The Western world is bulging with dualisms, dichotomies, and divisions that distract us from where we really should be dueling. We need to duel. I am not warning against fighting and resisting, I am trying to draw our attention to the fact that much of our fighting amounts to waving our swords at windmills, or even worse, at friends.
If you are getting uncomfortable with all the talk of duels and sword shaking, you can reassure yourself that I do keep in mind that we are not waging war according to the flesh and that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood. But this does not mean that we don't wage war. "The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete."
In this real battle over truth I am afraid we are, as I said, often fighting in the wrong direction. This brings us back to the dualisms and dichotomies. We often separate the world into this-and-not-that. Natural and not supernatural. Intellect and not emotion. Emotion and not intellect. Nice and not mean. Individualism and not communalism. Objective and not subjective. Building up and not tearing down. Laughing and not weeping.
Too often we choose a side and we fight the opposition with our words. We side with nice and go to war against mean. We side with spiritual and reject all things natural. We side with intellect and cast aside emotion. We side with objective, and throw away subjective. So what is the problem? The problem is that in these examples we are pitting two created goods against one another. We are stirring up a fight among friends.
If we believe that God created the world good, then we should see a fundamental unity, a basic agreement and friendship among all the things that are created good. Paul teaches us that everything God made is good and is to be received with thanksgiving. This introduces one basic dichotomy that should be kept in mind, though it is a friendly dichotomy. There is a fundamental distinction between the Creator and the creation. That is important to maintain, lest we be forced to the conclusion that God contains in himself all the evils of the world, or that within God himself is an eternal balance of good and evil. That view of the world means no end to the fight, no triumph of good. Once we establish a fundamental distinction between God and the world, we can then recognize another real dualism in the world itself. On one hand you have created good, and on the other hand you have sinful evil. This is the dualism to duel over. "Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul." "Sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it."
The problem is first in ourselves. The place to duel is against sin. Adam was tempted immediately to shift the blame and fight a created good, although he didn't really fool anyone but himself. "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate." How does Adam frame the problem? It is the woman, she is other, she is the problem. Thousands of years later we still haven't stopped that foolishness.
Let me give a few more examples to make all of this a bit more clear. We see the problems of greed, hunger, poverty, etc. and we think the answer is to feel guilty about our stuff, or to turn against stuff in general. Here is the problem: stuff is not bad. Giving away your stuff won't stop your greed (see Colossians 2:20-23). I have seen greed living under a bridge. I have seen generosity living among a wealth of things. And I have seen envy thriving next door to a pile of things. Am I saying it is wrong to give stuff away? Of course not! The person who rejoices in God's generosity to him will give away more than anyone because he is a person who loves generosity. The person who rejects the good things given to him will give only as much as it takes to make the nagging guilt go away. And it isn't about how big the pile is, because the little old widow who gave away her last coin understood God's generosity all the way down to the little details. I suspect she gave that coin away because she was thankful to God for it, not because she felt guilty for having it. In other words, she saw her enemy as covetousness and greed, not the coin. If the coin itself were truly the enemy, why give it to anyone?
On a larger scale, think about the intellectual climate we live in today. We carry out our lives on a bridge between the land of modernism and the land of postmodernism. The modernists of the Enlightenment want everything boiled down to mathematically representable propositions. With these objective truths they will solve the problems of the world. And bah-humbug to subjective sentiments and feelings, intuition, faith, hope, and love. The postmodernists feel nauseated by the cold and sterile world created by all of this rationalism and want a universe that is alive and warm. And so they march forward in the light of their hopes and dreams, their intuitions and feelings, casting aside that cold, stainless steel intellectual stuff. And so they duel. And we are caught up in the duel. But in the good world God made, the intellect and mathematics are good and true and beautiful. In the good world God made, intuition, feelings, romance, and faith are gifts to be delighted in. To pit them against each other is a waste of time, and it is a manifestation of unthankfulness.
Maybe one more quick one. Most Westerners are still raving individualists. We tend to be suspicious of group-think. We tend to define ourselves by what makes us unique, and feel embarrassed about what ties us to family and community. We want to be individuals but not members. Lately there seems to be a movement towards a more communal identity. I think it is good movement because that is the direction we need to go. However, community should not be embraced apart from the individual. That merely trades one side of the dichotomy for the other. Notice Paul, "Now you are the body of Christ (communal) and individually members of it (individual)."
This post is getting long enough as it is. There is much more I want to say. If there are holes that keep the overall point from being clear, hopefully they will be filled in through discussion or further posts. I will tie it together by saying again that this is not a relativistic call to embrace everything, as though good and evil are all the same, as though truth and lies have no distinction. Evil is evil, lies are deadly, and this is where we duel. We must bring the fight in the right direction: not against created goods, but against rebellious sin; first in ourselves, and only then in others. It should be assumed, but probably shouldn't be, that this fight is made possible through the death and resurrection of Christ, received by faith. Apart from the atonement that brings, we can't let ourselves see the problem for what it really is, because we are too busy trying to shift our personal guilt and shame somewhere else where it won't stick.
It might be a good idea to let Solomon the wise have the last word for now.
"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a tim to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace."
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