Continuing to read the book “Total Truth” by Nancy Pearcey, I came across these interesting paragraphs as the author began to talk about dualism after discussing how the Reformers acted against it

Over the centuries, of course, the definition of what is sacred and what is secular, or worldly, has been redefined. Among the Puritans, some defined worldiness in terms of wearing colorful clothing and ruffled collars; to be holy meant wearing dark, plain clothing. Today many older Christians can remember growing up in churches where it was still forbidden to dance, smoke, play cards, chew tobacco, wear makeup, or go to movies. When a friend of mine attended a Christian college several years ago, “mixed bathing” was still forbidden in the college swimming pool. Even now, walk into some fundamentalist churches and you feel like you’ve been transformed back to the 1950’s: All the men in dark suits while all the women wear skirts below the knees with pumps and hose. The congregation might not exactly call it a sin for a woman to wear pants, but they certainly regard it as a “bad witness”

The problem with this secular/sacred dualism is that it does exactly what Plato did so many years ago: It identifies sin with some part of creation (dancing, movies, tobacco, makeup). Spirituality is defined as avoiding that part of creation, while spending as much time as possible in another part (church, Christian school, Bible study groups). This explains why work in the spiritual realm as a pastor or missionary is regarded as more important or valuable than being a banker or businessman…

I read that and was moved by the words written here. I thought about what was the definition of worldiness. Was the definition based on a Scripture or was it really based on someone’s personal opinion (stuff not mentioned in the Bible) that was forced upon people as ‘Thus saith the Lord’. What this led to was that not doing certain things was defined as being ‘holy’ and doing other things such as spending all of your time on a church pew was defined as being “Spiritual”. Most of the time, this is based on someone deciding not to do a certain thing and when they quit doing that thing, a good thing happened and therefore the equation of the thing I quit doing must mean sin and seperation from God and therefore I must warn the others to stop doing that thing I stopped doing in order to be more spiritual. From this, a ’standard’ was set up to define the ones who spent more time in prayer, read more Bible verses, did / did not do the things we liked / disliked, or watched Christian television more as being “more Spiritual” and defined the ones who were the most proficent at not doing certain things was “more Holy”.

Therefore, this created ‘levels of Spirituality” that was equated to rank in the military that the Bible never states as existing. This also generated a theology that I define as ‘next-level’ theology that usually followed the formula of “the more holy you become and the more spiritual you are, the greater the chances of going to the ‘next level’ with God” when no such formula was mentioned in the Bible.

Then the ‘next level’ was deemed as ‘the next great revival’ and when people could not find revival or obtain ‘the next level’, then we deemed them as not being holy enough or not spiritual enough. Because they were not ‘holy or spiritual’ emough, we deemed these people as being in ’sin’ . By doing this, this created a three-fold process that was formulated into the pathway to revival.

Pages: 1 2