Ockham's Razor

"Ockham's Razor"
Mark 12:28-34


William of Ockham was a philosopher back in the early 1300’s.  The school of philosophy to which he subscribed and attempted to perfect was called “reductionism.”  Basically, what a reductionist does, when faced with an issue or a problem, is to reduce that issue to its simplest form.  You don’t get caught up in a lot of details.  Those details, that minutia might lead you astray.  You don’t add on layers to a problem in trying to solve it, thereby making it more complex.  You don’t pay any attention to all the sidecar issues that arise in the problem-solving process.  Instead, you cut away all the extraneous stuff in order to get to the heart of the matter.  Reduce things down to their simplest form.  That is where you will find the truth, according to Ockham’s way of thinking.

Lucy has a way of doing that for all her friends, but mostly for Charlie Brown.  In one strip, Charlie Brown is looking morose, with a wrinkled forehead and downcast eyes.  He’s leaning over a wall, staring off into nowhere.  Lucy approaches him and says, “Discouraged again, eh Charlie Brown?”
No answer.
Lucy continues.  “You know what your trouble is?  The whole trouble with you is that you are YOU!”  Lucy has reduced all of Charlie Brown’s issues, all his troubles, and worries into one simple, but inclusive statement.
Charlie Brown then turned to Lucy and asked, “Well, what in the world can I do about that?”
To which Lucy’s forehead wrinkles, and she replies, “I don’t pretend to be able to give advice...I merely point out the trouble!”

I don’t know what Lucy calls her brand of reductionism, but Ockham called his, “Ockham’s Razor.”  He would attempt to cut away the meaningless layers of argumentation, and find the heart and soul of an issue.  Once that is discovered, unlike Lucy, Ockham felt the solution would be simple and affect all the other issues that were heaped upon it, like so many clothes draped over a bedroom chair that you can’t even see the chair anymore.

Ockham’s detractors called him and his ideas too simplistic.  They felt that the issues and problems we face in life were too large to be reduced to simple terms.  They are too complex.  Life itself is too complex to be reduced from pages to mere sentences, as it were.  Ockham’s philosophy was ridiculed as something for simpletons, whose minds couldn’t grasp the great complexities of life.

What I’d like to do this morning is apply Ockham’s Razor to the church.  But not only William of Ockham’s, but more powerfully, Jesus Christ’s razor.  Jesus’ has a much better ability to cut away at the fat and excess of religion, helping us discover in any time what is the heart and center of our beliefs.  Christianity, under Jesus’ razor, is at its most simple and yet most potent and profound form.

Let’s turn our attention back to what was read from Mark 12.  Jesus is fielding and responding to a question pitched at him by one of the teachers of the Jewish religion.

But we need to take one further step back to see what was happening just before that question was asked.  There was another group of Jewish teachers called Sadducees.  They didn’t believe, in opposition to the Scribes, that there was eternal life with God.  Jesus had been teaching about that topic.

This group of Sadducees came to Jesus with an inane question:  It was the law that if a man married a woman and then he died, his brother was supposed to marry the widow and take care of her and any children she had.  So the Sadducees asked, What happens if a woman marries into a family with seven brothers; all of them die in turn, leaving her to the next brother in line.  When she gets to the heavenly kingdom, whose wife is she going to be?

The response of Jesus to their question leads us to believe that these Sadducees felt their question was of great importance.  It was like if they found out the answer, one of the great mysteries of the universe would be solved.  Nights of worry could end, and the Sadducees could finally get some sleep.

The Scribe--the teacher of the law--had been listening to all this, probably with some amusement at the inflated level of importance to which the Sadducees had raised this issue.  Finally, he cut in with his Ockham’s Razor type question:  “Which commandment is the most important of all?”  That is, “Let’s cut through all this fat and religious gas that is ultimately meaningless, and get down to what’s most important.  In simplest terms, Jesus, what is really expected of us?”

Jesus’ answer:
The first in importance is, “Love the Lord God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence and energy.”  And here is the second: “Love others as well as you love yourself.”  There is no other commandment that ranks with these.  (EHP)

I believe that one of the greatest problems that is faced by the church at large, and congregations in particular is that they are asking and acting upon Sadducee types of questions, rather than the Scribe’s type of question.

