Anti-Language

A few days ago, this piece from the good folks over at CNN's Belief Blog caught my eye.  And even though the article itself is about a year-and-a-half old, there's lots of truth in its fundamental premise:

Christianity isn't just a faith, it's also a language.  And you either speak it with varying degrees of fluency, or you don't.

It's a little like name-dropping, in a way, in that it is meant to establish someone's bona fides...someone asks me about my  "testimony," they aren't asking me for a deposition or if I've witnessed any crimes lately.  They're asking me about my relationship with God as revealed through Jesus Christ.  (Same goes for the term "witnessing.")

And there are tons of terms that float around the church world that have this sort of double meaning--one meaning out in secular society, and an entirely different meaning within Christianity.

Saved.

Born again.

Mission (or, everyone's new favorite word in church growth, "missional")

Emergent.

And the list goes on and on.

To be honest, I'm not always sure what to make of it.  Sometimes I worry that we as Christians are making ourselves--and our knowledge of Jesus Christ--shut off from everyone else who isn't like us.

My New Testament professor in college called this sort of phenomenon "anti-language."  He argued, basically, that words that commonly mean one thing in a larger culture get co-opted by a smaller culture living within the larger culture to mean something totally different and inaccessible to the larger culture.

It's something that we see in the Bible all the time.  The Book of Revelation is full of it--just ask any Bible scholar about the number 666.

But it's also in the Gospels.  This season, our Tuesday morning Bible study is working its way through the Gospel of John, and already in the first four chapters, we have encountered two glaring instances of this "anti-language."

The first, in John 3, is Jesus telling Nicodemus of the need to be born again, or born from above, depending on your translation.

To which Nicodemus replies, "How can I be born a second time?"  He takes Jesus' words at their most literal and, presumably, at their most common interpretation.

But Jesus is creating a brand new interpretation of some very old words.

The same thing happens one chapter later, at Jacob's well when the Samaritan woman, about to draw water, asks Jesus how He can produce this living water He speaks of, for He has no bucket!

The Greek used in that term can also mean "running" water, like in a stream or river, and it stands in opposite contrast to the still water of the well.

Again--the most common and literal interpretation of a word is not what Jesus goes for.

He instead goes for creating something entirely new...not new words, but new ways of using words that, in the end, become accessible to us through God's guidance.

What if we were to continue to do that with the words we come up with in church today?

What if we made them accessible and inclusive?

What if people knew God's love because we did precisely that?

What a great church that would be!

Yours in Christ,

Eric