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In his final letter, St. Paul gives Timothy an important exhortation for those under his pastoral care:
Remind them of this, and charge them before the Lord to avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers (2 Tim. 2:14).
In his previous letter, Paul gives an even more strongly worded warning:
If anyone . . . does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit, he knows nothing; he has a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, base suspicions, and wrangling among men who are depraved in mind and bereft of the truth (1 Tim. 6:3-5)
As you can see, Paul is not a fan of fights about words.
Yet Paul’s letters are filled with arguments about various issues. How can we square these two facts?
The basic resolution is that Paul cares about substance—that is, what a person believes—and he’s willing to argue about that. But he doesn’t want to argue about expression—that is, how a person phrases his beliefs. Paul is concerned about substance rather than style. As long as the substance of what a person believes is correct, Paul doesn’t want to quibble about how expresses himself.
I’m sure there would have been limits to this. I can imagine situations where Paul would have thought a person was expressing a true thought in a manner that was so misleading that he would have considered it worth discussing.
However, the principle remains: We shouldn’t be quarreling about words in the Christian community. We should recognize that a true belief can be expressed in more than one way, and the mode of expression is not what we should be concerned about.
This is especially true in discussions among different groups of Christians. Because language naturally changes over time, it is only to be expected that different Christians will develop their own ways of using language and their own nuances for terms.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of arguing about words in the Christian community today, and a good bit of it comes from not recognizing how flexible language can be.
People have a natural tendency to assume that words are just meant to be used the way they use them, and if somebody is using them differently, that person must be wrong.
Continued below.
http://jimmyakin.com/2021/05/how-not-to-fight-about-words.html
Remind them of this, and charge them before the Lord to avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers (2 Tim. 2:14).
In his previous letter, Paul gives an even more strongly worded warning:
If anyone . . . does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit, he knows nothing; he has a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, base suspicions, and wrangling among men who are depraved in mind and bereft of the truth (1 Tim. 6:3-5)
As you can see, Paul is not a fan of fights about words.
Yet Paul’s letters are filled with arguments about various issues. How can we square these two facts?
The basic resolution is that Paul cares about substance—that is, what a person believes—and he’s willing to argue about that. But he doesn’t want to argue about expression—that is, how a person phrases his beliefs. Paul is concerned about substance rather than style. As long as the substance of what a person believes is correct, Paul doesn’t want to quibble about how expresses himself.
I’m sure there would have been limits to this. I can imagine situations where Paul would have thought a person was expressing a true thought in a manner that was so misleading that he would have considered it worth discussing.
However, the principle remains: We shouldn’t be quarreling about words in the Christian community. We should recognize that a true belief can be expressed in more than one way, and the mode of expression is not what we should be concerned about.
This is especially true in discussions among different groups of Christians. Because language naturally changes over time, it is only to be expected that different Christians will develop their own ways of using language and their own nuances for terms.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of arguing about words in the Christian community today, and a good bit of it comes from not recognizing how flexible language can be.
People have a natural tendency to assume that words are just meant to be used the way they use them, and if somebody is using them differently, that person must be wrong.
Continued below.
http://jimmyakin.com/2021/05/how-not-to-fight-about-words.html
