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created mind to grasp them.
A Rationale for Divine Concurrances
There are good reasons to work towards a formal solution of paradoxes regarding God's
nature and his relation to us. However, there are also at least two good reasons for appreciating
paradoxical truths as they are.
A Moral Good of Divine Concurrances
First, what if God has set up the universe, including our minds, in such a way as to
promote our humility? What if he built an intellectual hurdle into the relation between the
structure of reality and our own understanding to foster humility. He created the normal adult
mind to be able to think formally. But a created mind must have finite attentional and memory
capacity. Moreover, let's suppose he "set" the human mind's capacity at "average" intelligence
(having a distribution from extremely mentally impaired to extremely gifted), but set in such a
way that most would recognize these apparent contradictions in reality and in God's own nature,
forcing us to "lay down our mental lives" and confess we cannot solve all of the world's
intellectual problems. They are within our grasp to recognize, but beyond our capacity to solve.
Concurrences (or offenses, to use Kierkegaard's term) are meant to reveal, to make clear to us
our sinful tendency to put our selves (here, our intellectual selves) in place of the priority to be
accorded to God and his revelation (particularly the Bible, which is ipso facto symbolic of his
authority). The cognitive problem we are confronted with in metasystemic dilemmas, then, is
not just the finitude of human understanding, but also the problem of the sin of pride. Could we
"figure God out" completely we would be more inclined to exalt ourselves and our "divining"
reasoning powers, and less likely to submit to God and his challenging revelation. Concurrences