Spiritual and Religious by Tom Wright

Author:Tom Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9780281072859
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2017-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

Dry dualism

The first sort of dualism I call ‘dry’ because it is, at its heart, very intellectual and wordy. It is a gospel for the stiff-upper-lipped. In some parts of popular evangelicalism, it presents itself as an ultra-sound restatement of old truths, and claims to possess the only true gospel. This gospel, it turns out, is that which characterized a certain kind of evangelical in (among other periods) the 1950s. The gospel and politics inhabit totally different worlds. The same is true for the gospel and the emotions, the gospel and physicality. Sexuality is deeply suspect. The sacraments are given a wide berth where possible, and handled with great caution where not. Preaching the gospel is telling people how to go to heaven when they die, and anything else is a watering down of that timeless message. It would be perfectly possible to believe this ‘gospel’ and go off to work every day for years without noticing that one was building the Tower of Babel.

There are other consequences. Worship must be severely ordered so as to exclude any ‘Catholic’ trappings. Counselling is basically done from the pulpit, not one to one. Anything which suggests loss of control, launching out into the unknown, taking risks in the spiritual sphere, is strictly off-limits. The charismatic movement is a snare and a delusion; modern miracles are figments of the imagination. The Bible is the authority, though it is very much the-Bible-as-read-within-the-tradition. If you suggest that biblical authority might reside in the Bible itself, with all its peculiarities and puzzles, consisting as it does mostly of stories not lists of rules and doctrines, you will be ruled out of order. This dualism (I have described the evangelical sort, because I have seen quite a lot of it, but I do not doubt that there are other sorts of ‘dry’ dualism around in the churches today) achieves its certainties at the expense of excluding large areas of God’s world, and God’s word.

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