Category Archives: Dualism

The Church’s Mishandling of the Gospel—Living with Unanswered Questions, Part 2

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In my last post, I raised some of my questions about what the Bible teaches—especially where this teaching seems to contradict human experience, modern science, or other things the Bible teaches.

But not everything the Bible teaches is difficult to understand. Some of my questions have to do with why the church distorts biblical teaching that seems to be quite clear.

To put it another way, why do Christians do such a terrible job of living out the gospel, or even of grasping what the gospel is about? This leaves me utterly perplexed.

The Church’s Reduction of the Gospel to the “Spiritual”

To start with, there is the common reduction of the gospel to some small “spiritual” area of life, as if our faith doesn’t embrace the entirety of life in the world God has made. This other-worldliness in the Christianity I was raised with (this division between the “secular” and the “sacred”) makes no sense, given what the Bible teaches.

The Bible teaches that this world is God’s creation and he loves and cares for it, despite the sinful brokenness we humans have introduced. In fact, he loves the world so much that Jesus came to die on the cross for our sin, and now forgiveness and new life are offered to all who want a part in the restoration of the world.

The Church’s Blindness to Present Evil in the World

But the sacred/secular division not only blurs our vision of this good world, it often leads to our ignoring—or even buying into—the present evil in the world (in the so-called “secular” area), since it offers us no resources for challenging that evil on the basis of how the world should be.

One egregious example of this is the unholy mixing of the gospel, especially in the United States, with secular ideologies. This results in sincere people who claim to be disciples of the Crucified One advocating military action and even torture against people whom they think of as their enemies (without any pangs of conscience or struggle about how this relates to the teachings of Jesus).

It is paradoxical that the National Association of Evangelicals in the 1980s put out a position paper on war, in which one of the positions they rejected as “sub-biblical” was labeled the “love your enemies” position! It just doesn’t make sense to use Jesus’ own words to label a position you think is unbiblical.

Perplexed but Not Despairing

But I guess I’m in good company with my questions.

The writer of Ecclesiastes long ago had “applied [his] mind to know wisdom and to observe the labor that is done on earth,” including “all that God has done.”

Yet he ended up with the conclusion: “No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it.” (Ecclesiastes 8:16-17; NIV)

Questions like the ones I’ve mentioned leave me quite perplexed, and even confused. But not in despair.

In my next post I’ll explain why I haven’t given up on my quest for answers.

What’s Dualism Got to Do with It? The Tom Wright Connection, Part 4

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This is part 4 of a four-part post on my connections to N. T. Wright, the prolific New Testament scholar. For part 1, click here. For part 2, click here. For part 3, click here.

What’s Dualism Got to Do with It?

Although I’ve mentioned various two-way influences between Wright and Walsh-Middleton, the connection goes even deeper, and it begins back in 1983. This was when Wright was working on his first book, a commentary on Colossians and Philemon for the Tyndale series (published in 1988).

Wright was writing the Colossians material when Brian Walsh first got to know him at McGill. Based on their friendship, the two would meet regularly to discuss what Wright had written, and Brian would give feedback and critique.

As Brian tells it, he kept challenging the sacred/secular dualism with which Wright was reading Colossians. Wright kept separating salvation in Christ from life in the mundane realm (including the political realm). But according to Colossians 1:15-20, the same Christ through whom all things were created, and in whom all things hang together, is the one whom all things are reconciled. The creator and redeemer are one.

So Walsh and Wright did regular Bible study in Colossians together during the time when Walsh and I were completing our work on The Transforming Vision. And our critique of otherworldly dualism and our framing of salvation as God’s redemption of earthly life managed to impact Wright’s reading of Colossians.

Wright’s own account of how he came to shift from a dualistic worldview to a holistic vision is recounted in his autobiographical essay “My Pilgrimage in Theology,” Themelios, 18/2 (January 1993): 35. There Wright states:

In 1983 I started work on my Colossians commentary. By the time I finished it in 1985 I had undergone probably the most significant change of my theological life. Until then I had been basically, a dualist. The gospel belonged in one sphere, the world of creation and politics in another. Wrestling with Colossians 1:15-20 put paid to that. I am still working through the implications (and the resultant hostility in some quarters): my book New Tasks for a Renewed Church is a recent marker on this route.

Although this article doesn’t mention Brian’s role in the shift, Wright thanks Brian for his contribution at the start of the Tyndale commentary (p. 11).

Now, I’m not going to claim that Tom Wright got his emphasis on the redemption of creation from Walsh and Middleton in any simple or direct sense. But it looks like our early work on worldviews, dualism, and holistic salvation served as a catalyst for Wright at a formative phase of his theological development. At the very least, our work enabled Wright to see what was staring him in the face all along in the text of Colossians.

I started this four-part post with a comment about the similarity between Tom Wright and myself on the eschatological redemption of creation, a point that many have noted. I’ve tried to explain how that similarity may have come about. It is gratifying to think that the early work Brian Walsh and I did on holistic salvation may have made some small contribution to the development of Tom Wright’s powerful and illuminating eschatological vision.

In another post I explore ways in which I’m not quite on board with all of Tom Wright’s eschatology.

You can read about my 2017 visit with Tom Wright at St. Andrews in Scotland here.