Paradoxes in LDS doctrines and culture

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, in his October 2011 conference talk, spoke of a “paradox” regarding mankind in relation to God and the universe: “This is a paradox of man: compared to God, man is nothing; yet we are everything to God. While against the backdrop of infinite creation we may appear to be nothing, we have a spark of eternal fire burning within our breast. We have the incomprehensible promise of exaltation—worlds without end—within our grasp. And it is God’s great desire to help us reach it.”

A paradox is opposite ideas or inconsistencies that are seemingly both true, “a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true” (Miriam-Webster); “a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth” (Dictionary.com); tensions in a culture that appears to be logical contradictions” (Terryl L. Givens, “People of Paradox: A History of Mormon culture”, pp. xiii-xiv).

Characterizing particular gospel principles as paradoxical may initially strike us as a little strange and inconsistent with what we may have been taught about truth, that truths have consistency with other truths, that “there is right and wrong to every question.” Yet Brother Givens, a the highly regarded LDS scholar, has recently published a book that focuses on four other “paradoxes” for Latter-day Saints or tensions that seem to him to drive the development of a distinct Mormon culture (“habit of mind”).

1) Authoritarianism in the structure of the Church vs. individualism/free agency

2) The certainty of religious knowledge vs. the eternal quest for learning

3) Collapsing the distance and differences between the sacred and the human (seeming opposites in juxtaposition), without diminishing the former

4) Alienation from the larger society/chosen/peculiar people vs. a desire for acceptance and integration

Having this introduction, a couple of more paradoxes come readily to my mind:

1) Salvation by the grace of God vs. our needing to work out our salvation (where should the credit be given?);

2 ) How we relate to other institutions/churches--abominations in the sight of God (1 Ne 14; P of G P Joseph Smith–History 1:19) vs. respecting the relative truths they have (Alma 29).

This first has some common elements with President Uchtdorf’s paradox of man; the second has a connections to Given’s #4.

Here are two questions that come to my mind about the existence of these (and probably also other) paradoxes:

1) What is their source? I would suggest the answer is, God. It seems to me that they would not exist in God’s Church unless he placed or allowed them to be there,

2) What then is their purpose? Is it possible that these doctrinal paradoxes build and bless us? If so, how?
(Image: Nephi and Laban, by Walter Rane)