressible
New understanding can be messy and cause you to revisit problems you thought were settled. But this is a small price to pay for the rewards it brings.
Answers that neatly fit are comforting but ultimately unsatisfying. If we are open to it, we find that ambiguity is most often the rule in life, not the exception. And that is a divine gift.
Wrestling with paradox is a complex but rewarding task. Indeed, it is only the noble-hearted who can confront the difficult and complex challenges, having faith in solutions that are not evident. The existence of unscalable mountains is what inspires people to become worthy of standing on the peak.
We better appreciate the meaning and impact of an idea when we have to work hard to understand it. Perhaps this is why we are drawn to paradoxes, and how we can see so much wisdom in them even though that wisdom is often frustratingly difficult to express.
Like the development of the concept of infinity in mathematics, we start by finding a way of expressing the inexpressible, aware that it is only an approximation, and then explore its properties and boundaries to understand it better, all the while cognizant that ‘better’ is the goal, not ‘completely.’
Even if, like infinity, we can never hope to reach the end, still we persist in struggling toward that end. This is the human relation to mystery. This is the tension between the finite and the infinite.
Holding on to Doubt
There is a fascinating rhetorical trick that atheists play when it comes to the unknowable, like the existence of God. While certainty is not possible for either the believer or the unbeliever, it is the believer who is said to have faith and the unbeliever who is said to have doubt. This is misdirection at its finest, since both need faith to maintain their position.
G.K. Chesterton argued that between the Christian and the atheist, only the Christian’s belief allows him to have doubts.[1] If an atheist doubts atheism, then he has allowed for the possibility of God, and is that really atheism? But the Christian who questions his faith is simply being a faithful Christian.
“[T]his asking, this questioning, this challenging, this complaining are practices of faith because they rest on the very nature of who God is.”
Jen Pollock Michel, Surprised by Paradox, p. 167
For a believer, however, any creeping doubt tends to elicit fear. But fear of the consequences of falling into doubt can, paradoxically, hold us back from fully committing to our faith in the first place.
It is not falling into doubt that we should be afraid of, but rather the attachment to doubt in the first place. And make no mistake, the badge of ‘doubt’ is highly coveted in elite intellectual circles. For those who choose to hold on to their doubt and put their faith in human enlightenment instead of God, it is quite literally a Faustian bargain.
“[Faust] surrendered himself to the Devil for the express purpose of attaining enlightenment, and it follows that he was not in possession of it prior to this; and precisely because he surrendered himself to the Devil, his doubt increased (just as a sick person who falls into the hands of a medical quack usually gets sicker). For although Mephistopheles permitted him to look through his spectacles into humankind and into the secret hiding places of the earth, Faust must forever doubt him because of his inability to provide enlightenment about the most profound intellectual matters. In accordance with his own idea, he could never turn to God because in the very instant he did so he would have to admit to himself that here in truth lay enlightenment; but in that same instant he would, in fact, have denied his character as one who doubts.”
Hong & Hong The Essential Kierkegaard, Selected Journal Entries, p. 4
Those attached to their status as a ‘doubter’ are bound to doubt the Devil’s ability to deliver the promised ‘enlightenment’ because the Devil can never fulfill his end of the bargain. And yet we hold on to doubt because once we let it go there is no longer any excuse for turning away from God.
Infinite Resignation
According to Kierkegaard, to desire God is a human being’s highest perfection. If one is to know God better, he must be diminished, that is to become “fully convinced that he himself is capable of nothing, nothing at all.”[2]
God’s unfathomable greatness makes Him invisible to us. We cannot ‘step back’ far enough to comprehend His infinitude unless we are able to become aware of our own vanishing infinitesimal-ness. The Apostle Paul was working to achieve this level of comprehension, even to the point of boasting of his weaknesses (see 2 Corinthians 11:30).
And yet faith is needed for the proper ordering of love of God. “[H]e who loves God without faith reflects upon himself; he who loves God in faith reflects upon God.”[3]
The first movement of faith is infinite resignation–the willingness to transcend the universal even after resigning all to the infinite. In essence, it is the willingness to give up everything you have, everything worldly and finite, in recognition of the infinite and eternal.
“Abraham I cannot understand; in a certain sense I can learn nothing from him except to be amazed. If someone deludes himself into thinking he may be moved to have faith by pondering the outcome of that story, he cheats himself and cheats God out of the first movement of faith – he wants to suck worldly wisdom out of the paradox.”
