A GREEN TREE GOSPEL
04/05/24 07:59
How to flourish in the world. How not to put non-believers off with religion.
NO DUALISM
There is no split life in a properly Christian life. It is fundamentally non-Christian to live from a dualism of thought and act. This is because Christ is not only the Creator and the Agent of the New Creation but the logos that is the Spirit of Life in the world and in people.
NO SPLIT REALITY
In the New Testament Age there is no God Time divided from our time and no Most Holy place external to your being. In Jesus, God meets with you in your heart – the centre of your being. You are a living temple of God. All real life, is life in God in the person of Jesus Christ who draws all things into Himself.
BELONGING AND INCLUSION
The relationship you have with God is similar to the relationship the trinity have with each other. It’s so close that God is woven into our being in Jesus Christ. Christ is in you and through you in the world where you are and whenever you are.
DUALISTIC PRIMITIVISM
Writing on the split life of dualism, Thomas Torrance observes that, “When the Christian Church spread out from its centre in Judaea into the Mediterranean world its preaching and teaching of the Gospel came up against a radical dualism of body and mind that pervaded every aspect of Graeco-Roman civilisation, bifurcating human experience and affecting fundamental habits of mind in religion, philosophy and science alike. The Platonic separation (χωρισμός) between the sensible world (κόσμος αἰσθητός) and the intelligible world (κόσμος νοητός), hardened by Aristotle, governed the disjunction between action and reflection, event and idea, becoming and being, the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the temporal and the eternal” and the mind/body. (1)
ALIVE IN CHURCH BUT DEAD EVERYDAY
Manning Clark could never understand how his mother seemed so ecstatic in church and so dull in the world. Many fundamentalists are fond of making distinctions between the world and spirituality. Ellen White’s writings are imbued with Platonism and its ‘the mind good, the body bad assumptions’. It is difficult when reading the works of such dualists that they are against pleasure. ‘Pleasure’ can be an idol when we are addicted to it or an idol when we make virtue out of denying it validity in normal life.
KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL DICHOTOMIES ARE ANTI-LIFE
This kind of dualistic spirituality is more religious than spiritual. It can be well embedded example of ‘cancel culture’ of the kind that has existed for centuries due to the lived paradigm of the knowledge of good and evil.
LIFE-GIVERS OR NOT?
Liberated from the law and this kind of humbug, we are free to move about in the world creating life and enjoying it in all its aspects, yet without sin. Sin is the effect of separation from God, even when this separation is embedded in our religion. The adventure of real life is lived in companionship with Christ who is forming us as our real self, because Christ has come in our flesh so that we are expressions of Him as a self and as the Church.
As well as this we will have better relationship with people. Rather than dividing all thought into right and left, we can become thinkers who can deal with complexity and ambiguity and so avoid the stultified mindset of the bigot.
(1)Torrance, Thomas F.. The Trinitarian Faith (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 47). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
