Sacred Roots Workshop

14 Sacred Roots Workshop: Retr ieving the Great Tradi t ion in the Contemporary Church

3. The role of culture: enabling us to compose our realities from scratch

B. Integrating the details: story and the need to live purposefully

1. Purposeful mindset: relating all details to the whole

2. Provisional mindset: relating to details as wholes

C. The problem of a reductionistic faith

1. Reductionism – substituting a comprehensive religious vision of Christian faith for an alternative, smaller, usually culturally oriented substitute notion, activity, relationship, or element

2. Rationalism – spending the majority of time using modern scientific proofs and arguments to underwrite faith in Jesus, reducing Christian faith to holding of particular, contextualized doctrinal positions over against other contrary views

3. Moralism – reducing the Christian vision to personal and communal decency and ethics, e.g., living well in a nuclear family context, holding certain views on selected socially controversial moral issues

D. Elements of a comprehensive biblical worldview

1. The recovery of “Christian myth”