Attention to all who think respect for paradox is reserved for those who disregard absolute truth: "While there are certainties in the Christian faith, at the heart of the Christian story is also paradox." Here, Michel explores examples in the incarnation (of the fully God, fully man named Jesus), the kingdom (that is here already and is not yet), grace (given freely, but somehow in a way that doesn't exclude law and effort), and lament (both a complaint to God and an expression of faith). As always, Michel has insightful, beautiful things to say. I found the third section the most helpful. For a good part of my adult life I've been unlearning a penchant for legalism, and lately (studying Galatians) have been beholding the mystery of life by the Spirit that also is a life with responsibility.
The older I get, the more I discover that certainty can be elusive. I want to be clear here. I believe in certainty, but I do not believe in comprehensive certainty....We know in part. —Russ Ramsey, forward
Theological understanding should not become a substitute for faith. Studied rightly, theology should lead to awe and wonder. —Russ Ramsey, foreword
I am not talking about abandoning orthodoxy or venturing away from the faith. God forbid. I am talking about venturing deeper in. —Russ Ramsey, foreword
Examples of paradox: the three-in-one God, the incarnation, grace (6).
"'How do you keep God's story prominent in your writing rather than your own?' I've puzzled over that question for years, understanding, on the one hand, the fear that we're raising up a generation of people who know no truth beyond their personal experience, who do not understand their stories as windows into the bigger, grander story of God. And still, I can't help wondering just how exactly to point to the place where my story ends and God's story begins. When God rained bread on his hungry people and opened rivers from rocks, whose story was that?" (44).
"A bodily life, which is to say a spiritual life, is a scandalously particular life. A special life. The incarnation, resting as it does on the paradox of particularity, reminds us of this. Jesus was the second Adam, born of God, born of Mary. But his life is not simply a model of universality. God narrowed infinite possibilities to become a particular man in the fullness of time....We learn to be human from Jesus, but this isn't to say that Jesus was a generic human" (47).
"Was God...up to something as generic as womanhood and manhood in each of our lives--or was there more to be discovered for living our unique, embodied lives of faithfulness?" (47).
"Though we sing a collective song of praise in eternity, we sing it from the particular timbre of our own voices. Though we are finally gathered as the single people of people, we are not a faceless mass of humanity. Sin, like dross, is burned away: specialness is not" (48).
"To receive grace, we need humility" (116).
"The curse of the law is that we cannot keep it. The evidence of grace is that we should want to" (121).
"There is fruitful tension between grace and law, law and grace, and paying attention to that tension helps us avoid the either of legalism (which separates God's law from grace) and the or of antinomianism (which separates God's grace from obedience). It is a paradox that God's gratuitous grace should rain on the righteous and the unrighteous--and that obedience should be demanded for no other apparent reason that 'it is his word'" (125).
"Human agency is not sufficient for justification, but human agency is critical for sanctification. And this is just a fancy way of saying that we must work in a life saved by grace.
"The only kind of faith that the Bible mentions is obedient faith (Rom. 1:5)" (139).
"This is what the spiritual disciplines are: not the rain shower of God's grace but the effort to get outside" (139).
"Spiritual response, said Jesus, is an easy yoke and a light burden, which is to say something lightweight and yet something to be carried nonetheless" (141).
"Lament, with its clear-eyed appraisal of suffering alongside its commitment to finding audience with God, is a paradoxical practice of faith" (147).
"...what lament teaches me, at the very least, is that it is not equanimity that I need in the face of death, but outrage" (159).
"There is pluck to lament, pluck to its faith. Lest we think that faith is slack surrender to God's will, the testimony that we have in Scripture is a faith paradoxically emboldened to ask, to question, to challenge, to complain" (167).
"Just as there is a necessary learning in our life of desire, there is also a necessary learning in our life of grief...we must be apprenticed in God's sorrow. As J. Todd Billings explores in Rejoicing in Lament, there are distorted forms of lament, including the complaint "about interruptions in [our] comfortable, middle-class lifestyle, without an eye toward seeking God's kingdom." The troubles we regularly bring to God might be more closely examined for what they reveal about the things we treasure, the things we most vigilantly protect, the things we cannot lose" (175).
"There is a way to complain about injustice in the world that has nothing to do with faith. There is a way of hoping to repair the world that has nothing to do with relying on God (and all about trusting in one's own do-gooding). There is also a way of existing in the world that doesn't complain or grieve but rather insulates itself from the everyday travesties of injustice. But there is yet another way, a more Godlike orientation to the world, and it's the paradoxical way of weeping. It's the way of Jesus outside the tomb of one of his closes friends, tears falling despite all his reassurances about resurrection of life. That way of Jesus is the way of lament. Lament cries out its anguish to God" (182).
"God's suffering is not an answer necessarily, but is a consolation. And even if the cross does not put to rest all the questions we have for the troubles we face, it assures us that god is fit to comfort" (186).