Hong & Hong, The Essential Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 9
What Kierkegaard is saying is that if you try to understand faith as merely blind obedience, even to the point of the severity of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, you will fail because the notion of blind obedience conflicts with the wisdom of the world.
But if you try to understand faith in terms of resigning all you have and all you are to the infinite (because you are nothing and all you have is nothing), then you might be able to transcend the tendency to get bogged down by the nature of Abraham’s actions.
Paradoxically, this first movement, the act of resignation, does not require spiritual faith because it is by nature a disciplined act of the intellect. “The act of resignation does not require faith, for what I gain in resignation is my eternal consciousness.”[4] It is the next step that requires faith.
Follow Me
Jesus asks us to do two things: (1) give up everything and (2) follow Him (see Luke 9:23). The first involves humbling oneself and requires great effort and discipline, but doesn’t require faith. The second involves acting with complete trust in God’s will, which requires faith.
Only by faith without any thought of one’s self can we obtain the power to move mountains. “By faith I do not renounce anything; on the contrary, by faith I receive everything exactly in the sense in which it is said that one who has faith like a mustard seed can move mountains.”[5]
You can only gain your life by renouncing it, since infinite resignation precedes faith, and through faith you receive everything.
“But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith. By faith Abraham did not renounce Isaac, but by faith Abraham received Isaac.”
Hong & Hong, The Essential Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 98
What is absurd is that by faith you receive back what you renounced in the subservient resignation that prepared you for faith.
“Faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal … in such a way that the movement repeats itself.”
Hong & Hong, The Essential Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 99
In other words, faith is a strange loop!
If we recognize through love and devotion of God that we are nothing, we are able to renounce the world and ourselves, and then through faith our individual action is elevated higher than the universal.
To be elevated higher than the universal, you must be taken out of and isolated from the universal. Through faith we gain everything in return, and Kierkegaard seems to suggest that this receiving starts a new cycle of the movement where we once again prepare ourselves through resignation.
When you are elevated above the universal, you are outside the ability of others to understand. “He who walks the narrow road of faith has no one to advise him – no one understands him.”[6]
And this is why we must somehow be able to follow Abraham’s example into the paradox of faith even though we cannot understand him.
Anxiety of Freedom
Faith is impossible without God’s grace and His gift of free will, because without free will, belief would be (blissfully) compelled. Without the ability to say no, how good is our yes?
In Western society, we take it for granted that freedom is an inherent good. However, like the guy at the party who counters every statement with ‘Well, akshully…,’ Kierkegaard the consummate party-pooper reminds us that freedom of choice breeds anxiety.
Anxiety is what manifests from freedom’s ever looming and limitless possibilities. Faith can overcome that anxiety by offering an inner confidence.
While faith is powerful, it does not overcome a sinful nature, and so the anxiety continues to nag, making us yearn for the confidence of faith to become something more–to become certainty.
With certainty, our path is determined and set before us. With faith there is fear, hope, failure, and bad decisions, but there is also learning how to trust God. Wishing for certainty is natural, but thinking we can achieve it is the same hubris that befell Eve and Adam.
“Paradoxically, God is a God who both self-reveals and hides.”[7] The key is to learn what is revealed and to trust what is hidden. Trusting in God and letting go of worldly attachments is ultimately how anxiety can be overcome.
Perhaps flying in the face of convention, we can practice letting go, and thus reduce our anxiety, by reflecting on our mortality; by reflecting on our own death.
Without a limited time on earth, we would not have much motivation to try to understand God’s plan for us and cooperate with Him in bringing it to fruition. The reality of our impending death provides the impetus for living a moral life.
“The thought of death gives the earnest person the right momentum in life and the right goal toward which he directs his momentum.”
Hong & Hong, The Essential Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, p. 166
It seems that the heroism of the faith of Abraham and Isaac allowed them to trust in God’s plan, even to the point of death. Which brings us back to the start of this post; just like a strange loop.
[1] “The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle.” G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “The Maniac”
[2] Hong & Hong, The Essential Kierkegaard, Four Upbuilding Discourses, p. 87
[3] The Essential Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 94
[4] Hong & Hong, The Essential Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 98
[5] Hong & Hong, The Essential Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 98
[6] Hong & Hong, The Essential Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 101
[7] Jen Pollock Michel, Surprised by Paradox, p. 71