Good morning church. Welcome to the eternity life podcast. This is pastor Daniel of Christ, the king Luther church in Cary, North Carolina. I had the privilege of interviewing Reverend George Fuller. And this is part two of our two part series here. He's going to tell us about the theology of dualism. The idea that things can be split up into categories like good and bad, or Jesus versus Satan. I hope that this conversation is meaningful for you and helps you to put your own theology together. Enjoy. Welcome back, George. Glad to be here. Dualism, could you explain that a little bit? Ourselves, our egos, as we grow, need to be built up in either oars, good guys, bad guys, right, wrong. And so, we don't. naturally recognize what Christ was, what Jesus Christ was saying, because Jesus Christ was crucified by the either ors of his religious tradition. And the either ors of the Roman empire, you're either for us or against us. So heaven and hell, heaven and hell ultimately have to exist in dualism because you have to separate. ultimate good from ultimate evil because they're not the same thing. And then when you recognize what Jesus Christ was teaching, he was talking about the, interaction of all of reality being redeemed by the Yahweh, the God Of all things, who was pure love, and that pure love didn't exclude dying, it, it caused dying to be part of living. It didn't exclude darkness, but that darkness was the contrast to light. And that the deepest darkness is actually the place where you're secure with nothing. And if you're secure with nothing, then you're safe in everything, which is part of the paradox. And so, Jesus was actually not a dualist, but if you hear Hades or Gehenna and you translated hell and literature of the Middle Ages defines hell for you, then it's a bad place of torture. If you walk into a room of recovery and somebody tells you their story of how they hit the bottom, and it was so awful they finally had to do something different, you would understand Jesus metaphor of Gehenna the Worst it gets, the trash, and the Hades, the place of death, and that it's there you're born again. And a seed must be placed in the earth and die, or it can't be. be born again, can't germinate, can't produce fruit. So Jesus isn't talking about after you die, you go to heaven or hell. He's saying that in our earthly life, which is really helpful for this eternity life podcast that we often experience, maybe not often, but we experience places of such loathing, self loathing, Awfulness, that is what that word means. That's what the Gehenna word is referencing is when you're in the pit, when you're in the worst of it, it's not an after you die punishment. Sometimes it, it feels like a punishment because of the choices that you've made. And sometimes it's not based on the choices that you made at all. You just found yourself in. a hell on earth, right? So you come out of hell to the call of love, Like Lazarus to the new life for the one calling you out or You you die and are born again all the time and that's something that Jesus did all the time all the time called people To their better life. He calls them to the eternity life Which isn't exactly that starts after you die. The eternity life is tapping into the good life That's beneath your feet all the time And knowing that even in the eternity life, you will die, you will suffer, there won't always be great times, but the dualism of modern Christianity is corrupting the whole thing, where Jesus sees shades of gray, the world wants it to be black and white, and are two party systems not helping? Um, the idea of good guys and bad guys, as you said, I remember, you know, growing up with, with army men, right? Little plastic army men. And there was, there were a good, and then there were bad. And we even had cowboys and Indians. I don't need to tell you which one we were rooting for. Right. Um, but those constructs so get in the way of the ministry. that God is offering us in Jesus and later in Paul. And even in the Old Testament, you see lots of times where the doors are open, not shut. Yeah. And I see a lot of people push back as I did on my way to this understanding by saying that then you're saying there's no good or no, and no bad, no right, no wrong. And that's absolutely not what this is saying. What saying is that Right now with everything as it is, all the good and all the bad present at the same time, you now are placed in a position where with the divine indwelling, you get to decide where does this go. And if you If you think you're the good guy, then you're not going to recognize the toxicity you're doing. Uh, you think you're the good guy. And if you think you're the bad guy, you're going to miss the indwelling of the spirit, the calling, the awesomeness that you are because you identify yourself as bad. And so the self loathing that hits me at three in the morning is the leftover stuff from the stories I got about life early on in my life, you know, good guys and bad guys. My dad would rage at me. And then tell me I'm wonderful. And it was all about, did I please him? Yeah. And so I was in or out with my father because of pleasing him or not pleasing him. And, um, my limbic system, my middle brain, where everything's stored still has that in it. So I still have this basic instinct of if I do something, disappoint