Dualism
Dualism is a word that is used to describe a way of thinking that tends to separate the universe into two utterly separate categories. It is presupposed that nothing can be in both sides of a particular dualism and any such crossing over is deemed to be “irrational.” If indeed Jesus of Nazareth is a real incarnation of God in real human flesh, it necessarily overthrows all manner of dualisms that tend to separate what God has joined together. In our investigation of three kinds of dualism, we will seek to understand first what the form of dualism implies, then why it is damaging to Christian faith, then finally how the reality of the Incarnation overturns such ways of thinking.
Cosmological Dualism
Many religions and philosophical systems include a form of cosmological dualism. In this form of dualism, the universe is separated into two different realms; the tangible realm and the intangible realm. The first of these includes everything that we can experience using our senses, whereas the second one is composed of things that are not observable through the senses. This can be understood as the realm of God (or the gods), or it might be the realm of “real” and “enduring” things, such as in Plato’s concept of an ideal plane.
In practice, such a dualistic worldview tends to presuppose that God cannot interact with the tangible world. For the ancient Greeks, this often took the form of God creating the universe before time began. Ever since that time, God has not actually interacted with the world. In fact, in some systems, God is not even aware of the world. Lest we think that this is only an ancient idea, Isaac Newton subscribed to a dualistic separation between God and the world. For him, the universe was a closed system of cause and effect. Any interaction of God that disrupted this order would be considered a miracle (as was often the definition at the time). However, Newton did not think that this was really possible.
This understanding of the world is disastrous to both Jewish and Christian faith, because the Judeo-Christian tradition affirms that God does indeed interact with the world. At the very least, this tradition believes that God created the universe, not out of logical necessity but out of freedom and love. God did not have to interact with that which is distinct from himself, but chose to do so while yet remaining distinct from that created world. This is affirmed throughout the entire biblical canon because God is continually cited as manifesting his presence among the Israelites and among the apostles. And yet, even though God does indeed interact in this way, there is no confusion of any kind between God and the world. However one interprets the relationship between God and the world, one cannot twist the Jewish and Christian scriptures to support a Pantheistic view.
In any case, the Incarnation shows that a cosmological dualism is a fundamentally inappropriate way to understand the relationship between God and the world. We are not free to presuppose that God does not interact with the world because God has indeed done so. Not only has God done this in the abstract, but in the very concrete person of Jesus. It is simply impossible to maintain both that Jesus is the fullness of God in flesh and that God does not interact with the created order. If we try to fit Jesus into a cosmologically dualistic framework, we can come to no other conclusion that, in Jesus, we are confronted with something other than the God of the universe, which fundamentally destroys Christian faith as presented in the New Testament and believed by the church.
Epistemological Dualism
Another area where dualism has had a damaging impact on Christian faith is in epistemology. Epistemology deals with our theory of knowledge, that is, how do we know what we know? On the one hand, an epistemological dualism makes a distinction between what we know and our knowing of it. This is a good thing because we need to always remember that things are what they are (most importantly, God) regardless of whether we know them or not. However, the view becomes a true “dualism” when it claims that our knowledge and the reality we know have no, and can have no real connection. This view asserts that we can never know something in itself, but can only know it as it appears to us.
Again, there is a certain nugget of truth here because it emphasizes the significant way in which the person of the knower affects knowledge. We already know this to be true in light of our consideration of God’s interaction with Israel. We must grant that personal considerations such as lifestyle have a considerable impact on our knowledge and that we are hindered from knowing certain things if the lives we lead are incompatible with that knowledge. However, this is only to assert that there is no necessary connection between reality and our knowledge of it. It means that, given that reality is objective and our knowledge of it is subjective, the knowledge we think we have might not be correct.
