Theology, actualized to the nth degree slaphappy and cacographic

A few years ago I had a student writer who thought she could jazz up her writing by rewriting her plain language with the help of a thesaurus. Her prose ended up being utterly ridiculous and unreadable, or as her thesaurus might have written, her tongue came to a halt actualized to the nth degree slaphappy and cacographic.

As I’ve chronicled before on these pages, there’s a deliberate effort afoot to remap Christian language to make it more acceptable to the unsaved. To a certain extent, there’s wisdom in speaking in a language that a listener can understand, but many of the efforts have the same outcome as my wannabe writer’s prose. You can’t just replace words rich in meaning with another word that a thesaurus writer has determined is within some extended semantic family.

Nick Charalambous, in advocating that we put saved in our back pockets for awhile, pointed his readers to a list of traditional Christian words and their suggested replacements. While not everything on the list is disagreeable, there are quite a few that do a great injustice to the carefully cultivated meaning of the original word.

Let’s look at a few of the suggested changes:

1. Converted becomes changed. Conversion implies a complete and radical change. I can convert my car from gas to biofuel, and in so doing I change the basic nature of the car. I can change my car’s fuel from 87 to 93 octane easily, but I can just as easily change back if it doesn’t suit me. Conversion talks of altered natures and character. Change is something one does to oil and underwear.
2. Get saved becomes made a decision to follow Christ. The key difference here is who’s doing the doing. If I need saving, there’s going to be someone or something that was the agent of that salvation. If I’m on a sinking ship, I generally don’t have the luxury of choosing whether or not I get saved. By emphasizing a decision to follow, we lose the emphasis and dependence on grace that is denoted in saved.
3. Preach becomes talk about. Everyone can talk, few are called to preach. Talking is something that buzzes around me and invites me to ignore it; preaching is God’s Word directed at me that demands my attention and obedience. Who wouldn’t rather be talked to than preached to? Talking is casual; preaching is insistent, which is probably why it’s taboo.
4. Christian becomes Christ follower. Belief is replaced with works. See a fuller discussion here.
5. Sin becomes acting against God’s will and offending God’s character. Acting against God’s will is one way we can sin, but it ignores the doctrine of original sin. I sin without having to do anything at all. I am not God, so my very existence falls short and offends God’s holy character. If sin is about doing bad things, then I can become less of a sinner by doing fewer bad things. Sin, in its full original sense, nails me regardless of what I do.

In a related article, a sensitive evangelist also suggests that we not talk about sin.

Rather than talking about “sin,” discuss the nature of broken relationships with God and the need for healing.

Healing? We’re dead in our sins and need an entire new life, not a few therapy sessions. It’s a similar diminution in meaning as we see in the converted vs. changed redefinition.

Which points to a more profound issue in evangelism. From what I can tell from the Bible, conversion involves repentance and belief. If we’re resorting to creating Christ followers who haven’t heard us talk about sin, perhaps we’re dealing with people who have neither repented nor believed.

If so, would that be their fault or ours?

Did someone put ignorance on the agenda?

There’s a curious sequence of posts coming from NewSpring’s leaders this week.

Perry Noble led the way, boasting about how God prepared him to lead 10,000 people by making him a theological and ecclesiastical know nothing.

I did just about everything you could do in a church and in all of that God was preparing me to one day lead a church in which I could understand the people that worked with me rather than spout out theology and ideas and methodology in which I knew nothing about.

Now Brad Cooper is following up, excusing Christians who don’t care to learn or think well, so long as they do stuff. He condemns Christian scholarship by approvingly quoting Soren Kierkegaard. If you see something in the Bible, Cooper and Kierkegaard tell us, and if it makes sense to you, jump right in there and do it. Don’t think. Don’t discuss. Don’t learn. JUST DO! We and God won’t even worry about your intentions, Cooper promises us.

It’s no accident that Kierkegaard is regarded as the father of evangelical liberalism and Christian postmodernism. There is no real truth; what you think is true is good enough.

Anyone see any potential problems with that?

Prettying up people who are far from life

I ran into an old friend today and asked what he’s doing for a job.

“I help people who are far from life look their best,” he said.

“Oh, so you sell makeup,” I replied.

“No, not really. But I do apply it.”

“You’re one of those beauty consultants at the mall?”

“No, I said I do it for people who are far from life.”

“You mean, you’re a mortician?”

“Yes.”

“And your clients are dead?”

“No! That’s cold. I prefer to think of them as just being far from life.”

The conversation is ridiculous and fictional. Much less fictional is a theology that seems to guide a growing number of churches who tell us that they are reaching people far from God.

Or, more accurately and bluntly, people who are dead.

Before we go further, perhaps it’s worth explaining why semantics matter. When you have an action-oriented theology that ditches creeds for deeds, the best way to know what some of these innovative churches believe is by looking at what they do and say. The new church movement (emergent, seeker-sensitive, purpose-driven, etc.) is quite deliberate and generally successful in trying to change the speech patterns of its adherents. Speech influences and reveals thinking, so I think it’s important to flag and challenge the thinking and the doctrines (creeds, if you will) that are behind the words being used in so many modern churches. Important words mean important things.

Saying that someone is far from God is about as useful as describing a corpse as being far from life; it’s just an attempt obscure the awful reality that the corpse is dead.

What does God think about our “far from life” status?

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins (Colossians 2:13)

There’s nothing a dead man can do to get closer to life. It’s a fundamental element of our faith that Christ alone saves us and that there is nothing we can do to initiate or reject it. If Christ decides not to save us, nothing we can do can change his mind. If Christ does mercifully decide to save us, there’s nothing we can do to resist him.

Describing sinners as being far from God is a fiction that, while trying to preserve the dignity of the sinner, ignores the absolute wretched position that he finds himself in. It’s a fiction that incubates thinking that if we could only change the way the unsaved think about Jesus, Christians or the church, that they would start to close the distance between themselves and a God who wishes they’d come closer.

Mark 12:34 does tell of a particular Pharisee whom Jesus describes as being “not far from the kingdom of God.” It’s a curious account because we don’t know whether the man did eventually enter the kingdom, though I suspect that Jesus was telling him that by God’s grace he was being drawn. The Pharisee had affirmed Jesus and demonstrated a clear understanding of Scripture, which is something that’s impossible to do without God’s help. One thing we do know about the Pharisee, he was not seeking God before his encounter with Jesus; he came to challenge and test Jesus with the intent of tripping him up. Although he sought God with evil intent, it appears that God demonstrated his mercy and gave the man a new heart. By his actions and intent, the Pharisee was living and running far from God, but by Jesus’ love and power he was brought close to God.

After this, no one dared asked Jesus any more questions. Why not? A hostile sinner asked Jesus a question and it probably appeared to all observers that he had been converted. When Jesus speaks to you, you change.

Look at Romans 3.

There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.

All have turned away, they have together become worthless.

The most moral sinner is just as far from God as the most murderous tyrant. Just as the distance between life and death for a dead man is infinite, so the distance between my unregenerate self and a holy and just God is infinite and terrifying. I am either so far from God that distance is irrelevant, or I am an integral and valued part of his body by virtue of his saving grace.

Once a part of his body, although I can be far from sanctified maturity, I can never be far from God.

This is the wonderful miracle, security and beauty of grace.