Dualism and the Birth of Anabaptism — Chester Weaver — Ep. 185

What is dualism, and how does it relate to the birth of Anabaptism? How is dualism an expression of Gnosticism?

Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here again with Chester Weaver from Texas. Chester is a board member of Anabaptist Perspectives and has been a school teacher for the last 37 years. On this episode, we're going to be continuing some conversations we've been having about what are the foundation pieces of Anabaptist theology. And particularly on this episode, we're going to be discussing dualism and how does this apply to the Anabaptist movement. Chester, can you define what is dualism and how does this relate with Anabaptist thought, and how does Gnosticism relate to all of these things? Yeah, kind of set the stage for us here. Okay, so dualism is basically a dichotomy where we have spirit separated from matter in some way, instead of being an integral whole like this.

Okay, so the question is, where does it come from and why is it this way? Well, Gnosticism says that at the very beginning, there was a demi-urge, God, who created the material world, which is full of sin, suffering, and death and all that. A good God could not have created that. Then a good God created the world of spirit. And so spirit is good and matter is evil, and they are separated in the world. Original Gnosticism said that Adam and Eve made the right choice. They chose the knowledge of good and evil.

And so that's where it starts. Now, this was a... Now, just to be clear, you're describing Gnosticism, is that correct? Yes, we're talking about Gnosticism. Okay, okay. And so this Gnosticism was very prevalent in the early world, early Christian world. And the scripture relates to it in several ways. One of them comes especially close in 1 Timothy 6, verse 20, where it says, "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science, falsely so called." Now, that is stated in an ESV as, "O Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you, avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge." Okay, so the root word of Gnosticism is gnosis, which means knowledge.

When we're talking about Gnosticism, we're talking about secrets, the people who get the secrets right, the secret knowledge. The secret knowledge was to somehow get rid of or deal with the evil matter and retain the spirit, which is good. And so Gnosticism dealt with evil matter in two ways. One was you indulge it. Since it's evil, indulge it, get everything at once, which is called antinomianism in the Christian side of things. Okay, the other way is deny it completely because it's evil. On the Christian side of things, that's called asceticism. The book of 1 John, especially in the New Testament, I understand one of the primary motives for having it written was to deal with this principle of dualism, which is the separation of the abstract from the concrete.

Okay, so you were describing Gnosticism, the separation of spirit and matter, and dualism is coming out of that, out of that worldview. Yes. And that's where the abstract and the concrete are pulled apart. That's right. And in more religious terms, it separates spirit from matter. So a lot of things grew out of that. And so dualism is a way the world works. And Christianity is a recognition that that's a defective view of the world. This wholeness, where there's no dichotomy, if men were created, Adam and Eve were created whole like this, and this happened with the fall, we completely disagree with Gnostic principles, completely. Men, by separating from God, sinned, and this thing needs to be healed.

God redeemed the world through Christ, and it's like, here we have faith and practice. God, through Christ, made a way that this could be brought together and healed. Now, this is part of the salvation trinity. Eventually, in glorification, it's completely healed.

Justification, I guess you could say, is like you bring the two together, and sanctification is the healing work inside. Yeah, I see. So it's basically, it's this idea of restoration. Things were broken and fallen to pieces, so to speak, and Jesus brings it back together. Okay, so the way, the reason the Anabaptism was born even is that in the Roman Catholic system, the way they dealt with this is you have sacraments, things, mystical things that you did through the church to deal with the fallen world around you. And that's one of the reasons you had to have mass regularly. You went to church to get the mass, to get grace inside you, then you're good for a while.

And then, of course, the other sacraments went around that. The most bizarre expression of this would have been in like in the Crusades. You could take the mass, you could get forgiven, you could go out and butcher Muslims, which is kind of sinful and ugly, but then you can go back to mass and you can get forgiven, so you can go out and kill more Muslims, which is bloody, so you've got to take more mass. It's like, this is bizarre.

Yeah. That's really the bizarre. But in the closer home in Europe, there's always this separation between spirit and practice. Okay, so Martin Luther recognized this. And he says, we got to, there's something wrong here. And as we did in the previous episode, came up with justification, which is like an effort to bring the least the two together somewhat. Okay, so Anabaptism saw that and said, well, there's more to be done. That's the beginning of the healing, but there's more to be done. And that's where the sanctification thing comes from. Okay, so you're basically saying in those systems of thought of how Christianity works, it was splitting these two pieces apart and attempting to bring them together in some ways, but you're basically saying that they weren't bringing the full restoration picture that Anabaptism was trying to mention or solve.

We want to talk about some things practically here, but if we don't get a hold of this basic foundational principle, failure here invites deadly consequences. Because dualism in practice is antichrist at work, and this is what 1 John talks about. Okay, so to Anabaptism, to Anabaptist viewers, Anabaptists must discern dualism whenever and wherever it surfaces and clearly resist it. And our history is we have not done so well with this. And so today, we're talking about today, we can't do anything about the past, but today we need to recognize that dualism is the modern version of the Gnostic heresy.

