If certain widely-held ideas are assumed to be true when
they are actually false (similar to counterfeit twenty-dollar bills being
passed around by common folk like you and me who think we’re handling the real
thing when we’re not), these are particularly difficult ideas to detect and correct.
If I had to name the one big idea with the greatest
effect in keeping followers of Christ from “seeing their shop as well as
their chapel as holy ground,” it would not be the atheism that arose in the
19th Century, nor the Secular Humanism that came into play in the 20th Century.
These lies are too obvious.
It would be the dualism that has been around since the days of Plato, and has plagued the church, off
and on, for centuries. It is a problem as common as a twenty-dollar bill. It is
such a deeply ingrained part of our culture that most of us grow up taking
it for granted.
What’s dualism? It’s
a way of seeing that divides reality into two separate arenas with a gap
between. Dualism separates “public” life
from “private” life, it divides the “material” from the “spiritual,” and the
“body” from the “soul.” It separates “facts” from “values.” It disconnects the “temporal”
from the “eternal,” and splits the world into “secular” and “sacred”
compartments. Dualism is the opposite of wholism, and what makes it so
difficult is that it is close to the truth.
Yes, it is true some things last forever while other things
do not. We can distinguish
between the temporal and the eternal, the physical and the spiritual, the seen
and the unseen. Yet all of God’s works, the
temporal and the eternal, the spiritual and the physical, are integral parts of
a one complete whole, sustained by a common Creator who upholds them all (Heb. 1:1-3). It’s
all His stuff. It all has value. It all has purpose. Even the temporal stuff.
Why is this important?
To be continued…
