Keeping our terms straight

July is named for Julius Caesar, so let’s momentarily return to ancient Rome and reflect on how even everyday words like fortunate reflect theology.

Many folks back then worshipped Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck or fate and the root of our word unfortunate. Julius, seen as exceptionally fortunate when winning battles, apparently became unfortunate on March 15, 44 B.C., when Brutus and others assassinated him. But Fortuna does not exist, and God does, so in WORLD we try to minimize use of words like fortunate or lucky. A much better word to shape our thinking, and reflect reality, is providential. That word recognizes God’s sovereign ordering of all that happens.

Here are seven other examples of word usage that reflects worldview:

A is for abortionists: In WORLD we don’t call them doctors, because instead of curing they kill. We try to avoid abortion clinic, because a clinic is a healthcare facility: We’ll say abortion business, center, or facility. We also avoid using the Latin term fetus, because that also distances ourselves from the tragic reality of killing an unborn baby.

We should not twist words, and ourselves, into pretzels.

B is for B.C., an abbreviation increasingly unpopular among secularists who don’t recognize Christ as the fulcrum of history: They want to use B.C.E., “before the Common Era,” but we stick with honoring Christ by calling every year of the past two millennia an anno Domini, a year of our Lord.

C is for compassion, rightly defined as a willingness to suffer with a person in need. We try not to use it as synonym for sympathy, government welfare programs, or pitying the needy without taking action (often time-consuming and costly) to help them.

D is for differentiating the Divine from the man-made: We capitalize God when referring to the God of the Bible but refer in lowercase to the gods of Hinduism or other false religions. We do capitalize proper names of particular gods (Vishnu, Shiva, Allah) for the same reason we capitalize proper names of individuals or characters in novels.

E is for extremists such as those who murdered innocent people in Orlando, San Bernardino, Chattanooga, Fort Hood, Boston, Paris, and Madrid. We do not shy away from identifying them as Muslims when they are, or recognizing that we are in a war against Islamic terrorism.

F is for fundamentalist, an honorable word and not one to be used to equate ardent Muslims with ardent Christians. We celebrated last year the centennial of the completion of The Fundamentals, a set of 90 essays published between 1910 and 1915 that affirmed theologically conservative Protestant beliefs, including the historical reality of Jesus’ virgin birth, miracles, and resurrection, along with the crucial importance of Christ’s death as the atonement for sin.

G is for gender, originally a grammatical term but now a common way of referring to maleness or femaleness without using the word sex. The World Health Organization offers a good distinction: “What do we mean by sex and gender? … Sex refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.”

Using gender when we mean sex reflects the non-Christian view that the difference between males and females is essentially a human construct rather than one ordained by God, as Genesis 1:27 states: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Thinking of gender as something constructed by man leads into the current headlines about “transgenderism”—but subjective assertions do not change the objective fact that God created humans male and female. If we accept the now-conventional practice of changing pronouns as soon as someone says, “I feel I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body,” we’re signing on to an unbiblical anthropology/physiology, because the difference between males and females is not just sex organs.

At WORLD we can sympathize with the unease and dissatisfaction of those who feel trapped, but we should not twist words, and ourselves, into pretzels.

Email molasky@wng.org