God’s nature, in all its complexity and mystery, can represent a challenge to faith. How is the Trinity three in one? How is the Son both man and God? How can we be saved and sanctified into new life and continue to sin? And on and on.

Jen Pollock Michel gets into this tension extensively in her book Surprised by Paradox: The Promise of “And” in an Either-Or World. And I’ve similarly found embracing paradox to be a boon to my faith and not a hinderance. I remember a Sunday school discussion where we debated, “Did Jesus operate ‘inside the box’ or ‘outside the box’?” The answer: Both. Our categories so often fail to capture the God of the universe. Whenever I hear Christians espousing a “both/and” approach, I think of how they are reflecting Jesus, who transcended what were otherwise seen as differences and division.

Religion and science, for example, are often seen as at-odds with each other, two completely separate approaches for understanding the universe. But people of faith in the sciences have demonstrated a robust, intellectual integration of the two. This week, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins won the prestigious Templeton Prize for doing just that.

“It makes me sad that we have slipped into a polarized stance between science and religion that implies that a thinking human being could not believe in the value of both,” Collins said in a 2001 CT interview. “I find it completely comfortable to be both a rigorous scientist, who demands to see the data before accepting anybody’s conclusions about the natural world, and also a believer whose life is profoundly influenced by the relationship I have with God.”

We also see tensions within the church that perhaps merit a “both/and” approach. Especially now, a lot of us have mixed feelings about closures due to the coronavirus. We believe the church is just a building and we can worship without it, while also missing the space. We want to take precautions to keep our community safe, while also wanting protections for free assembly.

N. T. Wright articulated it much better in his new book, God and the Pandemic, which was excerpted in Time last week:

I find myself caught between these two viewpoints, both of which seem to me right. I totally understand that we need to be responsible and scrupulously careful. I am appalled by reports of would-be devout but misguided people ignoring safety regulations because they believe that as Christians they are automatically protected against disease, or that (as I heard someone say on television) “you’ll be safe inside church because the devil can’t get in there.” (I wanted to say: Trust me, lady, I’m a bishop: the devil knows his way in there as well as anybody else.)

That is the kind of superstition that gets Christian faith a bad name. Equally, the debates about locking churches can easily stir up lesser controversies, between those for whom the building and all its bits and pieces has been a vital part of their spirituality, and those for whom all such things are irrelevant since one can worship God anywhere. Both sides here may learn from the present crisis, and we do well to hold one another in charitable prayer.

I think as Christians, it is good and God-honoring for us to reject false dichotomies so that we might see God in his rich transcendence. Especially when the rest of the world seems so caught in polarization and division, we are led to another way, sometimes referred to as the middle way, or via media.

“One of the most powerful practices of the via media … is to identify and understand the often hidden, root assumptions and presuppositions of both sides of an argument and to examine those in light of the truth of Scripture as well as the wide and long history of the global church,” writes Tish Harrison Warren. “The via media can help the church, as a community, hold our convictions passionately yet humbly. It might also help us reweave the fabric of our civic discourse.”

Kate