Definitions frequently plague us. One problem occurs when we think of the definition as having a reality apart from the thing it is describing. Thus it is that a man can fight for “the covenant” while in all his day-to-day covenantal dealings he assaults and insults the reality in various ways. But another problem with definitions results from a dishonest substitution of the biblical definition for another, one more flexible.
This happens because all Christians know what the good words are — love, justice, humility, and so on. The bad words are arrogance, selfishness, lust, etc. So if the goodness and badness of the words themselves are fixed, then all the devil has to do to get us to call evil good and good evil (Is. 5:20) is to switch the definitions on us. This is done so that marked disobedience can be shopped around as though it were pleasing to God.
If there is a mastermind behind this, his intent is clearly evil. But often unwitting Christians are sold on the new definitions, even though they have no idea of defending the ultimate moral inversion that these new definitions are calculated to protect and advance. And so it is that Christians can often be found policing the boundaries of the secular city for them. They form a weird sort of volunteer corps. The Christians are sold on the new definitions, and go after Christians who challenge those definitions, but have never figured out the strategic value of these definitions to the enemy.
This describes the current relation between pietism and postmodernism pretty well. Pietism, which includes many sincere and well-intentioned Christian people, vigorously defends a particular set of definitions that guard and protect the relativistic kingdom of postmodernism. Take the new definitions of arrogance and humility, for example. In the Bible, arrogance is claiming to be wiser than God. Humility means submitting to Him. In the new order of things, arrogance means claiming to know anything with certainty. Humility means acknowledging that you “might be wrong about this.” Or that.
But in the Bible, God’s faithful servants know, and they know that they do. Moses did not come down off Mt. Sinai, and say, “Thou shalt not steal, imo.” And the people did not hear him, and say, “Let us pencil that in.”
There is one other factor. Those who do not want to hear the word of God have a pattern or grid that they use to categorize those who do claim to have understood a clear word from God given in Scripture. This interpretive grid has been in place for centuries. Those who claim to have received such God-given knowledge must be categorized, not only as arrogant, but also as dour, humorless, baptized in prune juice, severe — a regular collection, as the French say, of le stuffed shirts. And unfortunately, some of those who rightly fight the drift toward mushy relativism accept this part of the story that is told about them, and then do their best to fit the mold.
This is a strategic blunder of the first order. The native home of humorlessness is actually disobedience. I have seen many indications that humorless pursed lips and tut-tutting are not in short supply among the pietists and postmodernists. And this is why the skylarking over at Credenda gets so much attention from them — it doesn’t fit their paradigm. The central problem for them is that it shows the conservatives are not the ones with their skivvies in a twist.
So the need of the hour, in this our on-going battle with epistemic invertebrates, is for believing Christians to adopt the demeanor of Chestertonian Puritans, medieval cowboys, Presbyterian orangutans, Reformed yahoos, and liturgical party commandos. Not that we don’t have our quiet, pensive moments too.