Unbelief fragments. Faith integrates. God created a world abounding in distinctions, but not abounding in shattered pieces. From the beginning there were glorious distinctions between heaven and earth, between male and female, between land and sea, between soul and body. Faith received these distinctions with integrated understanding, without trying to tear one away from the other. Faith received both the one and the many; faith received all this from the triune God, the only true God, the God in three Persons, forever blessed.
When sin entered the world, it caused us in unbelief to approach the world as though we had the authority to separate sign from reality in the sacraments, or male from female in the marriage bed, or God’s early purposes before Christ and His latter purposes in Christ, or fill in a long list of unacceptable dualisms here.
But in order to reject these unacceptable dualisms, we must insist upon a biblical and absolutely necessary dualism — the antithesis between faith and unbelief, the antithesis between the heart that has been born again and the heart that has not been. This is because unbelief is the font of all the other problems. To therefore blur the distinction between the unconverted and converted heart (whether that heart is within the covenant or outside it) is necessarily to enshrine a host of other hopeless dualism in the practice of the Church. It is to put death in the pot.
So this is why we have unbelieving dualisms streaming from today’s pulpits. This is why we have dualism in our baptismal practices. This is why dualism and confusion abound in wedding ceremonies. This is why we cannot be brought to admit that Jesus Christ is Lord over all pluralist societies. This is why we think the Old Testament and New Testament are strangers to one another.
It is because we have failed to insist on the one thing needful. It is because a host of evangelicals and their ministers need to be born again.