God, do something wrong, then I'm not worth anything. And yeah, and that's just not true. And so, yeah, no, that's, it never stops being there. The dualism never stops being there because We actually do get to make choices. Yeah. So when you get past dualism, it's not that you don't get to decide left or right, right or wrong, good or bad, healthy, unhealthy. You get to, you get to keep deciding that and it's your responsibility to decide that. We just preached on this because we're in Lent and we're talking about Jesus in the wilderness. And it's so easy to settle into dualism that Jesus is all good. And Satan is all bad. That's not the role of the Hasatan, which is to tempt you off that path. The reason that Jesus feels called into the wilderness is so that he can be tested so that he makes those good decisions, even when it's hard. And so if you, if you call it dualism, you think you're making it better, but you're making the story worse. You're refusing to see that the choices that he's making are very intentional and difficult because you're saying, Oh, he's, he's just a, you know, he's a hero of good versus evil. Yeah. And the, and dualism demand simplicity, you know, a clear, right. A clear wrong. Yeah. Um, I think it was you, but I remember talking, having a conversation with, I think it was you and Steven, but anyway, y'all, you said you ought to get a podcast and you ought to call it. It's not that simple because that was a phrase I used all that. It's just not that simple. Yeah. Here's how it's, You know, it's like the pro life stance in today's culture. Yeah. If you could just say, let's protect human life from womb to, womb to grave. Yeah. And let's value every human life equally, then you got a way to find an answer. But that's complex. Yeah. How do you value everyone's life from womb to grave? But we tend to decide there's a, there are lives that are better or worse. Right. More valuable, less valuable. Yeah. And You know, the good people do this and the bad people do that. It only shows up as simple if you don't listen to anyone else's story. That's it. Because as soon as you say this is a human being from the, you know, the time that it's, you know, conceived, uh, what about all those embryos? Right. Yeah. And, and why did 40, 000 children die of starvation? It could be prevented every day. And the same people that want to stop. Babies from being killed before they're born aren't desperately, desperately begging everyone to take a day off and feed the 40, 000 dying of starvation today. And it, it, it's because we want it to be simple. We want to be able to define ourselves as good people aligned with God. And so we make it simple and I'm not saying we should ignore or even demonize the instinct to make it simple. Yeah. I, I don't want to demonize making it simple. It's just to recognize that when we do that, that's what we're doing. We're making it simple and That's why the systems we're in and the leaders we have have to work systemically with everything. Because then it can be simple. Like if all the products we bought were safe for us, then we, that would be great. But in, in the truth, you gotta find out if products are safe, because we don't demand they be safe before they're sold, so. Yeah. You gotta figure it out. Ah, it's just so well said. And I didn't, uh, I mean I started AIDS ministry, Thinking I would convert and straighten up gay people, but I had to do gay, had to do AIDS ministry because that was the leprosy of my generation. And Jesus clearly was with lepers. So I'm going to go be with lepers because Jesus needs to be with them and the church is treating them poorly. So there needs to be some testimony of Christ in their community. And then I was just, you know, leading small groups of people who were dying, had no reason to be dishonest. And found out that everything I thought about sexuality and gender was wrong. I was just wrong. It was a lot more complex than I thought. You were wrong because of, wait for it, dualism. Dualism, exactly. You thought there was a man and there was woman and they were made for each other. And I, uh, I was just wrong. I mean that was, you know, one of the big shifts for me. Was understanding the kind of the nature of identity, sexuality, gender, consciousness. Realizing that was very complex and that certain things you can't see because you grew up where you grew up. You just can't see it. And until you get to know someone who shows you a different view of life, you actually can't see it. So you don't even need to be blamed. Like when, when people are you know, toxic and violent, I used to see them as bad. Now I realize they just don't. are operating on what they could see. And best thing that would help everybody is if we could all see from each other's eyes and so many times I realized, no, I'm, I'm supporting the systems that give them nothing to do except suffer and say, thank you. You were also one of the first ministers I know who was willing to embrace world religions and have conversations about how Christianity. plays well and doesn't play well and other faith practices and not simply assuming that Christianity is always the be all and end all, you know, when it comes to those and, and using the language of frame, you know, my frame is as a Christian in the world, but I can certainly