Thrown into Contradiction
God reveals Himself in the middle of conflict and contradiction--and we want to find Him outside all contradiction.
Importance of contradiction: the contradiction essential to my existence is the expression of the world's present: it is my contribution to the whole. They are my "place." It is in my insight and acceptance of contradiction that the world creates itself anew in and through my liberty--I permit God to act in and through me, making His world (in which all are judged and redeemed). I am thrown into contradiction: to realize it is mercy, to accept it is love, and to help others do the same is compassion. All this seems like nothing, but it is creation. The contradiction is precisely that we cannot "be creative" in some other way we would prefer (in which there is no contradiction).
January 20, 1966, VI.354-55
From Gifted by Otherness:
ReplyDelete"God has a strange propensity for creating new families out of groups of people who have nothing to do with each other. We usually think about the Exodus in terms of the offspring of Jacob--a single clan with a common ancestry--rising up and leaving Egypt, but there's one little verse in Exodus (12:38) that tells us that a mixed multitude went up with them. The ancestry of Israel isn't just the line of Jacob. It's the line of Jacob plus the offspring of the mixed multitude that left Egypt with them. An even more vivid example of this strange tendency is the creation of the church in the New Testament. The church began as a small Jewish sect, composed of people who shared a lot of common perceptions and presuppositions, and then God had the temerity to surprise that group of people by calling in *Gentiles*--people who were categorically "other than" Israel."
You just never know what God's going to pull next.