Originally published at crisis magazine
If the whole point of doing theology is to conduct reasoned discourse about God, whose mysteries defy all human efforts to master, how then does one measure success? By what criteria are we to know the job is done, that the market on the meaning of God, both who He is and what He’s done, has been, as it were, finally cornered? The answer is by faith, there being no other dynamism to drive a discipline dependent on data drawn from God Himself. That is, Divine Revelation, without which, to quote a wise and holy monk named Anselm of Canterbury, there can be no understanding.
And what is it that this faith is being asked to understand? Well, among other things, the fact of an infinite God becoming a finite man, a virgin becoming a mother, a helpless child born into the world He made.
Call it the Divine Paradox, of which the following anonymous poem from the fifteenth century provides vivid and striking expression:
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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A God and yet a man?
A maid and yet a mother?
Wit wonders that wit can
Conceive this or the other.
A God, and
