Thursday, July 16, 2009

There Is No Tightrope

Is it holier to cut our lives in two--to save a portion for reading Scripture and the rest of the day to spend on walking the dog, laundry, studies and friends? Is it more Christlike to be single--to just "be happy with God"? Is it more noble to be a missionary than a streetsweeper?


I catch myself thinking, sometimes, that these are either/or issues. "I can be super-holy by spending an extra hour reading my Bible...or I can lose holiness points and go play with my little sister." Or, "Someday I'll have to choose between getting married or spending my life sacrificially on the missionfield."


Worse than catching myself with this false dichotomy, sometimes I don't catch it at all. Snap decisions are made based on the assumption that some things are holier than others. I constantly walk a tightrope between what I suppose makes Heaven smile and what daily drudgery I've got to do. This is problematic, because it means that the "holy" aspects of my life are in a constant clash with all the necessary "other things."


Nancy Pearcey critiqued this thinking in her book, Total Truth. She explained that dividing our lives between the sacred and profane is dualism, not biblical Christianity:"[In Platonic dualism] Creation was divided into two parts: the spiritual (superior, good) and the material (inferior, bad). ....In contrast to the Greeks, then, the Bible presents the material world as originally good: Since it was created by God, it reflects His good character.... For instance, Scripture does not treat the body as inherently sinful or less valuable....Indeed, if the body were inherently sinful, the Incarnation would have been impossible, for Jesus took on a human body yet had no sin."


Pearcey went on to say that Augustine, who was heavily influenced by Plato, popularized this stream of thought in Christianity. As a result, it became popular in the Middle Ages to choose between conventional living or the "holier" life of a monk or nun. I shudder to consider how much of this thinking has impacted my own life and decisions. What can be done for a cure?


The trick to living rightly must be to find the celestial in the mundane. Instead of separating the different strands of our lives, we must unite them as balanced whole: Taking every thought captive to Christ. Doing all to the glory of God. Obeying our parents out of loving service to God. Studying because God is the Author of all real truth. Walking the dog because...well...surely that counts as being faithful in small things.