So many people around the world turn to the Bible for consolation in their darker moments. We pray, and we read “the Good Book.” What is it about the Word of God that can be so centering? In this essay, Prior (2020) argues that it is because the Bible strikes a balance between “sense” and “sensibility,” a reference to Jane Austen’s classic novel.
Some wield the Bible like a stick, to chastise or to criticize others. Some go further; they raise it as weapon to terrorize or to frighten others into compliance with their ideas of moral conduct. Some cynically refer to the Bible, the ultimate authority, to elevate their own standing, that is to be seen by association and by others as the ultimate authority. However, the Bible neither does nor claims any of these things. Like God himself, it simply is. One sits with it; one reads it; and one is changed through a personal, mysterious dynamic.
The Bible Is a Living Contradiction
There are many translations and versions of the Bible, and many ways to read it. Perhaps one of the ways to read it would be to take note of how many times the Bible substantively contradicts itself without being contradictory or untrue. Like a person with both a right and a left arm, with a right and a left leg, its stories and statements balance each other, and it is consistent and true in its whole.
Let me more specifically define what I do mean and do not mean by contradiction. I do not mean differences in accounts or historical details, which likely simply reflect errors in translation, memory, or other expected inconsistencies with an extremely old document. (See Sommer’s rather tedious enumeration.) I also do not mean incongruities between the Bible and the scientific understanding of man and the universe because if one believes in God, the rest is moot.
What I mean is that the Bible provides both guidance and no guidance. It gives answers and poses questions. It gives clarity while retaining mystery. The contradictions are the stories themselves. God gave man both free will and the Law to follow. The Bible asks us to believe in Jesus’s miracles, which includes raising people from the dead, and in Jesus’s death on the cross. Why would a man who is the son of an omnipotent God not save himself?
Well, to understand the answers to these questions is to better understand Christianity and why it provides solace for so many. One of the most striking aspects of the Bible is that one would normally find contradiction discomforting, yet in it, people find the opposite, they find comfort.
Atheists Misunderstand the Bible
Atheists often raise “contradictions” as proof of the Bible’s intellectual or inherent weaknesses and its false claims to divine inspiration. Sommer writes, “Humanists reject the claim that the Bible is the word of God. They are convinced the book was written solely by humans in an ignorant, superstitious, and cruel age. They believe that because the writers of the Bible lived in an unenlightened era, the book contains many errors and harmful teachings…. The Bible is an unreliable authority because it contains numerous contradictions. Logically, if two statements are contradictory, at least one of them is false. The biblical contradictions therefore prove that the book has many false statements and is not infallible.”
The opposite of an “unenlightened era” must be the Enlightenment. However, as Prior notes, the reaction to the Enlightenment was the equal and opposite reaction of Romanticism. Atheists’ argument reflects not just their inability to understand God but also, perhaps mainly, their inability to understand man.
G.K. Chesterton (1904) wrote, “Rationalism is fighting for its life against the young and vigorous superstitions…. Christianity, which is a very mystical religion, has nevertheless been the religion of the most practical section of mankind. It has far more paradoxes than the Eastern philosophies, but it also builds far better roads…. The Christian has a Triune God, ‘a tangled trinity,’ which seems a mere capricious contradiction in terms.”
There is a sort of Weberian quality to this line of Chesterton’s argument in which he implies that the very contradictions of Christianity lend themselves well to a more productive and prosperous society. Of course, exercising my own reason, he clearly provides no empirical evidence to back up his assertion.
However, from a strictly intuitive sense, perhaps a religion that comfortably lies at the intersection of the rational and the emotional, of the known and the unknown, of God and man, would also give man the best sense of balance to deal with all of the uncertainties of life. If one’s certainty rests in God, the uncertainties of life are but a drama in which one participates but does not direct. In this knowing, one can find liberation and resilience.
Chesterton also expresses these contradictions as follows, “The difference then is very simple. The Christian puts the contradiction into his philosophy. The Determinist puts it into his daily habits. The Christian states as an avowed mystery what the Determinist calls nonsense. The Determinist has the same nonsense for breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper every day of his life.”
Chesterton continues, “The Christian, I repeat, puts the mystery into his philosophy. That mystery by its darkness enlightens all things. Once grant him that, and life is life, and bread is bread, and cheese is cheese: he can laugh and fight. The Determinist makes the matter of the will logical and lucid: and in the light of that lucidity all things are darkened, words have no meaning, actions no aim. He has made his philosophy a syllogism and himself a gibbering lunatic.”
To translate Chesterton for those less initiated in his style, by accepting the contradictions and the mysteries, Christians end up being more consistent than the rationalists or the Determinists. We own the contradictions, and therefore, in a consistently paradoxical way, the inevitable opaqueness of our beliefs ends up providing more light and being more transparent than others’ “more translucent” attempts to enlighten the world or to be truly honest.
Like the Bible – Man Is a Walking Contradiction
One might ask why. How could this be? Simply, because people are naturally contradictory. Thus, a religion that can honestly and authentically capture man’s state is going to be truer to man as he or she is. Christianity is not founded on an ideal idea of a person, but at its foundation is the Judeo-Christian understanding of a fallen man.
A perfectly rational man, as the humanists suggest we should all aspire to be, would not be man at all. It would be a computer or a robot. To be human is to be both rational and emotional, to have both sense and sensibility, to love books and argument and to love art and wonder. The Bible perfectly captures these divinely contradictory combinations such that in it, we find balance, and with it, we find wholeness, comfort, and God.