In this writing, I am standing on the cusp of the Renaissance. For the first Christian Millennium in Europe—to oversimplify it—it chose a foundation of a dualistic Neoplatonic philosophy. Despite Paul warning the early church not to be taken by cultural philosophies, it always has. Even now as I write, besides adopting once again a dualistic philosophy, the conservative churches are also adopting Christian nationalism (and this isn’t the first time), which is an antithetical position to the teachings of Christ, while the progressive church is also adopting a mixture of Christian and Buddhist ideas.

However, at this point in history, circ. the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, there were two oppositions to this Christian dualism: the Catholic Scholastic of northern Europe and the Medici family in Florence, Italy. They each wanted a new way to think and live because the old dualism, which saw the material world as unimportant, wasn’t working.

Once again, I will defer, hopefully until next time, the nitty-gritty details of this transformation, what we now call the Renaissance, The Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. But I must take a more practical application of dualism, again, to help this all make sense.

The Example of Miracle Signaling

In our present world, both in the conservative and progressive arms of the church, it is a cultural norm (and highly enforceable by social sanctions) to give praise to God about everything good in life… or even the bad. This act of praise is conjoined with the belief that the event in our lives, good or bad, is a supernatural miracle, directly from the hand of God, and therefore is praiseworthy. To not give God the praise in these situations, and thus the sanctions, you are assumed to be an ass.

I could give a thousand examples of this, but one that is very close to home is my cancer. Having lived for thirty years in evangelicalism, I know the norms. I see it every day played out in the multiple myeloma forums, where people feel obligated to give God praise for the miracle that they are alive. But here is the rub. Most of those things are not supernatural miracles. It is a lie. Now, for me to say that will come across to most Christians as if I’m not grateful and give fodder for them to attack me as an ungrateful wretch. But that’s not the point. The point is not thinking in a dualistic way. The fundamental thinking of dualism is that this natural world and everything in it is inferior, meaningless, and only the unseen (or spiritual, or miraculous) has meaning. It has an echo of the old Christian Gnostics who claimed this world was created by the devil.

Case in point, I am in remission from multiple myeloma after living for at least three years mud wrestling with the Grim Reaper. Am I grateful? Hell Yeah! Was it a miracle? No! If you are honest about this (and this series is titled, “Honest to God”), you can explain each step of my cancer rationally. How I got it: not sent by God as a punishment, but a simple genetic mutation; and not in remission because of an irrational and supernatural event, but a very natural and rational event of smart scientists working with an incredible natural system to find a brilliant way to sabotage a natural process. You see, specifically, when my plasma cells mutated, they also found a way (as most cancers do) to cloak themselves from our immune system. I have been put into remission by genetically modifying human antibodies to see through that cloak and to attack those bad cells.

But if God really did create nature, not the devil, then the incredible universe we live in… well, is incredible. Or as Dr. Brian Greene, physicist and String Theorist, calls it, “The Elegant Universe.” No, I do not worship the creation, as I was accused of at my church.  N.T. Wright, Anglican Bishop, scholar, and author, told me that my manuscript, Butterflies in the Belfry, would be interpreted by many Christians as me being a panentheism at least, if not a pantheist or a nature worshiper. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let’s think sensibly without looking through the Neoplatonic dualistic lens. Who created this world? Who created biochemistry? Who created genetics? Who created the minds of the scientists? Who created that mathematical way the universe works? If you believe in a creator God, then you have to say “God” in all of those cases. Therefore, I can be profoundly grateful to God for allowing—via their hard work, not by magic—a treatment that put me into remission. Being honest about it, rather than lying and saying that the only way God could help me was by a supernatural means (because God sees the natural as dirty or inferior), screams of the dualism that saturates our way of thinking. Einstein was a gifted man, and he understood this issue when he said, “There are two ways to live your life: as if everything is a miracle, or as if nothing is.” There is no rational way to live where you believe only some things are miracles, and the rest were created by… You know, Demiurge or the Devil.

In closing, I must add one more point. I know that this gets confusing, but I saw a friend post on Facebook the other day, and he had as part of his avatar, “Non-binary Thinker.” What he is referring to, I’m sure, is something very different than me… in some ways, the opposite. Richard Rohr teaches that most of our problems are from thinking in binary ways. If you listen to what he says carefully, he is writing from his post-modernist viewpoint that there is no truth. So, his “binary” is not about the seen vs the unseen, but in logical thinking, there are areas of binary logic. Some things are true, some things are false. Some things are light, some things are dark, and some things good, some things bad, etc. But as a postmodernist, he assumes that there is no truth, no good, no bad, not light, and no dark. It gives a false sense of peace when we have no differencess. He says there is no difference between Naziism, and Communism, a killer and a life-saver, etc. That notion ends in absurdity, not peace. Much of life is binary.

Next time, the Renaissance for sure

Mike