The Absurdity of Contradiction: Paradox

I love a good paradox.

There is just something about a seemingly double-minded but yet still somehow spiritually cohesive truth that gets my blood boiling.

God is sovereign and yet men are free.

God has chosen you before the foundations and yet he desires all men to be saved.

We are saved by grace through faith and yet by your works you will be justified and by your works you will be condemned.

Many people I know who must have everything logically flow and make complete rational sense hate, despise, abhor paradoxes; I love them because God really is in his nature strangely paradoxical. Chesterton seems to be able to capture paradox quite succinctly in The Man Who Was Thursday; I would dare say that he is one the most delightful Christian novelists I have read in awhile (and I am not a fan of CS Lewis) simply because of the absurdity. The anarchist are the policemen? Sunday goes from blowing up diplomats to hosting a masquerade ball?

While we are on the subject of Sunday, he is perhaps the greatest example of twisting paradox. Now, if you are not careful you could see what is being said as fatalistic dualism (God is both good and evil; right and wrong don't really exist), which would be completely missing the point. What is being talked about is the nature of God and how complex and paradoxical he often appears. Now I do not believe we are supposed to draw any direct correlations between God and blowing up government officials, but the idea is that God is often seen in paradoxical terms. Sunday is disturbing from behind like a monster but yet from the front he is almost too charming and kind; he is seemingly dense (since his entire inner circle or policemen) and yet he is also amazingly penetrating because he can see through individuals. He is enormous and yet he can leap tall buildings in a single bound; not really but you get the idea.

In similar fashion God is said to involved in both the good and the evil; don't try to figure out how that works. What is important is that Sunday has terrified them the entire novel but yet at the end he literally offers them restoration and the true peace of God. He again unites the council but now the "anarchy" is a different kind of anarchy. I think that is what ends up happening throughout the book. The anarchy goes from being about blowing up buildings and disrupting world affairs to accepting the peace of God and yet still disrupting world affairs with the implications. God is doing things for the good a true anarchist in a world that has chosen to governed by madness and materialism. Yet, God's motives are for good and he is working to restore the order from the chaos; a rebellion that has more consequence than any type of socialist revolution.

God is a king and an anarchist? Yeah, kind of trippy isn't it?

The whole novel is laced with such contradiction or maybe we should say seeming contradiction, because a paradox is not a real contradiction. Paradox will one day be explained; we will understand how God laughs and cries at the same time. We will get how God is out for our good and yet seemingly always allowing things in to trip us up. The point is we don't know what way is up! We can't tell when we are looking God in the face. Those men at the table hated Sunday and so do we! We come to the table with our own thoughts about God and our neat ordered universe and so find ourselves coming to the point of hatred when God is simply beyond our comprehension and our reasoning. The whole time Sunday was simply calling them to a deeper relationship and a more fuller trust in who we was; he was inviting them to embrace the paradox and even to the very end they (as do we) distrust and question Sunday.

The irony is that the only black/white character in the novel was Gregory, the archetype of Satan.

Go figure.