True, but....

I recently heard a radio preacher use the word antinomy.  It must be a technical word because I have never heard it used in the way he used it.  I am familiar (from my Christian Reconstructionist days) with the word antinomian, meaning someone who rejects the binding nature of the law of God (for a variety of different reasons), but the sense in which it was used on the radio was closer to the definition I found in Merriam Websters dictionary...."a contradiction between two apparently equally valid principles, a fundamental and apparently unresolvable conflict or contradiction."  The speaker was referring to some of the mysteries we commonly hold in our study of the scripture, free will versus divine sovereignty, God is love versus the wrath of God, created in the image of God versus total corruption, and others like those.

We do not naturally feel drawn to such things because we have been drilled that there is absolute truth, that this absolute truth is knowable by revelation, and that this revelation is given to us in the written Bible.  Thus we have the common proverb "God says it, I believe it, that settles it."  But when God says, or does, or shows forth two things that in themselves are true but which are the opposite of each other, then we are forced into the mental and verbal gymnastics that fill even the best of commentaries.  And the argument that these are just two sides of the same coin is an analogy that falls short in my estimation, because anyone who has won or lost a bet on a coin flip knows that which side of the coin lands up takes precedence over the side that is down.  It is that very coin flip that has split arminianism from calvinism, or universalists from fundamentalist.

I don't have much more to comment on this, nor do I remember much of how the radio preacher dealt with the apparent antinomy he had in mind.  I merely think we would be better served if more of our teachers would dare to admit that they do not have a clue as to how two characteristically opposite truths can be true at the same time.  It would be much more honest than cobbling together a system of intricate verbal arguments that seem to me to be nothing but a house of cards waiting for a stray breeze to scatter them.  Let's accept the fact that our "professionals" cannot really adequately explain the tensions in Christian revelation and living to us, and let us seek to live our lives well in the moment, trusting to the one who holds our souls in His hand.