dualism

Love the sinner, love the sin. That is what I'm coming to believe more and more, which is funny to me because I don't even know what it means, just that I feel it's more true than "love the sinner, hate the sin." Recently I read a letter to my school newspaper where someone was writing that Jesus didn't get in bed with sin. Immediately when I read that, I thought "Of course he did," and that that is the sort of love that Jesus had for people and that I should have for others. I don't know how to explain it except in sexual terms, and even then I can't explain it very well.

In other news, I don't think that I'm a dualist anymore. I believe less and less in a distinction between mind and body or between spirit and flesh. I'm not struggling with sin. My experience of life isn't an experience of being at war with myself. I'm not quite sure how to explain this, because there are definitely ways that I need to and want to change, and ways that I want to treat others better and love others better, and ways that I hurt people and yes, sin against them. I can recognize that and at the same time honestly say that I'm not in a struggle against sin. I also wonder if this is more towards what it means that the old me has been killed, that there is no more struggle and no more war within me.

Maybe it has to do with loving the sinner and loving the sin, that it's impossible to love myself without loving the sin. I think that one of the reason's I don't see my life in terms of struggle with myself is that I believe less and less in the division of all things and more and more in the unity of all things, and that the sinful part of me is exactly that: part of me. The more I read and experience life, the more I see the problems in dividing my existence into terms of flesh and spirit, especially when flesh is interpreted as my own physical body. I don't want to hate any part of me, even the parts I don't like. I want to understand them, and love them so that they can heal. I don't want to hate any part of anyone, I want to understand those parts and love those parts so that they can heal as well. Hate is like amputation, but love is more like healing. One is fast and crippling, the other is slow and restorative. That is what I believe.

But doesn't the Bible perpetuate dualist ideas? Yes, but also no (perhaps). A part of me wants to say that we read Paul's ideas through Descartes, who divided mind and body, and through Augustine, who had a hyperactive conscience (incidentally, I like Augustine). I think that's true, and should be taken into account. But it also needs to be taken into account that Paul was working within a Platonic framework, and that Plato had divided up the individual 2000 years before Descartes did. But I think it's fair to say we don't understand Paul as well as we think we do.

Here's what it comes down to for me at the moment: when Paul speaks in dualistic terms, this should not be read as a description of reality, it should be read as a framework for understanding reality and for understanding how sin and God can coexist. And it's a good framework, it really is very useful and has been useful for much of my life for defining my own experience with my self and with God and with sin, but I think in the end it is only a framework, and not reality itself.

Incidentally, I was at church tonight listening to a song that I've heard many times before, but I understood it in a much different way, and I felt like writing about it. The lines? "worthy...of a childlike faith and of my honest praise and of my unashamed love." The way I've always understood those lines, and probably how the writer intended them, is that God is worthy of everything, and so I should be worshipping him in really demonstrative ways because I don't care what anyone thinks. There's probably some truth to that, but I think that the adjectives are super important: dancing around during worship and evangelizing to people on the streets may be neither honest nor unashamed for me, and there shouldn't be shame in that.

I've been thinking some lately of how important it is to recognize that we understand God in different ways, that we experience him in different ways, that he guides us in different ways and, maybe the most important, that we serve him and respond to him in different ways, and that this diversity is a good thing and not something to feel threatened by. It's just hard for me when other Christians' God seems so different and in some ways antithetical to the God that I love.

Let me tell a story that might explain what I was just writing about.

Imagine for a moment that a man and a woman are about to make love, and that one of them (it doesn't really matter, let's say the man) has an STD (it doesn't really matter which one). And he wants to wear a condom to not give this disease to her, but she tells him not to. It's not even that she's willing to "risk it", it's that in some sense she wants his sickness, that she wants to be sick with him. That is the way I understand the love of Jesus (and also not the sexual policy that I would reccomend adopting, at this point). I really do think that Jesus gets in bed with sin.