The Truth in Both Extremes

Paradox in Biblical Revelation

Robert S. Rayburn

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781666732078, 9781666725353
• eBook ISBN: 9781666725360
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

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.

1

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.”1 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 ta...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Paradox in Holy Scripture
• Chapter 2: The Origin and Nature of Biblical Paradox
• Chapter 3: The Holy Trinity
• Chapter 4: The Incarnation
• Chapter 5: Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom
• Chapter 6: The Doctrines of the Bible
• Chapter 7: The Christian Life
• Chapter 8: Biblical Ethics
• Chapter 9: Conclusion
• Bibliography