When Ockham’s Razor Cut Too Deep: From Nominalism to Postmodernism

We’ve been tracing how Western Christianity took a series of turns that reshaped the gospel from Jesus’ covenantal vision of resurrection and new creation into something smaller, thinner, and more fragmented.

With Thomas Aquinas, we saw how Aristotle’s four causes created a “second mediator” — the church as administrator of grace through a legal and sacramental system. John Duns Scotus emphasized God’s will, but in doing so loosened the anchor that tied God’s will to God’s covenant.

Then along came William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347). With the edge of his razor, he cut even deeper.

Ockham’s Razor and Nominalism

You’ve probably heard of Ockham’s Razor: “Don’t multiply entities beyond necessity.” It’s a principle of simplicity — the simplest explanation is usually the best.

Ockham applied this to the debate about universals: Are things like justice, goodness, humanity real, or just words? Aquinas (and most before him) said universals were real because they reflected God’s eternal nature. Ockham sliced that away. Universals, he said, are only names (nomina) we give to collections of individuals. Only individuals are real.

This move — called nominalism — seemed tidy, but it cut away the deep sense that creation was charged with God’s meaning. The aftershocks of that cut still shake Christianity today.

Nominalism sounds familiar to us because it is the air we breathe in modern philosophy and spirituality. We assume meaning is constructed, not given. And in the sacred/secular split, an irony emerged: science inherited “absolutes,” while spirituality inherited nominalism. Facts became fixed and objective; faith became fluid and subjective.

From Shared Purpose to Radical Individualism

Before Ockham, Christians understood themselves as part of a larger story: the Kingdom coming, God’s covenant promises fulfilled, and the restoration of creation. Faith was not merely private; it was a shared participation in God’s purposes.

Ockham’s cut left only individuals. “Humanity” became nothing more than a convenient name for many human beings. The church was reduced to a gathering of individuals rather than a body that participated in Christ’s universal life. The result was a shift toward personal religion. My sin. My personal decision for Christ so I can “go to heaven.” My private relationship with God. The larger vision — renewal of all creation, shared life together, covenant purpose — faded into the background.

From One Reality Under God to Sacred/Secular Divide

Before Ockham, creation was a book that revealed God’s wisdom just as much as Scripture did. Faith and reason, nature and grace, were woven together into a single reality. All of life pointed to God.

But if universals don’t exist, then creation doesn’t necessarily point to God. It can be studied on its own terms, without reference to the divine. While that helped give rise to modern science, it also created a dangerous split. Faith was pushed into a private sphere of revelation and obedience. Reason claimed the public sphere of “neutral facts.”

In this split, science claimed absolutes while spirituality was left with nominalism, stripped of universals and cast into subjectivity. Today, Christians feel that divide every time faith and science are pitted against each other, or when spiritual life is confined to Sundays while the rest of the week is considered “secular.”

From Eternal Truths to Modern Criticism and Postmodern Relativism

Before Ockham, truth, goodness, and justice were understood as eternal realities in God’s nature. Ockham’s cut reduced them to names. Meaning was no longer intrinsic; it was constructed in the human mind.

That move prepared the way for two massive shifts. In the era of modernity, thinkers like Descartes and Locke grounded truth either in the clarity of the individual mind or in empirical observation. With universals gone, knowledge had to rest on the self or on data. Later, postmodernism took the logic further. If universals are gone, then truth itself is relative. Language does not reveal reality; it constructs it. Truth becomes a tool of culture or power.

This is why today the church feels squeezed. On one side stands modern rationalism: “Prove it scientifically or it isn’t real.” On the other side stands postmodern relativism: “Truth is just your perspective.” Both are children of Ockham’s Razor.

Why This Still Matters

Nominalism’s razor didn’t just cut scholastic clutter, it cut Christianity loose from the universals that once tied faith to God’s eternal meaning. The results are still with us. Faith often feels individualized and privatized. The world is carved into sacred and secular compartments. Truth itself is questioned, leaving Christianity struggling to speak with confidence.

But the gospel restores what the razor severed. It calls us back into a story bigger than ourselves, a story of covenant, renewal, and resurrection. Christianity is not simply about my personal salvation, but about being swept into God’s plan to redeem and restore all things.

Shared purpose is real. The prayer of Jesus is not for souls to escape to heaven but for God’s Kingdom to come and His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. The good news is that faith is not a private enterprise, but a participation in this larger mission.

Creation is also meaningful. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the earth is filled with His steadfast love. Far from being neutral matter, the created world is saturated with divine significance. Every tree, every star, every breath is a testimony to God’s presence.

Truth, too, is more than an idea or a set of propositions. It is not an abstract universal waiting to be discovered, nor is it a human construct shaped by perspective or power. Instead, truth is embodied in history, revealed in a person.

That person is Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. In Him we see what goodness, justice, and beauty truly are. He is the one in whom all creation holds together, and through Him, the universals that Ockham’s razor cut away are restored in living reality.

Closing Word

Ockham’s Razor may be a great tool for simplifying complex problems, but it also left Christianity bleeding. The good news is that Jesus came not only to heal individual souls but to restore a cosmos filled with God’s eternal meaning and purpose.

That is a story no razor can cut away.