Sometimes it just doesn't work. . .

The tired and weary examples of words that have come to mean something new and different are manifold and need not be repeated here.  Suffice it to say that language is not an end but a means and when it is constantly in motion the thing is stripped of its value.  Some have tried to apply the changing nature of language to Scripture and the faith in the hopes of opening it up to those who do not know its voice.  The end result has not and will not be to expand but to contract, until what is known becomes doubt and what is fact becomes mere supposition.  In so doing, the faith ends up weak and uncertain, hardly a word worth our attention and certainly not a word that has the power to save.

Classical, that is orthodox, Christianity has not nor was it ever a passing phase.  The great lie of modernity is to suggest that somehow Nicea was an aberration and not the norm, that the overarching goal was not what does the Scripture say but what do we need or what can we sell.  In this 1700th year of the orthodox and catholic expression of the Trinity in Unity, we are given terms that mean something and their meaning is precisely to express and confess what it is that the Scriptures say.  Some have suggested that this is all rather passé, a passing phase that has come and gone and now we are in a new era and facing new challenges.  God must be redefined just as the faith, doctrine, and morality must undergo a freshening.  All of this is especially due to the change of language itself.

What has happened by those intent upon refreshing the face of Christianity is something far more than a facelift.  Catholic and orthodox Christianity has, to state it bluntly, simply been replaced by a brand new religion that, somewhat inconveniently for Christianity, borrows the terminology and vocabulary of orthodox and catholic Christianity but redefines them.  While this is certainly true of other aspects of the faith, it is precisely true of the Scriptures.  By raising doubt or expressing the fear of confusion over what the terms and vocabulary of Scriptures mean, the Scriptures themselves are sidelined and become merely one witness from one time and not the norming norm for all time.  Their power can be restrained by the simple evolution of language until no one can know really what something says or means at all.

I hate that the sex examples are the easiest to cite but the fact is that they are.  So Scripture cannot possibly mean what it says when it forbids homosexual behavior and since the terms are euphemisms for the explicit definition, it is quite possible that it does not mean at all what people have thought for a very long time.  Furthermore, since Scripture does not know as we do now the idea of a long term marital status between those of the same sex, it cannot possible be addressing what has been thought and must necessarily be condemning what is common to both homosexuality and heterosexuality -- rape, domination, and non-consensual sexual acts.  And there you have it.  The terms have changed, the meaning has changed, Scripture has changed, and Christianity has changed.

Sex examples are easiest but they are not unique.  Salvation is not about sin any longer but about the triumph of love.  The cross is not about the payment for sin's guilt and the bearing of our punishment out of His desire to save us but simply about love -- how far it goes in pursuit of those loved.  The old terms of atonement are gladly banished in favor of simple terms, even Biblical ones, that surround but were never seen to replace the juridical shape of our redemption.  Christ is victor (which He surely is) but not in addition to priest and victim.  No, He is victor to replace the outmoded and outdated concepts of sin and blood atonement which the Bible never meant to be dominant anyway.

The problem in all of this is that it just doesn't work.  Eventually it is obvious that this is no mere remodeling scheme but the wholesale transformation of Christianity.  The same vocabulary is used, the same language is spoken, but with different meaning, it says something completely different and Christianity becomes something alien and strange to what it was and is according to Scripture.  It ends up being a golden calf of a god that looks like and talks like the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but is not the same God at all.  You can change the meaning of the terms and you must adjust to the changing shape of language itself but the goal is to preserve and conserve -- not to reinvent.  That is something modern Christianity seems to have forgotten.

The end result is that when people gather for the Divine Service but do not intend or expect to meet Christ in the bread of His body and the cup of His blood, it is not the same Mass at all.  When people hear the Gospel and look upon the cross as example of love instead of the place where full atonement was made and peace between God and man, it is not the same Gospel.  When people confess the words of the Nicene Creed but do not mean Virgin or birth, for example, then it is not the same God and not the same Christ.  There is salvation in Him and in no other -- no other name under heaven and on earth by which any will be saved.  Words may change in meaning naturally but the Gospel is eternal.  To use the evolution of language to reinvent Christianity is to rot it from the inside out and to surrender to the devil something he need not even work to accomplish.