The Internet Monk 

"the power of opinion, the phenomenon of speech, the impact of truth"

A Webjournal edited by Michael Spencer

Fighting Words

What Happens When We Abandon The Vocabulary of Faith

by Michael Spencer

On the front cover of our State Baptist newspaper is a story headlined "Church Leaders Can Learn from Squirrels, Beavers, Geese." I kid you not. I have to commend my wonderful wife, who still knew the appropriate response was to laugh, even though the entire article was dead serious. I wonder how many pastors laughed, and how many immediately copied the illustrations into Sunday's sermon. (Not children's sermon- THE sermon.)

It occurs to me that it is no longer any news that Christians have abandoned the distinctive vocabulary of faith. I am not making a shocking announcement to say that in our attempt to become acceptable to the larger culture, we have surrendered the words that define our faith. Today, illustrations about squirrels, beavers and geese are expected to be our communication with the world. Christian music has adopted the vocabulary of romance. God is my girlfriend, faith is falling in love, the Bible a love letter and so forth. Preaching has adopted the vocabulary of modern psychology and the self-help industry. Sin is a lack of self-esteem. Christ came to give us meaning and purpose in life. The church is a support group, preaching a motivational talk. Oprah and Dr. Phil, not Paul and Moses, provide our new vocabulary.

When the history of modern evangelicalism is written, I predict that the abandonment of the vocabulary of faith will loom large as an explanation for the demise of Christianity in American culture. Despite what the Willow Creek-ologists tell us, "seeker sensitive" Christianity is not a surging cultural force, but a movement leading masses of Christians into retreat and cultural surrender. Islam is surging in America, and you will not come across many "seeker-sensitive" mosques. Cultures and sub-cultures that retain their distinctive vocabularies retain their distinctive identities. Just ask rap musicians, who don't feel the need to talk like everyone else to sell their music. If you don't get it, you're going to have to ask. Meanwhile, the slogan of American evangelicalism might be "Prepare to be assimilated."

What I find stunning is the inability of the advocates of vocabulary abandonment to see that there is a genuine difference between a church that proclaims a message of sin, justification and redemption and a church that seeks to produce the feeling of "a big hug from God."  I learned this lesson as a youth ministry specialist, one of those people with the job of keeping the kids interested in church by running a program that resembled church as little as possible. It is no surprise to me that so many of today's adults despise anything that looks traditional or classical in Christian worship. We fed them a diet of pizza, trips to the beach, concerts, games and the appropriate musical soundtrack and kept them far away from what was going on upstairs. We endured Sunday morning with the promise of "youth stuff" the rest of the week. While most of us never abandoned the Bible, many did, and we did practice the principles of communication that the seeker sensitive movement holds sacred. So if  you are looking for someone to blame that adults now want to applaud at Holy Communion, blame me. (But they paid us to do it.)

How can I reasonably make the assertion that it would be better to use a lot of words that the culture doesn't know to communicate with that culture? How can I talk to the MTV generation without talking about "God and stuff?" I mean would I go into the Amazon jungle and use the King James Version of the Bible with the tribes I found there?

To start with, the "KJV in the jungle" objection is bogus. Obviously, there are basic principles of translation that have to be respected. To communicate, you must have a vocabulary, and it must be the most accurate and understandable vocabulary possible for the task. Asking a tribe to learn KJV English is absurd. Asking the MTV generation to learn to read the New American Standard is not. In fact, once a basic vocabulary is established, a Christian communicator must decide if he or she is going to translate "justification" or "A big hug from God." And that choice matters.

The error consists of thinking that the same content is communicated with radically different words. For example, is the same content communicated in a song that says I want Jesus to kiss me with the kisses of his mouth as a song that says "Amazing love, how can it be, that thou my God should'st die for me?" Does "a feeling of being worthless" communicate the same content as "iniquity" or "transgression?" There are meaningful parallel choices of words, as any survey of competent translations will demonstrate, but there are also translation choices that change content. Take the NIV's unfortunate choice to translate the word "sarx" as "sinful nature" rather than, as the more accurate "flesh." Meaningful content is left out and distorted with such a translation, despite the sincere attempt to avoid misunderstanding of the Biblical content. If such minor surrenders of meaning happen in the course of translation, what is going on when sin, atonement, justification, regeneration, sanctification, propitiation and repentance are all replaced with language borrowed from the lexicon of romance or psychology? The results will not produce Christians, but romantics and followers of psychology.

