Dualism is a function of the religious lens that is the expression of the knowledge of good and evil and its innately bisecting impetus. It’s the child of an assumed religious, non-belonging and the human attempt to belong and be included by self-effort. But the apriorism of our lives is not separation from God but inclusion in God in the person of Jesus Christ.
DUALISTIC ILLUSION Religious dualism is expressed in segmented and compartmentalised thinking and morality of which the dichotomy of sacred and secular is the prime example. This means that one, as Christian is not a non-dualist because one is amazingly well read in philosophy and theology. We can be eclectically informed as well as foundationally dualistic if we think there is a division between our things and God things.
Spiritual Christians know that this is not the case, but not so religious Christian who often like to ascribe holiness to times, places, objects and modes of belief – to compartments – as opposed to other things - when such things have no inherent spirituality - even though they make up the substance of religiosity and in many cases pious humbug.
DUALISM UNDONE The ripping of the temple curtain at the moment of Christ’s death signalled the undoing of dualism. Such compartmentalisation was undone in the person of Jesus and His at-one-ment, that joined all to God. The spiritual man/woman living in the ‘naked now’ of union with God and the universe in Jesus Christ is whole and holy. You in church are no more holy than you cleaning your car. As Song 5 illustrates, we are just as holy in the bedroom as we are in Church. When we think of ourselves as being in God and God being in us – which is the fact of the incarnation, we are more whole/holy than the effete and irritating religionist.
FRAGMENTATION Thomas Torrance observes that, “In recent years .. the New Testament has too often suffered from hermeneutical methods governed by damaging dualist and analytical epistemologies in which form and being, or structure and substance, have been torn apart, with the result that the gospels and epistles and other books that comprise it [have] become severed from their deep roots in divine revelation and thereby lose the consistent substructure that holds them conceptually and meaningfully together.” (1)
NON-DUALISM IS UNION WITH GOD From a charismatic perspective Leanne Payne notes that, ‘We come to reality, not by theological ideas about it, but by union with it .. In union with Christ the whole of man’s being becomes hallowed.’ (2) Thus, dualism is anti-holistic as well as anti-christ as John warns those who resist the cogency of Christ come in our flesh. Indeed, Payne is certain that we come alive ourselves in Christ’s life when we agree with Him that we are new and whole in His person. “Practicing His Presence, we live decisively out of that new self. To practice His Presence, therefore, is also to practice the presence of the new man (self) rather than the old.” (3)
Notions of sacred and secular and sabbath/non sabbath are innately dualistic. If we live from dualism, it is most probable that we as a dualist are prone to the bitty obsession of political correctness and the puritan taint of this pseudo religious outlook. If we are a Christian and a dualist we have yet to live in what Jesus instructed: ‘On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20 NIV.
(1)Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 35). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. (2)Leanne Payne, Real Presence. (3)Payne, Leanne. The Healing Presence: Curing the Soul through Union with Christ (p. 54). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.