The World Was Never Divided (A Series: Part One)

Written by Jonathan Thiessen

I was probably 14 or 15 when my mom brought home a book she’d happened to see at a second-hand book store. It was the crazy, almost unbelievable story of the Logos, a ship purchased by a young man in his early twenties, launching a movement of youth sharing Jesus with the world.

The story gripped my young imagination. It unlocked a yearning to follow in the footsteps of radicals like George Verwer who were ‘all in’.

I spent the next 3+ years exploring this idea. I spoke with dozens of organizational leaders, travelled to meet missionaries, and pushed on every door I could find.

This was how I was brought up. It was idyllic in so many ways - I was surrounded by exceptionally committed, spirit-filled lovers of Jesus. I was discipled by aunts, uncles, cousins, and a Bible-centered church. I received the gift of a legacy and heritage I will always be proud of.

And yet, without knowing or naming it, like so many for centuries before us, we had adopted a view that divided the world. We deemed parts of life as sacred and others as secular. Looking back, how this played out in my story was inevitable - my community believed that answering God’s call on my life would entail laying my natural pull toward further studies and the marketplace “on the altar.” In their eyes, for God’s calling to ministry to flourish, the ‘secular’ part of my wiring needed to be set aside.

This was my framework for what it looked like to partner with God in the world - abandoning any natural skills to pursue “full-time ministry” instead. The only mention of vocation I can recall is a single vague memory of my Uncle Willie, a pastor in Ontario, remarking to me one day “Remember, this world needs Christian doctors and lawyers, too.” But, unfortunately that wasn’t the consistent narrative.

The rhythms of our lives - the songs we sang, the stories we told, the examples we held up all reinforced a divided narrative from an early age.

Looking back of course, our way of seeing the world was simply a product of something that stretched far back into early church history.

A Divided History

The calendar has just turned to the 4th Century – a time of cataclysmic change. The Roman Emperor Diocletian has just launched the Great Persecution. Eusebius, often called the “Father of Church History”, is one of the eyewitnesses to the destruction of churches and burning of Scriptures . This persecution continues to pick up steam and in 310 AD, Eusebius’ own mentor Pamphilus is martyred.

Relief is coming as Emperor Constantine marches on Rome and in 313 AD issues the Edict of Milan, granting religious tolerance. A massive flood of Roman citizens pours into the churches—soldiers, governors, merchants, and farmers—all seeking Christ but remaining bound to the duties of civic life. At the exact same time, a zealous counter-movement explodes as radical ascetics flee into the desert, scorning the compromises of the city.

Caught in an impossible situation, Eusebius, now consecrated as the Bishop of Caesarea, desperately seeks to prevent a major schism. He needs to defend the faith against pagan critics who argue that Christ's commands would collapse human society, while simultaneously reassuring ordinary believers that they were not spiritual failures for marrying or working everyday professions.

Fatefully, he writes the Demonstratio Evangelica, codifying the "two modes of life"; ‘The Perfect Life’, and ‘The Permitted Life’. “The perfect life is spiritual, dedicated to contemplation and reserved for priests, monks, and nuns; The permitted life is secular…such tasks as soldiering, governing, farming, trading and raising families.”

Later coined The Two-Tiered Christian Life, this sows the early seeds of a divide Eusebius almost certainly never envisioned himself. He doubles down: “The perfect life was the one God called the clergy to – a life of prayer, worship, and service to Christ through the church.

Other occupations, while not prohibited, Eusebius says, “carried less dignity”. The labor of farmers, artists, merchants, and homemakers was not evil, but neither was it blessed, and these roles were “certainly not callings from God”.

After all, they were concerned with the “things of earth”, while the clergy were occupied with the “things of heaven.”

In his rush to accommodate the seismic changes of his age, Eusebius failed to see that by labeling the ordinary life "permitted," he was sowing the seeds of a future, systemic rot. The "perfect" path became an exclusive club of spiritual aristocracy, while the arena of everyday life—the very fabric of culture, family, and work—was relegated to a second-class Christianity.

In short, he helped construct the scaffolding of a system that reduced kingdom activity to a narrow, specialized realm rather than its intended weeping, cosmic scope.

In the centuries following Eusebius, the Church largely did not challenge this spiritual dualism. With few exceptions, it was codified and institutionalized. A world emerged where the clergy and monks were viewed as the "sacred" operators, and ordinary laypeople were the "secular" spectators.

It’s interesting to note how from the 13th Century on, radical monastic movements were the first to chip away at the corruption that seeped into this ‘upper tier’. A more forceful reckoning came with the Protestant Reformation, which launched a total war against this two-tiered architecture.

Luther, Calvin and the Anabaptists each attacked the structure in different ways. Luther famously declared that a milkmaid milking a cow or a shoemaker making a shoe was performing a work just as holy as a priest praying a mass. Calvin rejected the idea that the secular world was just a tolerated, secondary space, insisting instead that the entire cosmos is the "theater of God's glory." The Anabaptists, in particular, elevated the Sermon on the Mount, arguing that every believer, regardless of vocation, is equally bound to its way of life.

Despite their best efforts, the ghost of Eusebius still haunts the modern church, lingering on in our language, our worship songs, and our way of ‘doing church’.

The Divide Today

Mark Greene at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity writing on the sacred-secular divide (SSD) says: “SSD leads us to believe that really holy people become missionaries, moderately holy people become pastors, and people who are not much use to God get a job.”

Perhaps one of the most damaging (and artificial!) of all the categories this divide continues to perpetuate is the very Eusebian idea of ‘full-time ministry’. John Mark Comer in his series on Philippians calls this out:

“One of the most demonic lies to ever infect the church like a cancer is that some of us are called by God to full-time ministry (whatever that means). That is a lie. Flat out.”

So, what is the way forward? How do we begin to recapture the scope of the Father’s love for his world, his intent for the Cosmos in its entirety to be redeemed and ultimately renewed?

In Part Two, we will dive deeper into the ramifications of this divide in our lives today and how we can start living out God’s bigger story.