Paradox as Gift to Open the Prophetic Heart

Douglas Blake Olds

This essay redefines paradox as a liminal and mobile crux--a tabernacle of accountable discernment rather than a crucible of destabilizing, mystical suspension. A manger rather than an emptied trough. In doing so, it advances a conative, deontological model of prophetic witness—charting a Biblically transformed epistemic-ethical trajectory rooted in Hebrews 5:13-14: ethical discernment, virtue, and aesthetic attunement to neighbor and world.

“Attachment [to form],” Weil wrote, “is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained/obtained only by someone who is detached”[5]. This paradox is not a simple contradiction but often becomes the victim of a faulty hermeneutical spiral, where detachment leads to moral indifference. Such distortion reflects a genealogical fallacy: privileging appearances, especially those formed in the camps of victors, as the measure of meaning. Behind this misreading lurks a Faustian temptation to quietism on the path to nihilism: “I’m the [victor’s] spirit that keeps denying [justice]… for everything created [by our victory] is worthy of destruction [yet we and our forms live on!].” Yet Weil’s detachment is not Mephistophelean nihilism—it is the ethical demand to receive reality as a gift, not possession. It is paradoxical in the sense of making no sense to a victors’ world of suspicion but is not paradoxical in terms of the Creator’s will for creaturely sustenance. However, the gift and its claims require investigation and accountability to ensure right application (sharing with the intended recipient those in privation and their enslavers). In this sense alone, paradox is harmony with divine grace that appears suspicious and counterproductive to outsider ethical structures. But in a more capacious sense, the Logos is the moral telos of truth-telling anthropology; when applied through aesthetic open-endedness and declamation--coherence with eternal soul (expressive nephesh)-making--it ends paradox. By the prophecy of poiesis, paradox is not a riddle to be solved but a test of moral orientation and reception carried through in witness and mission. 

For only the metaphysicals endure: all other poets, with time and scrutiny, become minor, bracquolage—gestures toward the ground in hope of seeding.

A sharp, iconoclastic theological redirection is necessary to counter both metaphysical conceits from mind and epistemic relativism. To move from Hegelian sublation—the rejected self-absorbed elevation of mind and its movement—toward divinely accountable human immanence anchored in covenant (Jeremiah 31—34) is prophetically to attend and align with the only accessible metaphysical ground of positive theology: the conative heart  [2]. Such a move both honors the Shema-Christological anthropology of essence as entelechy—unfolding through repentance—and departs from the ironic or aestheticized postmodern ethics of situational emplacement within formal orders. Rooted in both Hegelian and postmodern irony is the conceit that truth, conceived as formal coherence alone rather than involving moral or relational intent, must appear paradoxical when dispersed across horizons and forced into individual formal expression.

What is key is to move proleptically from spiritually passivizing denotations of Aufhebung/sublation [3] into the prophetic spirit in order to work toward deinstitutionalization that follows its own potential course, rather than merely circling institutional forms and the paths of a few heroes or saints of the faith. To retreat into esotericism is to withdraw into interiority, that proclaims biased or parochial first principles, to equate the structural presumption of normative conceit with esse [4], to analogize the Creator with the finite creature. Rather, the prophetic individual claims the horizon not to orbit sanctified forms, but to vector the agencies of the widening charter of grace in history [1]. 

All raw epistemic activity—attention, perception, articulation—depends upon the ethical infusing the aesthetic (Heb. 5:13–14)--a hermeneutics of metaphysics. Without character derived from repentance (metanoia), there is no applied knowledge (dianoia, Matt. 22:37). Language learning is not a neutral process. It requires experience, repentance, and the habitus of virtue. Epistemology is always embodied and moral. A machine that cannot process the data of character—empathy, integrity, ethical judgment and steadfastness—cannot assist human learning or progress. It may simulate insight but cannot inhabit paradox or unfold processive truth—discernment guided by the Spirit, unfolding through embodiment and ethical-aesthetic competence.

There is an undeniable lure in tethering oneself to Frankenstein—a secular, confected identity born of physical comparison and envy, masked as ego exaltation within narcissistic secularity. Such mirrors attendant fracture in the guise of escaping paradox, bringing forth the stumbles in processing metanoia of ethics (heart) and aesthetic training (purity of internal imaging rather than performance). This training includes processing paradox, synesthetic phenomena, parable’s condensation of worldly and heavenly abundance, and poetic déjà vu to arrive to a right, finite approach to eternal time. The latter serves as gateway to the knowledge that God knows all, and the human is unable in herself to pursue and program telic ethics and may align with telic grace--by virtue that serves others and the creation first. So that we pass successfully through nature’s tests to arrive at our glory of essence for which we have been created. 

Yet paradox does not merely challenge knowledge detached from metaphysics or ethically devoid aesthetics, it intensifies the question of Being. For esse—the essence of being rightly ordered toward its divine telos—is not static substance [Latin: substantia], but entelechy: a movement, an aligning, a becoming—a flow [ousia]. And it is precisely here that paradox becomes not an epistemic obstacle, but an ontological crucible for potentia and Parousia—entering into and participating with the attending Spirit of grace.

For in a creation disordered by history yet capacitated by providence, esse is never purely given without accountability nor merely deduced—it is wrestled toward, as Jacob with the angel, through paradox. To exist in the Creator’s image is to bear the tension between creaturely limitation and divine intentionality. Paradox is therefore not the stymie or breakdown of being but the threshing-floor of its clarification toward poiesie. David the King wrestled by Psalmic poetry to endow history with pre-covenanted investigation on the way to its realization in the messianic heart.

