Christianese

I have several friends who do subjects like computer science and electronics. They’re all very nice people, but if you put several together it’s a recipe for disaster. Nine times out of ten they’ll get the conversation round to something that is relevant to their subject and start talking in computer jargon about stuff I don’t understand. The same can be true of music students, or probably of almost every subject and hobby there is. In the summer, I help on a sailing holiday for teenagers. Sailing involves a lot of technical terms and jargon, and before we can teach the young people to sail, we have to explain the words we use. It’s no good telling someone to “haul on the peak halyard” if they have no idea what you’re talking about and reach instead for the jib sheet (apologies if you have no idea what that last sentence means, but that proves my point).

Many of the words we use to describe our Christian beliefs can so easily seem like jargon, or Christanese. Too often we assume that everyone, Christian or not, knows what we mean by them, and don’t bother to explain them, or even worse, never stop to think about what the words we’re using mean. For example, what would your average non-Christian student make of a sentence like “Jesus Christ became an atoning sacrifice for our sins so that we could be redeemed and sanctified in the sight of God”? Think about it for a moment. Do you fully understand all that’s implied by words like atoning, sanctified, redeemed or even sacrifice? Or even the little word “sin”? It may seem obvious, something that you know without even thinking about it, but could you explain the idea of sin as rebellion against God to someone who didn’t know (someone whose first language wasn’t English, for example)?

These are words that convey crucial concepts about our beliefs, words that are used in our churches and Christian meetings on a regular basis, often without explanation. When we’ve been a Christian for some time it can be hard to remember that not everyone knows as much as about it as we do, that not everyone thinks as we do. (How many people, other than Christians, would voluntarily go and sit in a chilly old building once or more a week and listen to some person they don’t know that well talking about an old book, for example?) But if we want non-Christians to understand what we’re trying to tell them, if we want our meetings to seem open and friendly rather than enclosed and cultish, we need to ensure that what we’re saying is comprehensible.

Surely that’s obvious, I hear you say. Well, probably it should be. The Church however has been struggling with this for centuries. Originally, services in the Roman Catholic Church were in Latin, a more or less universal language that many people in what had been the Roman Empire could understand. However, as time went on it became incomprehensible to most of the people who attended services, and even to some of the priests who took them. The Churches of England and Scotland were no better after the Reformation, however, since they often banned ministers in the remote areas of Scotland, Wales and Ireland from using the local Celtic languages in services. Few people spoke English here, so the English services must have been as incomprehensible as the old Latin ones. Unsurprisingly, support for the reformed churches was low in these areas.

So, how do we make our meetings more understandable and accessible? Do we impose a “jargon test” (a bit like a spelling test, but where people are required to defi ne ten commonly used Christian terms) on all members and speakers? Or have someone standing on the door ready to spot non-Christians and issue them with a glossary of Christian jargon (and then have someone else to compel them to look up every unfamiliar word)? Interesting as these ideas are, I don’t think they’d help our meetings seem more open to non-Christians. When I was involved with the running of one Christian organisation on campus, we thought that small things like worship leaders telling everyone when to stand or sit, or the person leading the meeting remembering to introduce themselves, could make a lot of difference in how open the meeting seemed. Maybe these things are specific to that organisation, but I think that some basic principles (like introducing the leader and not assuming that people will already know about the events or activities the organisation runs) can be applied to most societies and churches.

Even if the words used are simple themselves, the meaning (or meanings) they convey can be deeply complicated. For example, take the word “faith”. On the surface it seems so simple and easy to comprehend: it means having trust or confi dence in an object or belief. Fine. Stop to think about how this actually applies to you, however, and it becomes a whole lot more complicated. Where does faith come from? How do we get it? Why should we have faith in Christian beliefs? What does this faith do? If a friend asked us what we believed in and why, would we be able to tell them? 1 Peter 3 verse 15 says that we should “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” The reason for our hope is that we have faith in Jesus Christ’s saving death (oops, there I go again, what does that “saving” mean?). But that answer would probably not be all that helpful to a non-Christian. They would need to know more about what this faith is, and why we have it and they don’t.

Let’s try to answer these questions. First, what is faith? Well, the dictionary definition of faith is given above: trust or confidence. There is, however, no way of proving beyond doubt that God exists. We can find evidence, but we can’t completely prove it because God is beyond our knowledge and comprehension. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t be God! It is only by faith that we can believe that there is a God. The same is true of the whole of the gospel (or good news). Only by faith in the Bible and what it teaches can we believe that, despite human beings’ rebellion against God and refusal to follow his ways, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3 v 16). We need to have faith in the right things, in God and in what he has said to us. You can sincerely believe that a cup is full of tea, but this doesn’t change the liquid in the cup into tea if it is, say, orange juice. It’s all about believing “this righteousness from God comes by faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” (Romans 3:22). And as this passage implies, faith is a gift of God.

So if faith is a gift, why do some people have it and others not? If God loves us all, why doesn’t he give everyone this faith? I wish I knew, but I don’t. I don’t know why some people seem to be searching for faith without finding it, while others don’t seem to have to search very hard. All I know is that I trust God. In the Bible he reveals himself as a just and righteous God, who would not do anything unfair, as well as a God who loves all those he has created. But I don’t understand how this all works. I just have to trust that God knows what he’s doing and that he won’t do anything unfair, as that would be out of character for him. Ultimately, every argument comes back to faith: if you have faith then you are willing to trust God for the things you don’t understand.

If faith is a gift then, can we do anything to get this faith? Or to help others get it? I think we can. I think that God will give faith to those who are earnestly seeking for him and who realise their need for him. I don’t fully understand how it works, but it seems to be a two way process between us and God. Surely the key thing in this process is prayer. If we want to have faith and sincerely ask God to give us that faith, I don’t think that a God who loves us would deny us the chance to come into a relationship with him.

I hope that’s encouraged you to think more carefully about the words we use and what they mean. I’m not implying that we should never use words that are unfamiliar to people or have complicated meanings; often these terms exist because there is no other word to get across that concept. I’m simply suggesting that we think a little more carefully about what we say, what we mean, and how to explain it. I hope you understood that!

Lois Cross