The Sickness

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 which Christ brings is a kingdom displaying justice and
morality. But when these things are taken out of context, from the redemptive
work of Jesus Christ on the cross and his resurrection, they become an absolute
within themselves.[2] The gospel
narratives and Pauline epistles are then eisegetically
read from the perspective solely of justice and morality, resulting in a flaky
Social Gospel. But here I am concerned with a different reduction. Listen to an
author trying to put the ideas of Christianity into contemporary language.

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 16^th 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.