Divine Plagiarism

We talk about things existing in tension. Two seeming opposites pull at each other, and as they attempt to reconcile themselves, they create something entirely new. They do not simply reach a compromise; they find transcendence. A German philosopher named Georg Frederich Hegel wrote a good deal on this tension, calling it a ‘dialectic.’ A Jewish philosopher named Paul of Tarsus wrote on this as well. He called it ‘Jesus.’

Describing his relationship with his wife, C. S. Lewis notes that their points of greatest intersection were not where they were the same, but where they were different. It is one thing to be similar; quite a different thing to be complimentary. Men and women are tremendously different, but they are designed both in body and in spirit to complement each other. And in their reconciliation, they give birth to new life. The leaves of fall compliment the flowers of spring and they are both reconciled in growth. These dynamics are engineered into the universe, and they show up in our own engineering. Gasoline explodes against pistons to turn a drive shaft. Fire and fireproof come together to create motion. Two seeming opposites create something greater than either of them in their reconciliation. Reconciled paradox always points to transcendence.

From nothing, nothing comes. Everything in this universe exists as a reflection of something in its Creator. So it should not surprise us that when He showed up in our world, He showed up as the reconciliation of opposites. Fully Man and Fully God, the Suffering Servant was the Reigning King; the Lamb of God was the Lion of Judah. The King of Kings showed up as a carpenter. The First was Last and the Last was First. In more ways than we can count, He was the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. His life was no different. An old song goes something like this: ‘The Rose of Sharon wore a crown of thorns that day. The Carpenter had a nail through his hand.’ He lived, He died, He rose again. He is the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis, all at once. He is the whole universe wrapped up in One Man.

The Man who was reconciliation lived reconciliation. He was no simple populist firebrand, no icon for some socio-economic faction. He crafted an army out of fishermen, lawyers, soldiers, religious leaders, tax collectors and former whores. Rich and poor, young and old, slave and free, Jew and Gentile, men and women were all united with nothing but Him in common. When He unleashed that army upon the world, the gates of hell could not prevail against them. That ragtag unarmed army conquered the best armed force of the known world; they were led by a Man who conquered hell itself without firing a shot.

Myamoto Mushashi was a Samurai in 1600 A.D. Japan. In his Book of Five Rings, he describes the way of the general as the way of the carpenter. And so it was. The Carpenter was the greatest General the world has ever known. The general matches strategies to strategies, tactics to counter-tactics, measures to countermeasures. So infantry are overcome by cavalry, and cavalry in turn by pikemen. Battleships overtake galleons, aircraft carriers overtake battleships, and so on. Every new battle discards old tactics and weapons and ushers in new ones. But the enemy has never designed an effective counter-measure to the Sword of the Spirit, nor will he, for it was forged before the world was made. No combination of metal, fire, or anything else in this world can undo the Power that made this world. Similary, scholarship surpasses scholarship, and theories come and go, but all words come from the Word. No word or combination of words can ever hope to undo the One True Word.

So the way of the general is the way of the carpenter. And Jesus is a Master General. The master carpenter selects many different woods to build a house: sturdy Redwood to build the supports, an attractive Cedar for the floor, and plywood for the attic. He reconciles many different materials to each other in building a house. The house becomes beautiful, not in the elimination of tensions between materials, but in their reconciliation. Christ, the Master Carpenter, reconciles many different people to each other in building His Church. We are made perfect not in our uniformity, but in His reconciliation of our differences. In that tension, we are strong, for we image Him more completely.

Let’s take a step back. Christ is God and God is Christ, so whatever is true of Christ is true of God. Christ exists in eternal reconciliation, so God must exist in eternal reconciliation. Three Persons in one Essence, the Trinity is the first Reconciliation. The Father is eternally reconciling Himself to the Son, Who is eternally reconciling Himself to the Spirit, who is eternally reconciling Himself to the Father. There are three notes. There is one chord. The notes are the chord, and the chord is the notes. They are inseparable. Theirs is a perfect reconciliation, a flawless harmony without any sin to get in the way. In reconciliation there is transcendence, and so it must be with the Trinity. In the reconciliation between Persons, there is an Essence. God is Love. This is His Nature, His Essence. In His eternal reconciliation, there is an endless fount of love, a love that creates so that it would have others to love. Christ invites us into that eternal reconciliation. He brings in new notes to magnify the original chord.