Instead of asking questions that get at the simple heart of the matter concerning our mission and goals, we ask the trivial, that serves only to get us lost in the layers of meaningless complexity.  The whole organization of the church and individual congregations is developed around pursuing the trivial and the inconsequential, elevating it way beyond its own level of importance.

I have turned, at different times in my ministry, to the book, In Search of Excellence.  If you’re not familiar with it, it is a book that investigated our nations most successful companies, trying to discover what made them so.  The researchers hit upon seven principles that were found in each company.  One of those principles they called, “Simple Form, Lean Staff.”  Listen to a few of the statements the author’s make:

Along with bigness comes complexity, unfortunately.  And most big companies respond to complexity in kind, by designing complex systems and structures.  They then hire more staff to keep track of all this complexity, and that’s where the mistake begins …
On the other hand, making an organization work has everything to do with keeping things understandable for the people who must make things happen.  And that means keeping things simple …
The organization gets paralyzed because the structure not only does not make priorities clear, it automatically dilutes priorities.  In effect, it says to people down the line:  “Everything is important; pay equal attention to everything.”  That message is paralyzing. (pg. 306-308)

The authors then make a telling statement that capsulizes their thoughts about how the successful companies keep their organization simple:  “One dimension--e.g. product or geography or function--has crystal clear primacy.”

We in the smaller sized congregations have it easier in keeping the organization clear, without too many extraneous layers.  But we, like larger congregations, and the denomination as a whole, have just as much of a problem keeping priorities clear.  We fall into the trap, as the authors point out, of trying to chase after too many priorities at once, telling our people that all these priorities are of vital importance, thereby diluting what is of ultimate importance and confusing everyone who is carrying on the work of the church.

In order to avoid becoming like the Sadducees, dominating by asking too many of the wrong kinds of questions, we need to land ourselves on those singular dimensions of our work which will have crystal clear primacy over everything we do.  We need to hear the question asked by the Scribe, and we need to hear Jesus’ answer.  Above our Lord’s answer there’s nothing more important.  And everything we do much fall in line with his answer.

In simplest terms, and in its simplest form, our faith and ministry must be guided by these two primary commandments:  Love God with everything that is you; and, love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Anything else must be cut away.  All that we do in ministry must be able to be reduced to these two common denominators.  And everything we plan for our future must have it’s starting point and motivation from these two statements of Jesus.


Peter Drucker in his book, The Effective Executive wrote that, “Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time...This is the secret of those people who do so many things and apparently so many difficult things.  They do only one at a time.”

Stephen Covey in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People devoted a whole section of his book to this important fact.  He pointed out that even great musicians such as Bach and Handel could only devote their energies to one piece of music at a time.

Such is the case of Christian ministry as well.  We will find it more productive to focus on certain areas of ministry that need taking care of rather than trying to do something in every area at once.  The way to prioritize is to be guided by the two most important commandments of loving God with all that we are, and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves.

Prioritizing like this, and concentrating on just a couple of areas of ministry may be counter intuitive, or at least feel like it goes against the grain of our multi-tasking society.

It’s like the college student who rushed into the office of his faculty advisor just after mid-terms.  “I need help, bad,” he said, plopping down in a chair.
“What’s your trouble?” the advisor asked.
The student replied, “I just made four F’s and a D.
“Well, what’s your explanation for that?” the advisor asked.
The student said, “I spent too much time on that one subject.”

In our multi-tasking culture, it’s the person who can do so many things at once who is being held up as the ideal.  But in that chase, our culture has also lost the ability to distinguish between the real and the unreal, the necessary and the unnecessary, the important and the trivial, the relevant and the irrelevant.  Along with that comes the growing awareness that in all our business we are utterly lost in a forest of tasks.  And nothing of any substance is getting done.  We’re flunking all our subjects.

If only we could stop, and be still, if for just an instant.  If only we could stop the ceaseless business that goes along with covering too many bases that don’t need to be run.  If only we could silence the ongoing chatter and jabber that comes with doing too much that doesn’t matter and no one really cares about.  If only we could cut through all the deceptive illusions and let the real seep in.  If only we could choose that which could enter our souls and meet those deep places within.  If only we would concentrate on loving God with all that we are, and loving others as we love ourselves.

But that won’t happen until all else is cut away, and we feel the barrenness of our need for that which really matters.