consistency or dialectical tension

Oswald Chambers wrote something that I always keep before me:

“Beware of being obsessed with consistency to your own convictions instead of being devoted to God… There was never a more inconsistent being on this earth than our Lord, but he was never inconsistent with his Father… It is easier to be an excessive fanatic than it is to be consistently faithful, because God causes an amazing humbling of our religious conceit when we are faithful to him.”

I write this again today after being told I was an “enigma” again, as well as an “anomaly” recently. Most recently an “idiot“, but that doesn’t apply. I was listening to the Catholic priest Richard Rohr speaking today about the apostle Paul, that people often accuse him of being a dualistic thinker, when in fact he was a dialectical thinker. He’s accused of dualism when he talks about such things as the resurrection, which on the one hand seems to have occurred and is enjoyed in this life, while on the other hand he speaks of the future resurrection of the body on the last day. Dialectics is something Hegel proposed: first there is the emergence of a thesis (an idea); against which emerges an antithesis (an apparently opposing idea); these two must be kept in equal tension until hopefully there is a synthesis (the unification of the two). So, I’m sure many of you are right: I am somewhat confused, inconsistent, immature, a people-pleaser, unable to stand up for a truth, etc. Yup! That’s me! And I’ve heard it so many times that it rolls off my back as fast as it rolls off the tongue! But at the same time I’m truly convinced that I am caught, volitionally, in the dialectical tension between the thesis and the antithesis waiting for the synthesis to come. COME, LORD SYNTHESIS!

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