On Nondual Thinking: Part 3, Dualistic Jesus

In conversations about nonduality Jesus is pointed to as the primary example of nondual thinking. And yet, I think that is a hard case to make.

As any cursory familiarity with the biblical scholarship on Jesus would reveal, the scholarly consensus is that Jesus stood solidly within Israel's prophetic tradition which, with its moral castigations and proclamations of judgment, tended to traffic in moral and eschatological dualisms. 

For example, while we take it as a truism that Jesus was more tolerant than St. Paul, it is simply a fact that Paul never talked about hell while Jesus talked about it all the time. Jesus was a hellfire and brimstone preacher. Paul proclaimed a message of grace.

To be clear, Jesus most certainly didn't preach about hell as it came to be imagined in later Christian tradition. And Paul did speak of judgment and the wrath of God. My point is that we tend to trade pretty heavily on some misleading stereotypes when we speak of "Jesus" or "Paul." We think we know Jesus. Jesus is a liberal, loving, tolerant, humanist. Jesus was a nondual thinker. 

But that image of Jesus struggles to fit the person revealed to us on the pages of the Bible. As a nondual thinker Jesus preached a great deal about moral and eschatological dualisms. That makes sense given how Jesus stood in the stream of the Hebrew prophetic tradition. That said, we should rush to note, however, that Jesus used these dualisms to proclaim a message of love and care. A classic case is the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25, which starts: 

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left."

And the parable ends with this:

"Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.'"

This is pretty dualistic. There are sheep and there are goats. Which are you? There is a fate of blessedness or an eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. Where are you headed?

And yet, Jesus is leveraging the dualism in the parable for the cause of care: care for the hungry, naked, thirsty, homeless, sick and incarcerated. "Truly," declares Jesus, "as you did to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me." 

Summarizing, some of the actions we undertake in the world stand under God's judgment and censor. Other actions are graced and blessed. To be sure, from a psychospiritual and therapeutic stance we shouldn't rush to label experiences or ourselves in a binary, good versus bad, fashion. I'm all for mindfulness. Still, the Jesus we encounter in the gospels is laying over life a moral and eschatological dualism that he wants us to face with the utmost urgency and seriousness. Mindfulness, being fully and non-judgmentally aware and present to life, is wonderful. But at some point you have to face Jesus' question: Are you a sheep or a goat? Where's the moral trajectory of your life headed? Questions not to push you into a depressive, shame-filled funk--our neuroses does no one any good--but to rouse you to repentance and action. "Repent," Jesus preaches in the gospels, "for the Kingdom of God is at hand."

I will readily admit that we have to be very, very careful in how we handle the dualistic Jesus. The dualistic Jesus is prone to abuse. There are dualisms which are helpful (for example, Matthew 25), and dualisms that are toxic and dysfunctional. And insofar as practices of nondualism nurse us away from toxic dualisms it's doing good work. My concern with describing Jesus as nondualistic is that it extracts him from the pathos and matrix of the Hebrew prophetic tradition. In my estimation, this tames and domesticates Jesus, turning him into a guru, a philosopher, and a teacher of wisdom. A figure attractive to educated liberals. I'd prefer to keep Jesus' moral and eschatological dualisms in place keeping a focused, vigilant, and energetic eye on the prize he was aiming for, such as compassion for the "least of these." This Jesus is less cozy and more a hellfire and brimstone preacher. And for my part, if I can be a little nondualistic here, I say let him love and let him rage.