However, epistemological dualism maintains that real knowledge of objective reality from within our subjectivity is not only not necessary but not possible. This is finally the root of post-modernity and the emphasis in recent years on the idea of pluralism. Pluralism is a view that claims, since we can not have confidence that we really know something, because our community and background so affects our knowledge, we must allow for all different points of view. Both of these movements stress the knowing subject (us) over and against the object we seek to know (God). The latter of these ideas still grants that there is an objective reality that we can know but our knowledge cannot be considered accurate in any meaningful way because it is hopelessly filtered through our minds; the former denies that we can have any knowledge of objective reality, sometimes even denying that there is such a thing as objective reality.
The reason why epistemological dualism is destructive to Christian faith is because it effectively eliminates any meaningful understanding of revelation. If we presuppose that there is (and can be) no actual connection between what we seek to know and our knowledge of it, then, no matter what God does or has done, we cannot actually have any real knowledge of God. Thus, when the scriptures tell us things like in John’s prologue where we are told that Jesus has come to explain God, it has no real meaning. If we cannot finally have any real knowledge of God, then the gospel is finally without any real substance.
The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation does not allow for an epistemological dualism because God, as he is revealed to us (Jesus) is the same as God in his own being because Jesus is of one being with the Father. This of course does not mean that we cannot be mistaken in our understanding of Christ (just as we can with any reality), but rather that we know that, as we come to know God in his revelation to us, we come to know God himself. This overthrowing of epistemological dualism is one of the more radical ideas of Christian faith. Christian thought teaches that, because of God’s Incarnation in Jesus, we actually can have some real knowledge of God. The Christian God is not the undifferentiated unity of Islam or some strands of Judaism, but rather a Trinity of Persons. Because of this, God is intrinsically knowable as each Person of the Trinity knows each of the others. We become participants in this knowledge in Christ and through the Holy Spirit.
Anthropological Dualism
The last major dualism that we will be discussing is Anthropological, that is, it has to do with a split made in the middle of the human person. Most often, this takes the form of a dualism between body and soul, though there have certainly been variations on that theme. Anthropological dualism asserts that the human person is divided into two mutually exclusive parts, for argument’s sake, we will stick to the division between body and soul. These two parts may be connected together, but such a connection is seen as nothing more than at a mathematical point (that is, there is no real connection between them). That which effects one of them does not touch the other. Physical things have no spiritual value and spiritual things have no physical value.
Anthropological dualisms were extremely common in the early church, especially where Christianity had been influenced by Platonic thought. Even in more recent times, this form of dualism is latent in much Christian thought. C. S. Lewis (who I like in general) once commented, “You do not have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body.” If all he meant were that our souls are fully part of who we are and not something added on by people who are religiously minded, there would be no problem. However, to imply that the body is just added on is the same issue, just turned around a different way. Similar trends are seen when Christians talk exclusively about God saving the souls of believers as if, somehow, the soul is separable from the rest of the human person.
The early church realized that anthropological dualism tears apart the Christian faith and came to a church-wide agreement about it at the first ecumenical council at Constantinople in 381 AD. The issue at the time was called Apollinarianism, which proclaimed that Jesus could not possibly have had a human mind. The argument went something like this. We know that God came into the world as a specific human being and took humanity upon himself. However, the human mind is the source of all kinds of terrible corruption. This corruption was viewed as so utterly opposed to God that to say that Jesus had a human mind would be a tainting of the divine nature. The church eventually handled the situation by affirming a clarifying statement put forward by Gregory Nazienzen which said, “The unassumed is unhealed.” This statement basically means that, if there is any part of human nature that God did not take upon himself in the Incarnation, the same part of human nature remains unredeemed. In that specific instance, if Jesus did not have a human mind, our human minds remain untouched by God’s redemptive work.
The reality of the Incarnation overthrows such partitive ways of thinking of the human person. Jesus does not make a distinction between soul and body, but enters into both equally. There are moments in the New Testament where the authors will speak of the body in negative terms and the soul (or spirit) in positive terms, but upon closer examination, it is clear that this is merely an illustrative distinction and not meant to imply a complete dualism in humanity. Gregory Nazienzen is by no means infallible, nor is his famous dictum sacrosanct, but it is particularly helpful in summarizing the significance of the redemptive work of Christ, so it is lifted up here as a pithy explanation that is faithful to the gospel.
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