We don't use that old terminology anymore. We have nicer ways of dealing with this. So 1 John clearly tells us that Jesus Christ came in both the flesh and the spirit to keep them separated is the spirit of antichrist. And so Jesus Christ came in a physical body, but obeyed God in the physical body and matched it with the spirit. He was never dualistic. And that's the call for us too. So anything that keeps us from doing that is the spirit of antichrist, where we need to bring the good. How does this work itself out? Let's go to this one.

Okay, so we've been talking about spirit and matter, and we got to marry these, bring them together and heal. So it's another way of saying our profession and our behavior need to match. So what you say and what you do. Yeah. Yeah.

Practice what you preach. Okay, everybody knows that. It ought to be that way, but it's difficult for people to practice what they preach. We tend to think that what we do from Monday to Saturday, our work is separated from what we do at church on Sunday. We worship on Sunday, but we work in a material world on Monday through Saturday, and the two don't really relate to each other.

That's false. We worship while we wash dishes. We worship while we build trusses. We worship while we fix cars. Work and worship are interchangeable. We just stop our work on Sunday and go to meet with the saints of God in a formal expression of worship. But when we do a good job Monday through Saturday, building the best trusses we can and fixing the cars so they don't break again, the best, we're worshiping at our work.

And so that needs to be welded together in our lives. Now, you can't gamble well and be a glory to God because of some other principles. And there are other things like raising tobacco or processing tobacco or anything that destroys the body. That's not really worship kind of work. And so that helps us understand what kind of occupations we shouldn't be engaged in. We should be able to, in everything we do, worship while we work. Okay, I was wondering if this was concept was going to come in, the sacred-secular split. Do you know where that term even came from, like the sacred-secular divide concept? I don't know if I know. Yeah, I don't know if I know either, but it's all part of this same, yeah, this same worldview.

Yeah, really. It is. Of breaking these things apart. Okay, so we say that our secular work is Monday through Saturday, or we work outside Christianity when we deal with algebra or physics and that kind of thing. But we are dealing with the things of God whenever we deal with theology. Sorry, it's not that way. It's one and the same. We just have different subjects that we deal with. And whenever you study physics, you're just like, you worship as a result of seeing how this all works. It's just like, it's amazing what God was able to think and come up with. And all people do who study is just retrace the thoughts of God. And we marvel.

And so there is no such thing as a sacred-secular divide. It's just two different aspects, but they should be welded together, not separated from each other. Another one is, like I have on the screen right now, the public and private thing. We tend to think that what we do in public and what we do in private are two different things.

I can get away with some things in private that I can't get away with in public. What I do right now with you here, which is kind of, this is kind of a public thing, it should be the same kind of principles I relate with at home.

When I'm in private, what I really am is what I do when nobody's watching. And so it's all together. I should not have two sets of behavior. Public and private are the same. Okay? Otherwise, we say that's hypocrisy.

And in politics right now, each side likes to find hypocrisy in the other. Hypocrisy is bad. Everybody knows it's bad. Here's a big one. We as Anabaptists have not so well practiced this. We've had too much dichotomy in our history.

The gospel makes people industrious and frugal and know how to save, and we don't indulge the flesh, and all we do is get wealth. We are known through history as the people who know how to make money. And the governments have known that. And they like to have Mennonites around. Governments need two things. They need men and money. We won't give them men, but we will give them money. And they've learned that through the years because we're supposed to obey Caesar. Okay, so we've been a little bit lax, though, with what we've done with the money for ourselves. And we have kind of trimmed the corners on how we get money sometimes.

And we have been known to be stingy with our money. It's like part of our reputation, and I'm embarrassed about it. We have not been known to be generous. That's a part of the, that's part of history. I'm embarrassed because whenever we trim and cheat a little bit, we're into dichotomy. We're into dualism. But when our Christian principles direct in love how we use our money toward other people and toward ourselves, then we're healed. So we're back to this oneness. Whenever we are properly healed, then we're back to integrity.

Okay, so it's a lifetime of sanctification to bring us to this place. Okay, that's real practical about this. Young people are especially sensitive to the evident hypocrisy of dualism and are naturally attracted to the wholeness and integrity. Everybody knows. Young people, before they face the pressures of life, always want this wholeness. It's attractive. People have been telling each other for a long time, practice what you preach. And people naturally hate half-truths. People hate hypocrisy. The scriptures condemn double-mindedness and double tongues. It says, can a fountain yield both salt water and fresh? Does a vine bear figs? No. It's not that way. And so we know this instinctively.

And yet, when Jesus referred to the Pharisee, he says, beware of the leaven of Pharisees. And what is the leaven? It's hypocrisy. Now, the Trinity is a perfect single unit of oneness. Jesus asked us to have a single eye so that we can be full of light. We're speaking on one side of our mouth to one group of people and out of another side of our mouth to another group of people or individuals, then we're into doubleness. And it goes to swearing. Jesus says, swear not at all. Well, why? Because human beings tend to think, well, you can lie, and as long as you don't, you can get away with it, it's okay. But if you swear to tell the truth, then you can't do that.