If esse contains entelechy, it is so through discerned fidelity—trusting and aligned awareness--to the Creator's intent—not through analogic reception of form, but through conative movement in moral relation. Thus paradox becomes the very grammar by which esse resists collapse into either relative nominalism or static formalism. It neither dissolves into radical indeterminacy nor ossifies into fixed hierarchy. Rather, it forms the pulse of metaphysical responsibility: to choose becoming in fidelity with the expansive heart rather than nature held by mind as a cycle of recurrence and determination.

In this, paradox is not the contradiction of esse, nor can it be used for such, but its prismatic aperture—revealing that essence is not what one has or currently contains, but what one becomes in covenanted heart’s response to the kaleidoscopic possibles of divine encounter. In the eye and heart of virtue alone is the ontology of kingdom moments discerned and activated, and where sanctification reveals their continuing and developing competencies and alignment (1 Corinthians 15:28) in every moment.

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NOTES

[1]In this, I propose an alternative, interventionist model of theology regarding paradox: not systematics, process, analogy, or apophatic mysticism--which exert constraint--but poetic judgment embedded in a metaphysical hermeneutic of open prophetic witness (trained through Heb. 5:13-14)—paired with a theological praxis of deontological virtue. This model departs from process theology exemplified by Catherine Keller, who treats paradox as a communally apophatic processing of limits. By contrast, I re-ground paradox within the prophetic imperative: a crucible where ethical fixity and discerning obligation are tested, clarified, and enacted. Here, paradox demands not suspension but accountable response—integrating cataphatic theology and an aesthetic orientation tied to deontological virtue in service to the neighbor and perceptual reality.

I likewise depart from traditions of analogia entis and from aesthetic theologies that construe the finite as passively receiving beauty radiating from the infinite and its possibles—an orientation that aesthetizes paradox and favors contemplative closure over the prophetic rupture and clarifying reorientation that paradox both demands and embodies as the training ground of the heart and mission.

Systematic theologies are confined within formalist taxonomy and categorical closures, stifling the prophetic task of de-institutionalizing witness and iconoclastic revival. Likewise, virtue ethics—particularly in the Aristotelian mode in the work of Jennifer Herdt—tend to prioritize self-cultivation and instrumental teleological alignment over the Golden Rule’s deontological placement of virtue as ambient, sustaining agency directed toward the other, not the ego, in service to neighbor and suffering earth.

The heart is the covenanted organ of metaphysics, not a system of mind meld of finite with infinite.

[2] Olds, Douglas B. 2023. Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism, Appendix I. Wipf and Stock.

[3] Aufhebung, a term from Hegelian dialectic often translated as “sublation,” describes the dynamic process by which contradiction is both negated and preserved in a higher synthesis. Hegel’s philosophy at times spiritualizes this movement, which some have compared to tzimtzum in Lurianic Kabbalah—the metaphysical contraction in which God withdraws His immediate presence to make space for creation. Though distinct in ontology and purpose, both concepts invoke a formative absence: in Hegel, a cognitive training through dialectical negation; in religious mysticism, a spiritual bereavement or experience of reproach or yearning that opens the soul to deeper, aligning awareness of the divine.

Luria and Hegel terms are not metaphysically but functionally aligned to allow silence and concealment—apophatic human freedom—to function as productive negation that results in a space dialectical or mystical—unified in Hegel via Boehm. Their common theme of formative absence makes room for cultural—not to say ethical--emergence. When such displaces obligation, crisis if not condemnation results. As the pagan error (Heraclitus, Plotinus, Plato) allows for machining “intelligence” by fuzzy ethics of situated pragmatics, code-resolution of binaries as evolutionary taxis toward pharaonic ends of its designers (Olds 2025).

Yet German Idealism—especially in Kant, Fichte, and Schelling—too hastily celebrates the eclipse of tradition, bypassing its investigative role and thereby eluding the covenantal accountability borne by archive and poet. This oversight lies in subsuming tradition’s heuristic and epistemic function beneath the supremacy of autonomous reason, where absolute liberty is made the ground of ontology rather than ethical response. In so doing, it neglects the very conditions of historical discernment and poetic alignment with the metaphysics of grace and justice that make moral accountability possible. From eclipse, Hegel extends idealism by reconstituting tradition into the teleology of Spirit, which retains but subordinates it.

Included in this erasure of metaphysics--context and conative accountability--by the Idealists who have become identified with the Enlightenment, Johann Gottfried Herder stands as countertestimony, defending tradition not as rigid inheritance but as expressive emergence—wherein language, memory, and ethical primacy are bound together in the culturally embedded, Spirit-infused act of poetic and prophetic interpretation. For Herder, the archive is not an obstacle to freedom but its formational precondition—an affective repository of divine-human conation unfolding through time.

See Johann Gottfried Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), trans. John Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), where Herder argues that language arises not from abstract logic but from sensuous, communal, and affective perception--where the milieux of a language group extends to community history.
Also see Herder, This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774), In Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael Forster, Cambridge, 2002, 272-358), where Herder articulates history as a divinely-infused unfolding of humanity’s moral potential (Humanitat), shaped through tradition, emotion, and narrative.
Finally, Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–1797 in Forster, trans. 2002), in which Herder outlines a relational and affective anthropology rooted in empathy (Empfinden), Bildung, and a poetic-theological sense of history, his fullest integration of poiesis, moral pedagogy, and the divine-human horizon opening to radical immanence.

[4] Esse: The essence of being as a dynamic, divinely oriented entelechy—an inner directedness toward alignment with the Creator’s intention. The human trustee potentiated to reflect the divine conation to sustain ongoing creation on a regenerating earth. Where the divine essence of heart bridges to the renewability of the earth by processive Spiritual undertakings. Esse resists a false fixity of “nature” as culturally constructed norm, instead grounding human identity in a moral and metaphysical movement that transcends mere biological or social determination. True esse unfolds through grace-led becoming, not inherited convention.

[5] Gravity and Grace (1947).