“Forked-Tongue Thinking”

I had an interesting discussion a while back with a long-standing member of Union Church.  The part I found most intriguing involved his recommendation of a book by Nancy Pearcey called TOTAL TRUTH:  Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity.  In a nutshell, it’s a book that calls for believers everywhere to live out their Christian faith in such a way that it impacts everything they do and everywhere they do it.  It calls for putting an end to the idea that being a Christian is what we do on Sunday, and living life is what we do the rest of the week.

After the discussion I went right out and ordered the book and began reading it, and I have to say that I found the book to be truly fascinating.  It’s not that I had never heard of any of the ideas before, but just that the writer did an excellent job of weaving the whole of her argument together.  Right from the introduction to the book she points out that most modern (Western) societies have successfully divided life into two different spheres.

Sometimes these different spheres are referred to as the Public Sphere and the Private Sphere, and sometimes they are referred to as the Secular Sphere and the Religious Sphere.  Any way you look at it, the end result is that oftentimes what a person believes in their heart has no relation to how they actually live life.  This is how politicians, for example, can privately believe abortions are wrong, and yet publicly vote to make them allowable.

It turns out that this is actually not a new problem, but a rather old one.  It’s just that in America, we’ve elevated the practice to an art-form.  Jesus was constantly arguing against such dualistic thinking among the Pharisees, the religious leaders of the Jews at the time.  He would point out how absurd it was for them to say that He shouldn’t heal someone on the Sabbath, because “working” on the Sabbath was wrong.  Or how foolish it was for them to tell their parents they couldn’t support them because all their possessions had been “dedicated” to God.

Paul also had to confront dualistic thinking as well.  In Romans 6:2 Paul argues that since “we died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”  Some Christians thought that since all their sins had been forgiven through faith in Christ, it didn’t matter then whether they continued to sin or not.  Paul argued that such dualistic thinking was totally absurd.  He said that through faith in Jesus we have been freed from our slavery to sin, so that we might now become slaves to righteousness.  Dualistic thinking has been around for a long time, and it will probably be around when Jesus comes again.  But that doesn’t mean that we should fall under its spell.

The whole subject caused me to wonder how we at Union Church might sometimes show evidence of dualistic thinking.  Here are some thoughts that came to mind.  Do we focus on being a member, but not on the responsibilities of membership?  Do we want our children baptized, without concern for our parental responsibility to raise them “in the fear and admonition of the Lord”?  Are we concerned with our own personal finances without also being concerned with the church’s actual budget?  Are we focused on our particular piece of the Union Church pie, and not on whether the church as a whole is attractive to the lost world around us.

I could probably go on, but I’ll leave it at that for now.  None of us would ever like to be called a hypocrite; and yet all of us practice some form of dualistic thinking to some degree or another.  But God calls us to press on to better things – things that one would rightly expect of those who claim to fully possess the salvation that God offers the whole world through faith in our great God and Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.