You got to only tell the truth. Well, Jesus knows that we should be in wholeness all the time. We shouldn't have to swear to tell the truth. So if there's any reason why we tend to use those young people through the years, it's on this issue.

Because young people want wholeness, instinctively know it's supposed to be, but they don't see it in the adults in their lives and in the churches where they live. And in practical experience, if they would see wholeness and integrity everywhere, it would keep there, keep our young people. Because out there in a general society is where all this dualism is freely practiced and everybody accepts it. If the politicians say, what I do in my private life has nothing to do with what I say in public. I can privately be against abortion, but publicly I can be for it.

Okay, that doubleness is not really very attractive. And young people don't want that. And we owe it, I owe it as an older person, owe it to demonstrate to everybody that oneness is the way we can live through the power of Christ. Christianity coming out of an environment like this in, you know, in the shortly after the time of Jesus, you mentioned different parts in the New Testament that talk about this. Are there other passages where they talk specifically against Gnosticism or dualism that you're basing this on? Yes, I would have to take a little time, but in the book of Colossians, it talks about Jesus and Jesus is the fullness of the Godhead bodily.

The New Testament was written in this context, and so this is a very real issue. Because Gnosticism would have been fairly popular at that time, yes? Yes, yes. So you had that in the first century, you know, when the New Testament's being written, but then fast forward 1500 years to the Anabaptists, and they were facing maybe not Gnosticism, am I right on that? But a form of dualism within the, say, the Roman Catholic Church and the government and so forth. Am I tracking correctly? State Church operates on dualism.

Unpack that a little. What do you mean? Specifically for the early Anabaptists, you're saying the state church has this dualistic. How does that look? Okay, so the church has the ideal, but the state has to enforce that ideal. And so if there's somebody who needs to be disciplined, the church doesn't do it. The state does the disciplining.

Oh, like that, okay. And so you use that in their minds, like Martin Luther still believed in two kingdoms, but it was in terms of state and churches where his two kingdoms were. Oh, okay, and the Anabaptists are coming in and seeing that, saying, whoa, we got this backwards. This isn't right. Backtracking slightly.

Obviously, as we mentioned, Gnosticism was an issue that the early church faced, but it's still around today. Like Gnosticism, especially in more recent years, I've noticed it feels like it's actually making a bit of a comeback. It's still around. How is it impacting us right now? Okay, so some of these things, these illustrations I gave you, like public and private dichotomies, the way Christians handle money. Years ago, I had a separate, a segregated class at Calvary Bible School when I was talking about this.

And I was talking to the boys, and I was talking about this principle. And we had this idea that you can be inconsistent. You know what you should do, but you don't really do it. But praise God, you're saved. So Bruce Wilkinson actually went, he was preaching at a certain place one day, and the pastor who was the host was wondering, you know, on any typical Sunday morning, what percentage of the people are out of fellowship with God? This is a version of the new Protestant dualism here. And so they were batting some ideas around it, and the host pastor said to Bruce, why don't you check?

Take an actual vote here. So they voted in the congregation that morning. And I think the vote came up to 70% of the people present were out of fellowship with God. But praise God, they're all saved. But so basically they had split apart. I'm still saved, but I'm not living like I'm supposed to. And these boys at Bible school were living the same way. Yeah. And see, that sounds far into our ears, but yet we are practicing some of that. Well, this is coming back to the other episode that we just finished filming a few minutes ago on some of these foundations of Anabaptist theology and salvation and how that came out of in the Reformation years and seeing something is missing here.

That's right. You're basically unpacking this was the worldview that was driving some of these errors that were happening. That's right. And so this is why it even came into existence. It's an effort to bring into integrity and wholeness something that was obviously erroneous. So now fast forward to today, we are becoming increasingly comfortable with spirit being separated from matter again, because in the world, what you think is not expected to match what you do.

And we live in that environment, and it's affecting us. I really, I feel like this was an important cornerstone piece of the setting that early Anabaptism was coming out of. I don't know if I've ever thought of it quite in these terms before, especially using terms like dualism. It's a little shaky on how that applies to our history. This is, yeah, this is really interesting, and I appreciate you taking the time to share. And the one thought I had was, I think last time you were down here in Tennessee, we did a podcast or two on Gnosticism. I think that was with you. Maybe it was with another guest, but we have an exclusive podcast for our partners program over on our website, and we did a few episodes on this from maybe a little different angle historically, and that was very interesting.

And this is something that I feel like I need to learn more about. So thank you for taking the time to share. Thank you for joining us for this episode. We invite you to join our monthly partner program. Monthly partners are key to the financial sustainability of Anabaptist perspectives. Partners also gain access to bonus content, including our exclusive podcast where we respond to audience questions and comments. Sign up at anabaptistperspectives.org.