"Now, this term antinomy seems first to have been used in classical Roman law to describe the circumstance of every jury trial: one side completely prosecutes while the other side entirely defends. According to all legal assumption, the truth can arise only through such jarring antinomical interaction. The philosophic use of the term begins with Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781); and from Kant's work forward, the word exhibits a powerful and complex life.
Antinomicalness is, above everything else, an experience. It is the experience of disjunction, the experience wherein human discursive rationality breaks helplessly apart in the face of - better, in the teeth of - dissonant, often harsh realities. Such realities are the very ground of all biblical (indeed, all human) experience. The agony of forced exile is, at the same moment the way of redemptive joy; the created world is simultaneously completely good, completely fallen, and completely redeemed; Christ is at once fully divine and fully human. There is no direct way wherein human reason alone can reconcile the disjunctive elements in these expereinces; equally, there is no way whereby any element can be eliminated without radically falsifying the experience. Our fallen rationality simply breaks down when it directly confronts such antinomies as these."
+ Dr Donald Sheehan, Excerpt from the Introduction of "The Psalms of David: Translated from the Septuagint Greek." (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013)
"Christianity is, in fact, a
complexio oppositorum, which asserts in one breath two truths that at first might seem very difficult to reconcile: on the one hand, all Christian confessions grant that God truly gives Himself to man, and that He alone can do this, because His creature is in this respect utterly powerless; on the other hand, this gift would be a sham if God did not in reality make man live by His own divine life. There is a paradox here: in one sense, everything comes from God, and in another, everything comes from man, because no one is saved or damned who has not willed it. St. John’s phrase expresses this two-sided aspect of grace—that we should be called and should be the sons of God [1 John 3:1]. In other words, any theology of grace must insist both on the primacy of God who justifies and sanctifies man, and at the same time on the reality of regeneration."