We chose to break the harmony. A note that goes sharp or flat ruins the whole chord. So the composer cuts it out of the symphony. But God is no mere human composer. The note that makes a broken chord into a minor chord will resolve it into a major chord as the broken notes cease to be flat or sharp. He invites us back into the original harmony. The resolution of the chord may be disconcerting, but the final symphony is glorious. So Christ invites us back to the song. His Story makes a minor chord of our broken notes, but as we lose our flatness or sharpness, He becomes the foundation of an entirely new and entirely old major chord. He is the perfect note in the broken chord. He partakes completely in the brokenness of our chord, even as He resolves it. So He is Fully Man and Fully God, all at once, as He is fully part of our chord, yet fully the perfect note. And in this we see something new: reconciliation in a broken world is always broken at first. Surely, He was first broken for our reconciliation.

Perfect reconciliation is like a circle forever wrapping around itself. The old Celtic Christian Triquetra symbol looks something like three Icthus fish placed with their tails interlocked. It images the perfect and eternal reconciliation between the Three Persons of the Trinity. We draw it on a flat piece of paper, but reconciliation is always transcendent: it always adds a dimension we never imagined. Instead of a flat plane, imagine a sphere. Chose three equidistant points on that sphere, and draw the shortest line from each point to the other two. Remember that the shortest path over a sphere is a curved line. Now look at the sphere again. You have remade the Triquetra, but in three dimensions. The reconciliation of the points in two dimensions tells us to look for a third, and that added dimension makes the picture complete. The Trinity is the Perfect Reconciliation of Paradox, the Infinite Transcendent.

For a simpler example, take a round coaster. Hold it so that you can only see the edge of it. Now trace your finger around the outside. You will see your finger go up and down, seemingly going to opposite extremes and returning. All you see is a line, yet somehow your finger goes from one end of the line to the other. Now turn the coaster flat, so that you can see all of it. Trace your finger around the edge again. Your finger will go in an unending circle (at least until you get bored of doing this.) Your finger wasn’t going to one extreme and back, it was moving in a complete circle. It was always just one finger. The fact that that same finger could go to both extremes tells you that something else was going on, something deeper that a flat line couldn’t quite capture.

So Jesus exists as the reconciliation of opposites. This tells us that there’s something else going on with Him, some dimension we haven‘t quite wrapped our minds around. And the Church brings opposite people together in one Spirit. The song goes, ‘they’ll know we are Christians by our love.’ Our unity should tell them that there’s something deeper going on than mere interest group politics. Note that unity is not the compromise between opposites, for compromise is not reconciliation. Compromise does not bring transcendence, only co-existence. And while that may be a good starting place for reconciliation, it is not its ending. Two enemies may compromise enough to live at peace, and this is better than living at war, but it is not until they reconcile that they become family. God calls us to become family, for we are bound to each other by His blood. All families are a bit dysfunctional, but vendettas within God’s family do little to inspire outsiders to seek adoption.

Christ lived what He taught, and He taught what He lived. He lived in the reconciliation between opposites, so He taught about the reconciliation of opposites. He teaches that a seed must die to yield a crop. He tells us that ‘the last shall be first and the first shall be last,’ and if one would lead, they must learn to be the servant of all. He was telling us this well before 31 A.D. He writes it into His law, mandating justice for the fatherless and the widow. He explains it to Solomon, who tells us how the proud will be humbled. He paints it upon nature, in spring and in fall, in death and rebirth. It is then not surprising that Gautama and Confucius would recognize it in nature. Like Aristotle, they are not so much wrong as incomplete. This universe does exist in a tension. And that tension points to its Creator.

When Paul teaches, he draws upon the same tension. When he gives a command, he often balances it with a complimentary and almost opposite command. Children, obey your parents; fathers, do not provoke your sons to wrath. Women, submit to your husbands; men, love your wives as Christ loved the Church. He tells one to submit in life, he tells the other to submit even unto to death. They are both submitting to each other in very different ways, and in that submission both find love. The power of paradox is tension translated into transcendence. In that transcendence, the commands counterbalance each other; without each other, they would become tremendously destructive.

