The world is terrifying in its complexity and we are not served well by those who offer simplicity as a solution.
A New Writer
I found a new writer to read this week. Rev. Tara Beth Leach is the senior pastor at Good Shepherd Naperville. The message you can’t 
miss when you search their website is, “YOU BELONG HERE.” And a deeper dive shows a Nazarene Church that is led by an articulate, thoughtful pastor who is informed by the Bible and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Pastor Tara hosts a podcast for pastors, is the author of several books, and writes on Substack. The subject of her most recent post is what caught my attention: The Seduction of Simplicity.
The title reminded me of the book I enjoyed by Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs. Both Peter and Tara write well, offering a gift of healthy perspective for those with eyes to see.
Binary Thinking
Tara observes, “We live in an age addicted to the dangerous seduction of simplicity. The world is terrifying in its complexity, so we split it in two. Good and evil. Us and them. Right and wrong.” She refers to this kind of worldview as “binary thinking.”
Binary thinking is on display in the New Testament. It’s the value system that Jesus came to abolish. The ministry of Jesus was one long disruption of the binaries people clung to. When asked who is my neighbour he answered with a story about a Samaritan—an outsider, an enemy—who became the hero of compassion.
The apostle Paul made clear that followers of Jesus are to live counter to the norms of the dominant culture. In his letter to believers in Galatia he couldn’t be clearer, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28 ESV)
Religious adversaries, class differences, or relational stereotypes, were abolished at the foot of the cross. The antidote to complexity is not simplicity but the sanity of being out of control and happy with it.
Out of Control
“Binary thinking is intoxicating because it promises control. It tells us that the world is not vast and unmanageable, but tidy and predictable. It gives us a script: I am right, they are wrong; I am safe, they are dangerous; I am good, they are evil.”
Pastor Tara introduced me to David Fitch who names this temptation with striking clarity in his book Us Versus Them. He writes that when the church gets caught in the binary logics of the world, “we mistake taking sides for bearing witness. We confuse winning an argument with embodying the Kingdom. And in the end, we become just another tribe shouting in the cultural wilderness.”
Fitch published his work six YEARS ago in July 2019. Six years ago. And the winning of arguments under the guise of apologetics has only deepened and broadened in many church communities.
Pastors like Rev. Tara are voices calling attention to the mystery of God. Of the Father, Son, and Spirit who are not the same, yet they are not split apart. The inexplicable mystery that some try to simplify through an analogy using the three parts of an egg or water as liquid, ice, and steam. I used those in my teaching thirty years ago as a feeble attempt to offer certainty through simplicity.
Not everything about God’s nature fits into finite explanations or apologetics.
I am OK with mystery.
How about you? Please join the conversation and post a comment below.
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