Several years ago, I was on the staff of a church in a major city, a church that was blessed with many couples with young children. The church had just begun a children's church option, and there was quite a debate about the age at which children should come into the adult service. Now, it should be noted that for the vast majority of Christian history, the idea of a "children's church" option would have been considered ridiculous, if not well nigh blasphemous. There might be some grist for meditation in the notion that when Christians made the religious education of children the business of the family rather than of the church, the church prospered accordingly. Overall, the development of the age-graded Sunday School has been disastrous for Christian families. 

Anyway, the debate in our church was between those who said we must keep children through the fifth grade out of the adult service, for the sake of making content age appropriate and understandable to them, and their opponents who said children should be exposed to worship as soon as possible so that their parents could explain the meaning of the service. In supporting having children in the service sooner rather than later, our pastor made the point that it was important for children to be in a worship service where things were, at some point, mysterious and not understandable to them, so that they could engage in the process of gaining understanding through questions and instruction by parents.

A few years later, in a different church, a wealthy member offered to built a "youth church" where teenagers could have their own service completely apart from adult church. Such diversification is now commonplace, as bikers, skateboarders, singles, college students, golfers and other sub-groups have their own churches or services where they are properly insulated from the rest of us. Of course, while evangelical media has rejoiced at this trend (our state Baptist paper cannot contain itself at the sight of a special service aimed only at Hispanic philosophy students age 21-23), the overall numbers of Americans in church has decreased. I suspect this might be just fine to the cultural assimilators, who may harbor suspicions that Christians being separate from their culture in any way is a failure to "incarnate the message." Perhaps when we have incarnated ourselves right out of existence, the assimilators can explain the cultural significance of invisible, inaudible, insubstantial Christianity.

I will put forward another view: The Christian vocabulary should be fighting words. It should purposely be contrary to the vocabulary of the dominant culture and it should never submit to any vocabulary but itself. When we desert the vocabulary of scripture, and I would also include the vocabulary of the church as a community of faith, we surrender our essence and our content to the culture for dilution or extinction. 

For centuries the church held on to its message and identity by fighting for its vocabulary and the content of those concepts. Who can calculate what was gained by holding on to the term "Trinity?" "Justification?" "Substitutionary?" "Sin?" "Eternal punishment?"  "imputed righteousness?" (For those of you who already need a dictionary, I offer no apologies.) Maintaining the church's vocabulary has been a fight worth waging. And now we are giving it away with little thought of the consequences. Someone has noted that of the seven deadly sins, six are now cataloged as diseases. What was the result of changing the word "homosexual" to "gay" in popular media? What was Dr. Menninger warning of when he wrote "Whatever became of Sin?"

Somewhere in church history, someone innocently adopted phrases like "personal savior" and "Ask Jesus into your heart" as a way of speaking about Christianity. No doubt, the reasons for abandoning Biblical terminology in favor of more culturally appropriate terms were sincere. The results have been disastrous. These innovative terms, and all their accompanying abuses, have eaten up entire denominations and dominated decades of preaching and evangelism. How much would be different if we had held onto the fighting words: Repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, and your household. Come Follow me. Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.

My wife recently completed catechizing our two teenage children using the Westminster Shorter Catechism, as is, without modernized language. I can safely say it was the most productive year of religious education I have ever seen in any class for teenagers or young people. And learning what all those big words meant was part of the benefit.

The accommodators and assimilators would fill in the Grand Canyon so it is not so intimidating. They would level the Rocky Mountains so they are more manageable. What is lost in the quest for comfort? What is majestic, inspiring and worshipful. Let's hold on to our fighting words, and never surrender them to a culture that will soon be praying to God as "Hey Big Guy!" and reducing the rest of the service to "just cool stuff."

Michael@internetmonk.com                                                                             Post a Comment