Dualism Alive and Well

          Dualism is the belief that the physical realm and the spiritual realm exist separately and are not intertwined. This sort of understanding comes into Christianity from time to time and understandably so. If we are going to die and be in heaven, while our bodies rot on earth, how can the physical world not be separate and less important than the spiritual world? It is seems to me that the main problem here is one of stewardship. People know that they will be forgiven and that their earthly bodies will not exist in heaven as they do now. They neglect the idea that God has entrusted us with them for this time and that we will be held accountable for how we used them.
          In the modern church dualism is manifest differently than it was in ages past. In the early days of the church, and even in modernity in places outside Europe and North America, the gospel was spread by means of physical manifestations of spiritual power. In other words: miracles. The average church may pray for the healing of the sick privately, but not with the expectation of results. If a child is ill, the urgent response is to take them to a doctor, with a possible visit from a priest as an afterthought.
          It seems that the hope of the physical intervention of the Holy Spirit is virtually non-existent in the Evangelical Church of America. Where dualism used to manifest itself in the neglect of right action on earth, it now manifests itself in the functional disbelief in any physical work done by the Holy Spirit. As J.P. Moreland is fond of asking, ‘Christians are driving out demons in Asia. Christians are performing miraculous healings in Africa; but not here, and not now. Have we no sickness? Have we no demons?’
          Perhaps what we lack is not spiritual beings, but rather human acknowledgement of them. The great dualists today are not the Manicheans; they are the methodological naturalists sitting in the pews holding on to no hope of the manifestation of the power of God.