A thought provoking little article I found by Justin Taylor on the Gospel Coalition website.
In The Deep Things of God Fred Sanders has a very helpful discussion on the evangelical genius—and shortcoming—of emphasis, which can quickly become reductionism. This will be a longish post (I’m fighting the temptation to post the whole chapter), but I encourage you to stick with it.
Sanders starts the discussing by noting that evangelicals have always been concerned to underline certain parts of the Christian message.
- We have a lot to say about God’s revelation, but we emphasize the business end of it, where God’s voice is heard normatively: the Bible.
- We know that everything Jesus did has power for salvation in it, but we emphasize the one event that is literally crucial: the cross.
- We know that God is at work on his people through the full journey of their lives, from the earliest glimmers of awareness to the ups and downs of the spiritual life, but we emphasize the hinge of all spiritual experience: conversion.
- We know there are countless benefits that flow from being joined to Christ, but we emphasize the big one: heaven.
Sanders agrees that Bible, cross, conversion, heaven are the right things to emphasize. “But,” he writes, “in order to emphasize anything, you must presuppose a larger body of truth to select from.”
For example, the cross of Christ occupies its central role in salvation history precisely because it has Christ’s preexistence, incarnation, and earthly ministry on one side and his resurrection and ascension on the other. Without these, Christ’s work on the cross would not accomplish our salvation. But flanked by them, it is the cross that needs to be the focus of attention in order to explain the gospel. The same could be said for the Bible within the total field of revelation, for conversion within the realm of religious experience, and for heaven as one of the benefits of being in Christ. Each of these is the right strategic emphasis but only stands out properly when it has something to stand out from.
Evangelical anemia happens when the emphatic points are treated as if they are the whole story:
Instead of teaching the full counsel of God (incarnation, ministry of healing and teaching, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming), anemic evangelicalism simply shouts its one point of emphasis louder and louder (the cross! the cross! the cross!). But in isolation from the total matrix of Christian truth, the cross doesn’t make the right kind of sense. A message about nothing but the cross is not emphatic. It is reductionist. The rest of the matrix matters: the death of Jesus is salvation partly because of the life he lived before it, and certainly because of the new life he lived after it, and above all because of the eternal background in which he is the eternal Son of the eternal Father. You do not need to say all of those things at all times, but you need to have a felt sense of their force behind the things you do say. When that felt sense is not present, or is not somehow communicated to the next generation, emphatic evangelicalism becomes reductionist evangelicalism.
When “emphatic evangelicalism” degenerates into “reductionist evangelicalism,” Sanders writes, “it still has the emphasis right but has been reduced to nothing but emphasis. When a message is all emphasis, everything is equally important and you are always shouting. Your powers of attention suffer fatigue from the constant barrage of emphasis.”What’s the reason for such reductionism? Sanders answers:
When emphatic evangelicalism degenerates into reductionist evangelicalism, it is always because it has lost touch with the all-encompassing truth of its Trinitarian theology.
And what’s the solution?
What is needed is not a change of emphasis but a restoration of the background, of the big picture from which the emphasized elements have been selected.
He then goes on to look at the metaphor of “the cutting edge”:
A blade is not all cutting edge. In fact, the cutting edge is the smallest part of the knife. The rest of the knife is the heavy heft of the broad, flat sides and the handle. Considered all by itself, the cutting edge is vanishingly small—a geometric concept instead of a useable object. Isolated from the great storehouse of all Christian truth, reductionist evangelicalism is a vanishingly small thing. It came from emphatic evangelicalism, and it must return to being emphatic evangelicalism or vanish to nothing.
So does the doctrine of the Trinity belong to the cutting edge of emphatic evangelicalism?
No, it does not. It constitutes the hefty, solid steel behind the cutting edge. We do not need to use the T-word in evangelism or proclaim everything about the threeness and oneness of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in every sermon. But the Trinity belongs to the necessary presuppositions of the gospel.
From pp. 15-19 of The Deep Things of God. Again, I’ll refrain from quoting the rest of the chapter, but I’d encourage you to read the whole thing.
