I often (too often?) complain about words and their meanings. More precisely, I complain about words and their sliding meanings. Today it means "X" and tomorrow it means "Y" or, worse, "Not X". It means something quite different or even the exact opposite. In some cases these are merely amusing. "Egregious" used to mean "rising above the flock", as in being extraordinary or exceptional; now it's being particularly bad. "Awful" originally meant "filled with awe", now it means something really bad. In the other direction, "terrific" once meant something worthy of terror but now means something really good. "Artificial" once referenced being artful or skillful but now means "fake". A "moot" point was once an idea worthy of discussion and now means something not worth discussing. Strange, but mostly just amusing.
Sometimes, though, it becomes a real problem. Look with me for a moment at the biblical concept of divorce. The Bible is clear that marriage is for life. "What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." (Matt 19:6) That is the default. That was Jesus's answer to the question, "Can a man divorce his wife for any reason?" (Matt 19:3) "No." They pushed it, though, and Jesus ended up telling them, "And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery." (Matt 19:9) So, apparently "sexual immorality" is an exception to that default. Elsewhere we read, "But if the unbelieving partner deserts, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace." (1 Cor 7:15) Oh, okay, so desertion is the other exception, right?
I'm not discussing here the possible interpretations of the biblical texts here. I'm pointing to the change of words. So if you take these two as exceptions to the principle of the lifelong marriage, it would appear that there are only two and that they are very limited ... until you begin to let these words slide. Most people, for instance, will agree that "adultery" is in view when Jesus said "sexual immorality" so that's a good reason to divorce. But we've started moving that. What about Jesus's statement "But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matt 5:28)? So the wife who says, "Yeah, he was looking at women with lust so I divorced him" based on Jesus's "sexual immorality" clause would be fully justified, right? What about the husband caught looking at porn? "Sexual immorality"? What about the guy who asks his wife to perform sexual acts that she finds morally offensive? "Sexual immorality"? Now we've started moving that line from simple adultery to a longer list.
Then there's "desertion". What does that entail? We get "They left and never came back." What about the husband that "checks out", that isn't engaged, that is more involved with his work than his wife? What about the wife that is more involved with other things than her husband? What about the husband that is emotionally distant? Isn't that "desertion"? I've read Christians who have suggested that the abusive spouse is causing the abused one to leave, making the abuser a deserter. Is that there, too? Eventually you arrive at "He just wasn't meeting my needs" and that could be construed as "desertion".
You see, then, how the sliding meanings of words can end up in places that, I would hope, you clearly see as a problem. When we start to use words, even biblical terms, to mean things contrary to biblical principles, we should be able to see that we're heading down the wrong path. We're already doing this quite a bit. When we substitute "homosexual" as in "a lifestyle where a person is oriented toward sex with the same gender" instead of "homosexual" as in "sexual relations between two people of the same gender", we will end up completely confused about every mention of the concept in Scripture. When we substitute "love" as in "a warm affection" or even "sex" for biblical love as in "the choice of seeking the best for others", we'll find bizarre conclusions about what it means to "love one another." And don't even start trying to apply today's "marriage" term to biblical passages since today's version has no relation to the Bible version. We need to be careful that we're defining our terms in Scripture the same way that Scripture defines them rather than vice versa. If not, those sliding terms end up removing all meaning from the pages of your Bible.
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