Evangelicals and the Stewardship of Words

Words are cheap today.  It costs almost nothing to publish a single word in the digital age. So, many of my students are word weary. They face a tsunami of words every waking moment. And when they do awaken, the words are waiting for them on their digital devices, in books, in songs, in magazine adverts, in billboards. Words are everywhere. 

There was a time, of course, when words required a death.  Parchment was made from the skin of a calf, goat, or sheep. Books were bound in leather, the jacket of an animal killed for its flesh.  Words on the page were carefully copied, often by monks who saw the faithful duplication of those very words as their sacred vocation. Words were costly once.  Today they are worth almost nothing.

But as Marilyn Chandler McEntyre has argued in her stunningly helpful volume, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (Eerdmans, 2009), “caring for language is a moral issue.”  Language is a stewardship. “Words,” says McEntyre, “are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another.”  In my view, we have been poor stewards of words in general and of the word “evangelical” in particular. And our life together has suffered because of it.

The depreciation of words makes it extraordinarily difficult to rehabilitate them.  “Let’s just get a new one,” many will say. But as someone who taught for a decade at an institution where the word “evangelical” meant something—Trinity Evangelical Divinity School—I’d like to argue for the hard work of resuscitating the word.

Like Kyle Roberts, I’ve always understood “evangelical” to be an adjective modifying “Christian.”   And, really, only as one descriptor in a string that precedes the noun.  For me, the other adjectives include words like Apostolic, Nicene, Orthodox, Protestant, and Baptist.  And each of these adjectives has a genealogy of affirmations, denials, persons, and historical moments. Those words mean something. And I am happy to point to their origins and defend my use of them as short-hand to describe the variety of noun that I am.

When words are so cheap and thrown about so carelessly, it is incumbent on those of us who use them to define them for both ourselves and others. And as Sarah Ruden commented at the very end of her reflection, I’m at least as interested in showing what it means to be evangelical as I am in saying what is meant by the term.

Nevertheless, I have little doubt that the adjective will live on for at least several future generations, maybe longer. It is too embedded in our institutional life simply to vanish. When asked what I mean by evangelical I will continue to point back to David Bebbington’s helpful definition and George Marsden’s identification of evangelical affirmations.  Yet because of our contemporary laxness in the stewardship of words, I will also continue to ask what someone means when they use the word.

I have even more confidence that evangelicals themselves will live on, whatever the designation comes to mean over the next generations. Conversionist, Activist, Biblicist, Crucicentric Christianity will survive our word wars. Their numbers may wax and wane, their influence may be more or less felt; but they will survive until Jesus comes.

Having said that, then, it is important to affirm that the most crucial word in that string of words by which I describe myself is the noun.  I am a Christian, a disciple of the Lord Jesus, a follower of the Way.  This is how Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the 19^th-century prince of preachers, described himself in his first sermon at London’s Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1861: “I am never ashamed to avow myself a Calvinist; I do not hesitate to take the name of Baptist; but if I am asked what is my creed, I reply, ‘It is Jesus Christ.’”

The reason the noun is most important is because the Author and Finisher of our faith did not pray in John 17 that “evangelicals would be one” just as he and his Father are one, but that God’s people would be one people.  It is the Church for whom Christ died, and it is for her unity that Jesus prayed.  And that’s why I am glad to participate in these conversations with brothers and sisters who identify themselves as Christ-followers.

Whatever adjectives we use to describe ourselves—and words are important I have argued—it is for the unity of the Church that I also pray. Here and there I have been able to experience that unity. In my own disciplinary specialty, bioethics, I have been privileged to worship with and labor alongside men and women of a variety of adjectives (and in some cases even different nouns).  Doing so has led to what some have called an “ecumenism of the trenches.”  That trenchy ecumenism has often raised my hopes for a more robust ecumenism.  Christians live in hope. Insofar as the Church embraces her eschatology, we know that all those adjectives will one day dissolve into the noun. And those who are in Christ shall be gloriously one.

So I hope that through these Respectful Conversations we can acknowledge our distinctives while celebrating our unity. Words matter.  “Christian” matters. Whatever our adjectives, let the noun speak louder than words.