False Dichotomies, Part Three

The third on Chris Wright's list of false dichotomies created by evangelicals, is the tendency to separate believing from living the gospel, and to prioritize the first. That is, we seem to think that there can be a belief of faith separate from the life of faith, that people can be saved by something that goes on in their heads, without worrying too much about what happens in their lives. So long as they have prayed the right prayer and believed the right doctrine, nothing else ultimately matters, or at least, whatever happens next is secondary and distinct.

Yet, in the Bible faith and obedience are inseparable. Paul actually defines his missionary life’s work as bringing about "the obedience of faith among all nations" (Rom. 1:5; 15:18; 16:26). That is a combination that echoes Abraham, Jesus, Paul, and James. You can’t obey God’s word unless you believe it. But you can’t claim to believe God’s word unless you are obeying it. Faith without works is dead.

This is seen also in the way we tend to divide Paul’s letters into "doctrine" and "ethics", or "Gospel" and "implications", when Paul probably would not have made that kind of distinction. For example, the phrase ‘new humanity’ in Eph. 2 is exactly the same as ‘the new self’ in 4:24. What God has done in the Christ is to be fleshed out in the life of believers. The language of ‘unity’, ‘integrity’ runs through the whole letter. Faith and life are inseparable. Ethics is not something added to the gospel, but integral to it.

The bad result of this dichotomy is that we have people called believers and evangelicals, whose actual lives are indistinguishable from the culture around them –whether in terms of moral standards, or social and political attitudes and actual behaviour.