Guest Essay by Noah Hahn: Does God Contradict Himself?

It is sometimes suggested by Lutherans that God contradicts Himself. This is probably because many Lutherans enjoy focusing on various tensions in the Christian life, such as the tension between Law and Gospel, or the tension between the revealed and the hidden God. But there are two problems with suggesting that these tensions amount to genuine contradictions.

The first reason is that a contradiction, by definition, is the conjunction of two assertions that cannot both be true at the same time and in the same way. “All elephants are pink all over” and “All elephants are green all over” contradict one another, at least if asserted at the same time. If one is true now, the other is necessarily false now. But then, if there were a contradiction in God’s Word, it would mean that God has said something false. This cannot be!

Consider a few pairs of apparent contradictions:

(1) Whoever keeps the Law perfectly has eternal life.

(2) Those who break the law have eternal life by faith in Jesus.

There is no contradiction between (1) and (2). It is true that whoever keeps the Law perfectly has eternal life, even though there is only one person this applies to. All (2) does is expand the set of who has eternal life. It does not contradict (1).

(3) You shall not steal.

(4) If anyone does steal, he has forgiveness in Jesus.

Both of these assertions are true, and (therefore) they do not contradict one another.

(5) You must grow in virtue and improve morally by breaking sinful habits.

(6) Jesus has paid for all your future sins, independently of your moral progress.

Again, there is no contradiction between (5) and (6). Both are true. All six of these propositions can be established as true from Scripture, and not one of them contradicts any other. But what about this pair?

(7) God is angry with you.

(8) God is not angry with you.

This surely looks like a contradiction. Once again, however, it is only apparent. There need not be a contradiction even here. Perhaps God is angry with you in one sense of the term, but not in another. Even if “angry” is being used univocally (in the same way), it could be that (7) is asserted at one time and (8) is asserted at another. It would be contradictory to say that God is both angry and not angry with you in the same sense and at the same time, but Scripture never teaches this.

If none of these apparent contradictions are genuine, what do people mean when they claim that there is a contradiction in God’s Word? I think there are two answers to this question.

First, the pro-contradiction theologians might mean that God’s Word produces in its hearers certain incompatible reactions. And this is surely true. The law accuses in a way that rules out Gospel comfort; the Gospel comforts in a way that rules out Law accusation. These reactions are incompatible because one cannot feel at the same time both that he is on his way to hell, and that he is on his way to heaven.

Second, the pro-contradiction theologians might mean that God’s Word highlights the tension of being a sinner. And this is also true. For the law also accuses in a way that is not incompatible with Gospel comfort. When my pastor preaches against my sin, I may feel accused in the sense that I know I have sinned, but not in the sense that I feel I am on my way to hell. Provided that I have not grieved the Holy Spirit, I know I am a forgiven Christian; and this certain knowledge that I am forgiven is perfectly compatible with saying to myself, “The pastor is right; I have been sinning in this or that way. Time to stop!” The tension here is not in the Word of God itself, but in the Christian man who has both faith and a sinful nature. As far as this layman can tell, this means that a pastor can be both an agent of pure grace and an agent for the moral improvement of his members.

Real tension in the Christian life comes when a man falls from and returns to faith with some frequency. (Along with Walther, I suspect this happens more often than we imagine.) But this tension occurs because we are mutable, fallen beings whose life is extended over time. Looking at the course of our past, we may worry that our identity is torn between heaven and hell. Not so for God. His life is one, simple, and complete—“without parts,” as the Augsburg Confession has it. From God’s eternal present flows our temporal present: the time of grace which is called “today.” But however rocky the course of our life has been as we are pulled between God and the devil, we cannot charge God with contradiction.

A somewhat different tension happens on the mind of the pagan, who is used to interpreting natural revelation with his reason alone. Such a man might look at nature and draw the inference “God is angry with everyone,” or “ultimate happiness is earned by my works.” When presented with God’s word, such a pagan will surely experience a great deal of tension. But once again, the contradiction properly speaking exists between two propositions I have inferred by reason, not two propositions God has directly revealed.

In light of all this, we should stop saying that God contradicts Himself, or that there is a contradictory aspect to God. For instance, we should not speak of the “hidden God” and the “revealed God” as contradicting one another. There is only one God, and there is no contradiction between any two things that He says.

Someone might object that I have defined “contradict” too narrowly. Etymologically, the term just means “speak against,” and it surely seems that God “speaks against” Himself in a sense—over time, for sure, and perhaps even at the same time. In the Bible, God changes His mind, abrogates former commandments, and so on.

I sympathize with this objection, but I also think its patrons are setting up a sort of bait-and-switch. I suspect that once we have conceded that God “contradicts” himself in an etymological, garden-variety sense, this concession will be used to throw up a whole thunderous fortress of Divine Contradiction wholly unassailable to the meager efforts of human reason. This move would show us what its makers really think about the term “contradiction,” and thus would bar us from taking the bait.

I am not saying that every apparent contradiction in the Christian faith can be fully solved to everyone’s satisfaction. The tensions I detailed above are genuine, and no amount of reasoning is going to fully get rid of them. But this is to be expected. Lutherans do not name Reason as a means of grace. The tensions induced by the Word from the pulpit find their resolution in the Sacrament on the altar. It is therefore in the Liturgy that we experience the tensions of the temporal life; and, to borrow from Rilke, it is in the Liturgy that we “live our way into the answers.”

That said, I think that some reasoning could do a bit more to get rid of our tensions and muddles than most Lutherans would like to admit. To charge God with contradiction is to charge Him with falsehood. May it not be! His Word is Truth!