see how other people have others. And for me, that was really the first time I saw somebody not scared of the world's religions. Yeah, and I was scared till I wasn't scared. I, you know, I became, uh, friends with Steven Sager. He was rabbi of a synagogue in Durham. We would meet at the Mad Hatter Cafe in Durham and have our talks and, um, One day he said, you know, when you talk about Christ, it sounds like you're talking about Torah. I said, yeah, when you talk about Torah, it sounds like you're talking about Christ. He said, and you have a vibrant spirituality, almost like he's read Paul. I didn't want to learn Hebrew that well. You know, like, then, uh. It's the whole right to left for me. And I was just like, oh my goodness. But anyway, you know, so he and I had our conversations and unpacked things. And then I became good, good friends with a, a Buddhist guy that was called Papa. Had a place out in California and we had these conversations. Long phone conversations and emails and, and he would suggest spiritual practices to me and it would restore my soul and it was like crud now that I have to admit that works. Yeah, the Buddhists know what they're talking about. You know, be still, be quiet, notice, be totally aware of what's happening. enter into the world. And then I would think, Oh, this is what Jesus meant by consider the lilies of the field. I thought he was just doing an intellectual exercise on botany, but, but he was actually saying no enter into the full reality of the moment you're in and look at everything happening and, and be there. And, and notice that the birds who are struggling to find something to eat every day, still seeing, and just notice that like, go ahead, trust me like they did. And I'd say. I just, so he, he was, uh, he was very kind to me and helped me, uh, understand the depths of the mystical, um, if you remember my mystic, my mystics, uh, season, which continues is like, Oh, then I just dove into the mystic traditions of Christianity and found everything there. Yeah. But I was an evangelical. So I was thought to be suspicious of not thinking and exegeting. I mean, one of the most humbling things that can happen to you when you start to study. is to realize that somebody else has already had the thoughts that you have. You're like, you know, I wonder if Jesus isn't just divine, but he's more human. You're like, have you read any of the early church fathers? I mean, the Aryan controversy has been around quite some time. And then you start thinking, you know, I, I wonder if there's like a, a, a way to, there's like a secret pathway to God. And you're like, have you studied the Gnostics? Exactly. You know? Yeah, that's right. I mean, if Augustine hasn't already said everything I've ever thought, I'd be surprised, but, uh, you know, we, we forget how deep and, and spiritual they were. Yeah. When I had my Meister Eckhart period, you know, I was just diving into Meister Eckhart and he says, uh, unless your God dies, you'll never know God, you know, and I just had to push back, you know, and then I thought, Oh, really? Okay. that I have the God of my own understanding and an idol of my own making. I'll never know the one that isn't an idol and isn't one I made up. And then if I loosen my grip on the God I made up, you know, informed by people who were sincerely beautiful souls that taught me, if I didn't let go of that, I wouldn't have the capacity to, to journey into the horizon of the divine that is universal. Yeah. And that horizon is secure. So if you always see God in the furthest horizon, then you're always secure. But if you can only find God in some version of the past or some version you comprehend, then you're, you're vulnerable at, you know, at an existential level. It is, if, if it ever, someone ever questions you, you have to panic and that's the conservative instinct. Is it if someone confronts your idea of God or the world and you panic and you get defensive? Yes, and I've had many people say to me, you know, if you don't believe that the Bible is perfect or inerrant, you might as well stop reading it and throw it out. And, uh, I say, I don't think that's true. I love the Bible. I love the Bible. And also. I understand that it's a diverse library of different authors who are writing in different genre over different millennia and all expressing their notion of God. Yep. And the Roman empire was transformed by Christianity that was made up of mostly illiterate people who only had the Jesus of their experience in their stories. And when you concretize and, and, uh, print. something and make that the word of God, you do not have the power of the early church because the power of the early church was relationship with the risen Christ and stories told about the life of Christ. Uh, I love the story from tradition that when Peter was told that Mark was writing down the stories, he said, I'm not against it because the early church couldn't even imagine needing to write it down. Yeah, until after the temple was destroyed. Then once the temple was destroyed, they realized, Oh, this isn't going to be a short term kingdom. This is an eternal kingdom. And so, you know, all the letters of Paul written before the destruction of the temple, the gospels collected in, uh, in light of the anyway, won't go into all that, but, but yeah, if you, if you think you write down the life of God, you're wrong. You live and tell the life of God. If you think that the Bible is a closed library, you're wrong. How many times have we talked about the things that we would put in, you know, if we had a, if we, yeah, I would, I would add up in the Canon, I would add screw tape letters. Yeah. Yeah. A great divorce and great divorce. I mean, yeah, but, and those are CS Lewis books, by the way. And. They'd have to be recognized as metaphorical and useful, but not ultimately. