The dangers of reductionism

If there are so many Christians today, why don’t we see a greater impact on culture?

Mike Erre offers this explanation:

One of the foremost characteristics of modern American culture is reductionism.

We love to reduce big things to little things, complicated things to simple things, worldviews to bumper stickers, theological diversity to uniformity.

This comes to us as a gift from the Enlightenment worldview  that sought to control the world through breaking wholes into their component parts in order to understand them better…

This isn’t all bad, of course, but I wonder what violence this whole enterprise does to make sense of the Scriptures as a whole in the diversity of its entire witness.

We have reduced salvation into four steps that allow me entrance into heaven when I die.  But in so doing, we have bypassed the Gospel that Jesus preached – the Gospel of the kingdom of God.  This gospel deals with much more than ‘here and now’ rather than the ‘then and there.’  In this case, our reduction has helped to create the disparity between belief and behavior that we see everywhere.

If the gospel is only concerned with forgiveness and the life to come, the real discipleship to Jesus becomes optional.

- Mike Erre, Death By Church, pp. 25-26

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