Language wars

“If we eventually have to form a study committee over every word in our confession of faith, we are doomed, we are no longer a confessional people.”

This was said by Albert Mohler at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), in opposition to the motion to form a study committee over the word ‘pastor’. The SBC’s confessional documents does not allow women to be ordained as pastors, as they hold that Scripture does not permit this. The study committee will be tasked to study the word ‘pastor’ in order to see if ‘pastor’ could not be ‘Scripturally’ understood in different ways, in order to allow for ordaining female pastors.

Female pastors and the SBC’s struggles are not the points I’m trying to make here. But there is a very insidious principle at word in this motion that compliments the spirit of the age.

The ‘culture war’ is essentially a ‘language war’. What do we see: people changing the meaning of words, reinterpreting words, ascribing violence to words, canceling words, hanging their identity on words, retiring words, relativizing words, mandating words…

Language is the fundamental way we humans communicate – get control over language and you get control of people and their institutions.

We have seen the same thing happen in our church – the Dutch Reformed Church in South-Africa – where Biblical words like ‘ἀρσενοκοῖται’ (arsenokoitai – male [homosexual] bed partners) have been hermeneutized and contextualized into linguistical oblivion; away from anything that would hold sacred our church’s (and THE church for that matter) historical stance on God honoring relationships.

When it comes to language, we must be steadfast in not letting ideologies and their fashionable acolytes dictate for us. This is an absolute God-given hill to die on, lest we….