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Inerrant. Okay. Once it's in scripture, it's perfect. Yeah. There's no genre and, you know. And I love the fact that Jesus says you don't remove even a vowel point from it, and then you fulfill it. So, you don't live in denial of what's in the Bible. You don't deny any of it, and you don't relate to a God that's held inside of an idol that's printed and replicated. You, you then, from that base, journey into all that you're coming to understand God to be. And, so you, some people think, well, you, you then, to have, you know, Your Bible, you just have a private cannon, which is what most people do to hold onto the Bible as they begin to systematically make a hierarchy and ignore parts of the Bible so they can hold onto the Bible by just holding onto the parts that they think and still eat shrimp, still eat shrimp, still wear more than one kind of fabric, still hate the people they want to hate. Yeah. So abomination, same word for. Same sex sex and the same word for wearing more than one fabric in Leviticus. So you can, you know, if you wear cotton and polyester, you're an abomination. I like, uh, Steven told me one time, you know, that, um, charging interest on your loan was an abomination. Uh, how come that's not the one that any loan that lasts more than seven years and you return property to be for you to return property to the original owners. And we're not negotiating that with the native American, but that's in the Bible after seven years. Yeah, we would, it would be nice. It would be nice. The spiritual teachings and the, what it actually points to the Torah, again, as Rabbi Sager helped me see that go where the Torah points you, it leads to what I understand to be Christ. Such beautiful texts. Well, we're almost out of time, but I do want to ask this one question. What else would you add if the, if you could open the canon of scripture? Of all the things that you know and I've read. What do you think? I said screw tape letters, let me think. And anything from non Christian sources that you would add? Ah hmm, let me think. Letter from Birmingham Jail. Yeah, there you go. That would, yeah, yeah, that was still Christian, but yeah, that's right. Letter from Birmingham Jail. That would, that would be, that's one of the things I think would be right. It's my subtle way of getting Luther in there too, because he quotes Luther a good amount. Yeah, it's like, yeah, if we could, um, yeah, let, let the implications and lessons from Luther would be great too. I mean, you know, more power to you. Yep. Well, just, uh, give us the elevator speech of what it is that you're doing now. You're going to retire from the pulpit here pretty soon. May 19th. Yeah. And, uh, tell us about Life Compass Living. So the really short version would be that I believe that in order for us to know the security that we have as the potential within our close relationships of, I call it, chosen family and community, then we must, renegotiate them and rebuild them because we have deconstructed mutually supportive relationships and replace them with economic security and political security. And so we're very panicked around economic and political security because we don't have families that are multi generational and mutual supportive. So let me just add to that and, and yeah, and just saying it same thing in another way, instead of having three generations or four generations live in a house and We now live far away from each other. We put people in retirement communities. We live in a chosen diaspora from each other. And so then all of the conversations that should be familial about what we're going to do when we die about our assets, et cetera, we now put on the political system. To say, where's my social security? I need, you know, Medicare, Medicaid, because we don't have the nucleus the same way that we used to. And that's causing lots of problems. And that's kind of the, one of the things y'all are. Yeah. And then, uh, so I became convinced that if you start with people and their closest relationships and you re stitch the fabric of families and community. Then two things happen. One is they're actually more secure. So you're not just financing your fears, your resourcing relationships. So you actually find all the ways that you can resource being in relationship the way you want to be, and you mutually support one another multi, you know, and multi generational systems of support. And that that is actually the way the early church expanded its circle of compassion to the enemy was that they were so mutually supportive. Since I'm still convinced that we have to build the Kingdom of God, I'm totally committed now to sitting with people and helping them as individuals, households, chosen families. I've built a protocol called