Two Sides of Every Coin: The Dialectic Formatting of Christian Thought

Just as every coin has two sides, every topic within Christian thought also has at least two contrasting perspectives. These contrasts form both/and dialectics necessitating a balanced tension of complementarity between the two tenets. Western thinkers often have a difficult time accepting two truths to be equally valid though contradictory in light of Aristotle’s rule of logic, the law of non-contradiction, indicating that two contradictory truths cannot both be true. It is possible and necessary, however, to recognize that the Theo-logic of God’s revelation supersedes the natural human logic and wisdom of human thought. At the heart of Christian thought is the duo-form dialectic of the Person of Jesus Christ. Unique to the Christian revelation is the declaration that Jesus is both deity and humanity, God and man, simultaneously. By accepted Aristotelian logic such an assertion would be unacceptable and invalid. The Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451, determined that humanity and deity were conjoined in the hypostatic union of the individual Person of Jesus Christ, and this assertion has been regarded as intrinsic to orthodox Christian faith since that time. In this volume author Jim Fowler seeks to illustrate the dialectic formatting in various categories of Christian thought by utilizing one hundred and thirty dialectic charts.