Reflections
DANGEROUS DICHOTOMIES
By Pete Hammond
Dichotomies can appear to be safe. They help us separate, and even isolate, difficult tensions in life. The desire to put certain things into controllable or safe compartments is very understandable. But it denies reality and is ultimately destructive.
Several popular dichotomies exist today:
Sacred vs. secular - It's popular to believe that you can privatize faith and restrict its impact in work, politics, economics and community. But this conflicts with our being children of God in the tradition of Christ who claimed to be "Lord of all.'
Personal vs. public - To assume that you can be one person privately and another publicly is dangerous. This denies the intricate and interdependent nature of personality.
Spiritual vs. religious - It is becoming popular to think that we can be spiritual without either being committed to a community of faith or living our beliefs in the public square. This is a distortion which denies the fact that our faith makes us members of the body of Christ. It also cheats the society in which we live, learn, love and serve out of our values, convictions and leadership.
Family vs. work - It is dangerously myopic to think that we can separate these two defining realities of our nature, calling and fulfillment. The whole of creation depends upon our being "in the image and likeness of God' as integrated persons. It was very late in human history (the industrial revolution) that any separation of this sort was even begun as work moved out of the family farm or trade and into separate locations. These are deeply intertwined and never function in isolation from one another.
Church vs. world - Seeing the church as an enclave, a refuge or escape from the world is a denial of the very design of a people of God. We are to bless the whole earth and all its peoples by serving as restorative "salt' and enriching "light.'
We vs. they - It is all too easy to label and demean others to gain self-importance or distinctiveness. This is the root of racism, classicism and elitism. Building our importance on the destroyed or maligned reputations of others develops a very shaky and false identity.
Clergy vs. laity - We have slipped into a two-tier or split-level community of faith divided between professionals and non-professionals. Webster defines "laity' as "uninvolved and not a member.' What a label for 99 percent of our church members! Scripture views all followers of Christ as "ministers' who do the work of growing up in Christ, building the whole body of Christ and opposing evil (Ephesians 4:11-16).
Love vs. sex - Many view sex as an event or a physical gratification. Our sexuality, however, is an essential dimension of who we are. We cannot "give it away' without giving ourselves. Hence, Christians view sex as only proper within committed love relationships.
Life cannot be dichotomized into safe little compartments. Our faith cannot function as a little rabbit that we take out of its cage occasionally for feeding and petting (during church or family devotional times). Rabbits die in a roaring lion world. Dichotomies are not safe. They are dangerous and destructive to our health and our very nature.
Pete Hammond is a PCUSA elder, Presbyterians For Renewal board member, senior staff member of InterVarsity and the creator of the new Word In Life Study Bible ® . He and his wife Shirley live in Madison, WI and commute to see their four grandchildren in Chicago regularly.
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