As mentioned last week, the late Alan Bloom, a non-Christian University of Chicago professor, noted that the United States was once unified by a “vision for the order of the whole of things” which came from the “common culture” of the Bible. But this “vision for the order of the whole of things” is now gone from the public square, being confined to the four walls of certain churches, and private lives of certain individuals.
Why does
this matter? Because we are all affected
by its loss. People these days are shooting bystanders in shopping malls, strangers
in movie theaters, and little kids in classrooms. Retirement savings have vanished because of toxic securities
and shadowy dealings by graduates from Ivy League schools. On top of this, we
live in a deeply divided nation. Could this possibly
be related to the loss of a Biblical "vision for the order of the whole of
things?”
There I go
again, talking about the negative effects of dualism! But before I proceed with
“why wholism is good," let me say a word about its spelling.
Last week I
received an e-mail from someone informing me that the word wholistic is not spelled with a “w.” In the past, I was informed of this by my computer spellchecker, too. But I fixed this pesky problem by adding wholistic to my computer’s
dictionary. Now it is spelled with a “w.”
Blame for
its coining goes to Darrow Miller and Bob Moffitt co-founders of Disciple Nations Alliance. In Miller’s book, LifeWork,
he states: “Wholism speaks of the whole of God’s Word to the whole man in the
whole world. We [Miller and Moffitt] recognize that wholism is a coined word.
But we prefer it to the word more commonly used, holism, which has been
co-opted by the New Age movement…”
I'm following suit. We'll continue next week with why wholism is good.
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