Life Compass Living, and that protocol helps people have conversations and rebuild relationships. mutually supportive communities and families. And we've just formed a nonprofit silver compassion services. And so we're wanting to provide that process and system to people regardless of their capacity to pay, you know, just make it more available so that families, faith communities, neighborhoods, I've been working with a neighborhood in one town that just want to figure out intentionally how to be neighbors. And. So we're rebuilding the fabric of communities and families. And I believe that doing that is actually what Jesus was preaching. I originally built the protocol with Christian language, because I was contextualizing myself in the church, and then found out that using Christian language in the Life Compass, work was a hindrance to people who then thought it was a conversion agenda they were being given rather than an invitation to share life. And so the basic building block is life compass, which is person, people, place. So it means you must, each person must discover and live into and out of the best version of themselves as a person. They must have a group of people that are mutually supportive with them to build life. And you must have a place that is your home. And home is not the structure you sleep in, it's the relationships you flourish in. So you feel at home when you see the people around you are all flourishing. You're flourishing and they're flourishing, that's home. And so we build a home together at whatever, you know, network of relationships we can. And I'm now, I now work with a couple families that are three generational families that are working on it, you know, with three generations. I had the call I was on right before we started. It was with the family that we're gonna have a three generational conversation next, on Monday. You know, about how do we plan together to share life now and in the future, so. Uh, we say, the way we say it succinctly is that we help each other flourish in every stage of life, manage life transitions with elegance, build a plan, and find the resources to make it a reality. So we can avoid what I call life quakes. Where you have a crisis you didn't see coming and doesn't have a plan. I think I love this and for so many reasons and one of them is because you talked a little bit about coaching when your boys were little. This is coaching but it's not on the individual level, it's on the team level, it's on the family level, it's on the chosen family level. And you can coach one kid to shoot a basket but you can do so much more if you coach the entire team. Yep. To play together. Exactly. Yeah. And our. Civilizations become so individualistic that we've forgotten how to be a team. We've forgotten how to be family. We've forgotten how to be neighbors and community. We don't build front porches. We build back porches, right? So that we're not talking to our neighbors. Um, I, I talked to a guy who told me that he doesn't talk to any of his neighbors. He drives to his house, presses the button on his remote, opens his garage, drives in, closes his garage, and then gets out. I said. That's basically what you would do if you lived on Mars, he said. Yeah, that's a kind of how it feels. That's right That's kind of how it feels. That's right. I'd in my book I start out and say the two things we're trying to overcome is the lie of the independent self and the lie of permanence So not only are we all related and the only choice we have is how we relate because we're related to everybody on earth And everything that takes up the space of our biosphere We get to decide how to relate. The independent self is a lie. And the second lie is permanence. You don't get to stay where you are. You're always in the next moment in the unfolding of the whole biosphere. And so if, if we can keep ourselves from being convinced of independence or permanence, since we're in the flow of the eternity life all the time, how are we going to do it together? And, uh, agape, chesed, love. That is, you know, unconditional and mutual, all totally unconditional and totally mutual. Then we get to negotiate, like, how do we do it? And the dignity of choice I found out is the centerpiece, is humans cannot flourish unless they choose to be where they are. And so you know, one of the mindfulness movements centerpieces, Is being present and, and accepting reality on its own terms and being present with your, your current experience. My little, it's not a unique twist because it's based on lots of reading and brain science and everything. But it's actually when we have the experience of choosing to be present that we become human. Because, um, mammals without a limbic system are just present. They don't choose it. Because they don't have alternative stories to be in and we have all kinds of alternative stories to be in and we have to choose to be present in the one that's actually happening. Well, George, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. I could talk to you all day. Somebody's knocking on my door, which tells me that, uh, you're the man we're done with time. That's good, man. It's so great to spend time with you. And, uh, hopefully we'll do it again sometime. Yep. I love you. And we will keep doing this. Love you too, bud. Thanks. Right.