This is part two of the blog series "A Gospel Stripped of Power". Read the intro. and part one.
What is reductionism? Barth calls it a shift in emphasis. It is an easy trap to fall into. As a church body we want to be effective as possible and in confronting different cultures and circumstances, the Gospel may be presented in a way that appeals to that different situation. The problem as Guder tells us is when these emphases become the absolute.[1] In other words, over time, the people of a church body begin to see and interpret the gospel through the lens of this emphasis. For instance, the kingdom of God
Jerry Pattengale in his new book giving "straight" answers about today's Christianity shares with us a story opening his chapter on the doctrine of salvation. He offers a couple of disillusioned teens at the beach the message of the good news of Christ. They reply in typical angst ridden rebellious fashion, "Tell us the g-oo-oo-ood newwws."
Pattengale begins, "The bible says that if you are living in sin, you are going to hell."
He would continue his conversation to the best of his ability, eventually praying with one of the recipients to receive Christ into her life. But something is very interesting about this tale.[3] Consider how he starts. The poor girl might consider anything good news after first hearing that. The book continues, it gives a model of how to "witness" to others. A Christian reader, who we will call Bob, is asked to pick two questions from a list to begin a conversation. I'll pick a few:
· What do you think that a person has to do to get into heaven?
· Do you know for sure that you will go to heaven when you die?
· Would you mind if I told you why I'm not afraid to die?
· Who do you think that Jesus is?
Afterward, Bob is told to share, if the recipient is open, the six points of the Gospel. Of which the final two, after Jesus died and rose again, focus on heaven and eternity, the fruit of Jesus' labor.[4]
This is the reductionist gospel of which I speak. The problem is that we have picked an element, a mere byproduct of what the central truth of the gospel is and stressed it to the point of making it an absolute. It has become the lens by which we view the saving grace of God. This byproduct is the subject of Heaven and Hell, and as shown by Mr. Pattengale above, the Gospel is now understood as a means of a gain, a Heaven ticket if you will. What we are left with, is a Gospel manageable but stripped of its power.
How did this happen, I'm sure it was painfully simple. Coming out of the Reformation which rightfully stressed the grace, and reacting from the collective oppression of the 16th century church, the protestant stressed the individual care of God for each man. If this is where the problem was rooted, then perhaps it was a necessary evil. The enlightenment era of individual rationality fit well with this rising form of individualism.[5] The revivalists would adopt some form of necessary reduction to fit the mentality and appeal towards the individual. For individual appeal, it may have been easier to stress the eternal. It was moving and easy to systematize. It plainly showed the fruits of repentance and the consequences of rejection. In short, it was easy to manage.
This desire to manage is the first finger pointing towards the curse of reductionism. In trying to contain the gospel, or pigeonhole it, aren't we implying our ownership of the Gospel? Aren't we in essence telling Jesus that we have it from here? By limiting the Gospel of Jesus Christ into a subsection, aren't we claiming lordship over the task given to us?
Jesus is living. We sometimes forget that. But the truth is, that Christ is the Lord over the Church whether we say he is or not. He will not allow his Gospel to "sink into the abyss."[6] But a community of believers who take it upon themselves to fit the gospel into their box and attempt to establish its logos over Christ's will find themselves a product of their own making.
At first this problem isn't evident. Again, we find the difficulty in trying to explain what is wrong when the reduced gospel is based entirely on the True Gospel of Christ. "Formally," Barth says, "such an impartation need not be lacking in biblical foundation, biblical content, and attachment to the best traditions of the ecclesiastical past, such as, for example, those of the century of the Reformation."[7] The message might be that salvation is by grace alone, achieved only by Christ, but there is a qualitative difference. It refuses to see the Gospel as the living Word and continuing mission of Jesus Christ himself.[8] So instead, we preach a Gospel of benefits to the people evangelized to. The church offers a potential convert a gift box with a sticker that reads, "From: Jesus Christ." Inside is a ticket. His guilt is not at seeing how his life has missed the mark; he doesn't understand his sin in the brilliantly painful light of the holiness of Christ. Rather, his guilt comes from either a standpoint of eternal damnation or solely moral conviction; the first thing that Pattengale appealed to was the horrors of hell.
In this Heaven-Hell dichotomy, we may begin to subconsciously understand Christ as a Deist Christ. That is, because we understand his work as means by which we gain heaven, his work is finished, or that he accompanies at a distance, leaving his work purely in the hands of people. In this dichotomy, Christ is not dynamic, present, and living. He is merely a presence, a sidekick to the Church. All the while, this fire continues to spread as the urgency of Hell continues to add fuel to the movement.[9]
The emphasis on the conversion as the efficacy of salvation denotes a conditional love. Both Calvinist and Arminean camps, when viewing salvation through this lens, could demean the work of Christ. Either we do not take seriously the work of Christ as the appropriation of our salvation or we make love conditional by placing grace after election and conversion instead of within Jesus Christ.[10] The difference between this reductionistic Gospel and the living Gospel of Christ is extremely subtle, but the consequences are huge. It is the difference between a vibrant, living community participating in the work of Christ in his Lordship and a community that tries to control Jesus.
It could be argued that this type of reductionism results in no more than a Gnostic flavor of Christianity. Is that what we are not telling the world, that we have a salvation claimed in what we know about Christ? Our questions and aspirations have now become, not what the living Word of God has to say to this age; rather, our effort is put into how we can be relevant or "fresh" to the generations. In other words, "how do we best explain this knowledge to the world?"[11]
Thus forms our mission to the world. We hold this good news, and are left with the mandate, the obligation, to share it. Out we send our missionaries. I wonder how often we miss the mark. I remember a story about a missionary sent to Kenya. A student recounts what a tribesman said. "The missionaries missed their chance" he said, "They should have used baptism much more to initiate us into one new divine community."[12] To often the contents of our gift box is written in the wrong language. Our effort to reduce the Gospel and control it results in a somber trip back home. In our effort to master the Gospel, we only show a world of set of standards and ethics which have been stripped of their life-giving power.[13] In this "unevangelical conservatism" we find that we are not comfortable letting go and letting Christ be the head.
[1] Guder, Darrell. (2000.). The Continuing Conversion of the Church. Grand Rapids. Wm. B. Eerdmans. Pg. 101
[2] See Guder. Pg. 124
[3] Pattengale, Jerry. (2004.). Str8t@lk. Marion, Indiana. Triangle Publishing. Pg. 43
[4] Pattengale. Str8t@lk. Pg. 161-162
[5] See Guder. The Continuing Conversion of the Church. Pg. 115-119
[6] See Barth. CD IV, 3.2. Pg. 796
[7] Ibid. Pg. 813
[8] Ibid. Pg. 815
[9] Ibid. Pg. 817
[10] For a detailed discussion on this read James Torrance's essay The Incarnation and Limited Atonement.
[11] Barth. CD. IV, 3.2. Pg 818
[12] Asante, Emmanuel. (2001.). The gospel in Context: an African Perspective. Interpretation, 55-4, Pgs. 355-366
[13] Barth. CD. IV, 3.2 Pg. 819
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