What's a Lutheran? (7) Comfort with Paradox and Mystery

One of the themes you may have noticed in these reflections is that Lutherans tend to express our faith in paradoxes.  God’s word is both Law and Gospel; God’s power is found in weakness; we are simultaneously sinners who fall short of God’s law and saints, God’s beloved children called to relationship with God.  To us, these paradoxes are a feature, not a bug.  God is ultimately beyond our comprehension – except as God has chosen to reveal God’s self to us for our salvation – and paradox often reflects how we humans experience the presence of God.

God is always both present and absent to us.  We are made right with God by God’s grace totally independently of our works, yet our salvation can only be expressed and realized in acts of service for others.  Christians have been set free in Christ and are servants of no one, and at the same time Christians are called to be servants of all.  Christ has already done everything that needs to be done, yet Christ has no hands in this world but ours.  Living into these paradoxes, without trying to resolve or simplify them too quickly, helps us to grow in faith and spiritual maturity.

We therefore are suspicious of any attempts to present Christian faith as obvious or simple, or to reduce spirituality to a series of predictable, easy steps.  That’s not how we have experienced faith to work.  And we recognize that, within the broad outlines of our Lutheran confessions, there is a great diversity of experiences and understandings of how God is working in our lives and our world, and we do not try to impose uniformity of belief or practice within our communities.  It is part of the paradox of Christian life that we express it in a variety of ways throughout our lives and our congregations; respect for the conscience of our fellow believers as we wrestle with the mystery of God is part of our identity.