Consider a car’s engine. You have a number of pistons pushing in sequence against a central shaft. One fires, the shaft turns, and the second fires. As long as they fire in sequence and opposite each other, the shaft keeps turning and the car keeps going. The cylinders are similar in certain ways, but they are different in some very important ways. In this mix of similarity and difference, we find complementariness. The cylinders compliment each other and together they make motion. They rely on each other for balance as the tension of their reconciliation produces something greater than the sum of their parts. Take one cylinder out of the mix and the engine becomes unbalanced. Take two parallel cylinders out and watch as the engine tears itself apart, the tension that once fueled its motion now only driving it to destruction. Break the dialectic, and the whole engine comes apart.

So this is the enemy’s tactic: pull some cylinders off the driveshaft, as it were, and watch the rest of the engine tear itself apart. Take complimentary commands and break them apart. Take good things out of the context of a relationship with God, and watch as they wreak havoc. Take Christians and set them at each others‘ throats. Break their trust, and watch as the tensions tear relationships apart. Stand back and watch as their differences, taken out of the context of Christ, drive them to war with each other. And what could have been a hallmark of unity becomes a case study in disunity, as the Body draws swords against each other.

The thing that makes reconciliation so beautiful and powerful in context is the same thing that makes it so catastrophic out of context. As the two forces pushed against each other, they created movement along dimension perpendicular to both of them. (Quick and boring physics refresher: Maxwell’s equations tell us that electricity and magnetism vary with each other, and propagate perpendicular to the plane of both. Electricity and magnetism push against each other, and that tension moves the wave on its way.) In tension, the forces tended to dampen out the worst parts of the other. Deny that added dimension for movement, and both forces set themselves directly against the other. They push farther and farther away from each other, with nothing to dampen or balance them.

Go to war, and both sides become polarized against each other. So immediately after the Council of Trent, any discussion of conducting the Mass in the vernacular was not to be entertained by any Catholic in good standing. And after seeing the abuses of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Pentecostal gets squeamish when reading the passage about ‘most blessed among women.’ The excesses of one side feed the excesses of another side, and the cycle goes on as the sides become more and more estranged. Where they once balanced each other, now they feed each others’ unbalance. And eventually, the two sides become so distant that they forget what it is they are fighting about. They fight just to fight, and each attack just fuels the other’s war machine. It becomes less about ten years ago, and more about last Tuesday. Enough last Tuesdays go by, and you forget why the war even started. Or at the very least, you forget the part you had in starting the war. And the two sides end up with two completely different narratives, and all context is lost, along with any hope of either side being right.

World War One was fought this way. In 1917, it was not so much about what happened in 1914. I’m sure few in the trenches really cared what happened to Archduke Ferdinand by that point. It was more about whatever happened in the course of last week’s offensive. You lose some friends to some German machine guns, and you want to see all Germans dead. And they lose their friends to your mortars, and they want to see you dead. And on and on it goes, until everyone is dead. Nations will trade, one way or another. They can gain from each other’s differences and trade goods, or they can hate each other’s differences and trade bullets. (Don’t get me wrong, though, there are some things worth trading bullets over. This is not about current events, at least not directly.) We all have our Battles of the Somme.

We are built to be in relationship, and dynamic tension is the dynamo that keeps relationships going. When relationships are broken, that tension is turned on each other. We tear each other apart with the same tools we would have used to build each other up. There is not so much difference between a surgeon and an assassin, really. The surgeon uses a knife, chemicals and his knowledge of the body to heal. An assassin uses a knife, chemicals and his knowledge of the body to kill. We know more about enemies than we know about strangers, though hopefully we know more about lovers than enemies. That understanding which would have been used to heal and encourage is used to tear down and destroy. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, so the saying goes. The passion that fueled her desire now fuels her rage. Hate may not be the opposite of love, but sometimes indifference might be less disastrous.

If your car’s engine started tearing itself apart, the first thing you would do is turn it off to prevent additional damage. Then you would take it back to the dealership, because the people who made the engine probably know best how to put it back together. If God made relationships, complete with complimentary parts and opposing tensions, He probably knows how to fix them. We are smart enough to trust our cars to their makers. In relationships, we should go and do likewise.