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Reduction and the Sunday School Jesus

June 15, 2026

The invitation from God is always an invitation to relationship, not an invitation to the right way of following rules and regulations. We fall into danger when we slip into esteeming religious rules above relating to the living God. 

(This post is from “Reframation,” by Alan Hirsch and Mark Nelson, 2019, p. 55)

Reductionism happens when we make following God anything less than relationship with him. We need to understand that love (for God as well as for others) and relationships really matter. (Mark 12:30) When defending truth is done in a loveless way, it violates the very purposes of truth – to make us more like Jesus who is the way, the truth, and the life. (John 14:6) If our convictions leave broken bodies in the wake, or if our pursuits of our religious values and prerogatives snuff out people’s vitality in other ways, then we are almost certainly doing something wrong.

C.S. Lewis warns us saying, “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast.

Lewis goes on to say that this shattering is actually one of the sure signs of God’s presence. The incarnation is the ultimate example, leaving all previous ideas of the Messiah in shattered ruins.

Reductions, restrictions, and limitations are much more easily managed than interpreting a truth and grace, that confounds our sense of logic and fairness, a truth that is always bigger, never smaller. Have we placed God in a box, and in doing so, have we created an ossified, wooden, empty, and legalistic religion that has reduced the reality and truth of God?

For all those with a penchant for boxing God up nice and tight, we would do well to remember that the God of the Scriptures is not one who will endure such reductions. That is why in scripture he is revealed as spirit and fire – whoever approaches God approaches the uncontainable fire of a holy love that cannot and will not be contained. This holy love will offend a life obsessed with safety and security. (Hebrews 12:18–29) God is not safe nor containable, and he claims us, body and soul, but this is what we are made for. In acknowledging God as a consuming fire, we recognize he can never fit in any box we try to place him. He is always the ever-greater God and the seducer of our hearts. (p. 56)

The Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann writes, “The gospel is a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane.” 

When we reduce God and truth what naturally follows is a reduction of the story of God that we tell. The telling of a reduced story takes the always impressive and authoritative story of Jesus, and siphons it of its transformative power, drains it of its restorative influence, or simply bleeds it dry of life. This happens all the time in Sunday school when Jesus stories are used to bolster middle class morality rather than unleashing the revolutionary call to transformation they are intended for; hence the prevalence of the so-called Sunday School Jesus. (p. 63)