No new definitions, please

Bad things happen when we try to ‘define’ the big words--the words of life--religious words like truth, good, bad, faith, love, hope, charity, beauty, evil, pain, doubt, fear. I used ‘define’ in quotation marks so that you begin to see what I mean. There is a surface-level definition of the word ‘define,’ which is just to describe the nature or the meaning of a thing. I can define the word ‘faith,’ for example, with a surface-level kind of definition: Faith is confidence in that which is without much evidence. It’s, in itself, evidence enough of things unseen. That’s how the writer of the book of Hebrews put it.

But that’s a surface-level reading of the word ‘faith,’ and, there is a deeper sense in which... this is hard to put into words, forgive me. To define these words is to open them up to constant re-definition in a way that is terribly unhelpful. Here’s what I mean by that. I spoke with an atheist once who had left the Christian tradition, and his criticism of church life and culture was this: Lessons were so often formulated, “You’ve always heard ________, but I say to you ________.” Example: “You’ve always heard it said that God is a great grandfatherly type of guy in the sky, but I say to you that God is a spirit and has no body, no form.” See the re-definition taking place?

That’s all well and good when it’s something silly or obvious like that.

Another example: “You’ve always heard that repentance means to change your behavior, but I say to you that repentance is a change of mind.”

And it’s all well and good when there’s an objective, historical basis for the re-definition.

But a whole heck of a lot of re-defining happened in Nazi Germany, to name one example where re-definition went off the rails. Paul Tillich explores that, having been thrown out of Nazi Germany after W.W.I., having seen the re-definitions taking place, which were leading to unspeakable abuses.

My atheist friend protested that this constant re-definition taking place in Sunday Schools and small group bible studies was re-defining him out of belief in any god at all. In other words, after his thinking had been revised so many times, he got sick of the whole process. Now, my response was that that is the very definition of the word repentance, from the Greek metanoia, meaning ‘new mind’: We’re to have a new mind about any given topic. And I said that we’re only following after our Lord, whose teachings were formulated using that very pattern: “You’ve always heard ________, but I say unto you ________.”

At any rate, I understood my atheist friend’s criticism and I sympathized with his intellectual fatigue. I can see how, through the process of re-definition and revision over and over and over, one might become exhausted with the whole matter and just give up. It’s sad, though, to me, to see someone abandon such a depth of tradition and such indescribable beauty as our faith. It’s sad to see someone resign, to throw up their hands in frustration and, in their spirit say, “to hell with all of it!”

One of the reasons that that is sad to me is because it topples God over in the faith-life of the individual. What I mean is, it removes God as the head and source of the thinker’s spiritual life and establishes himself or herself as his or her own highest aim. The concept of God is unseated, and in its place all that remains are the individual’s own ideals, which are grounded in that person’s experience and are entirely subjective. So then, we get enough people running around following their own orders and serving their own highest aims, and we’ve got a real mess of competing concerns on our hands. 

Another reason that this makes me sad is because it removes the individual from a source of community, from a rich tradition spanning centuries, and from friends so close they call themselves brothers and sisters.

A third reason that this kind of falling away in intellectual exhaustion makes me sad is that it is entirely avoidable. Nothing--nothing at all--needs re-definition, almost ever. Our definitions are just fine. We all know the truth, Paul said. The word is not far from you, Moses said. All men have seen the light, John said. He has written eternity on the heart of man, Solomon said. We know good from bad, we know faith from doubt, we know love from abuse, we know beauty from destruction, we know hope from fear, we know joy from pain.

We don’t need new definitions of these things. 

We stand on the shoulders of giants, or, as the bible puts it, we have this great cloud of witnesses: Men and women who have gone before us, enlightening us to that which is true, good, and beautiful. Showing us a better way.

What we need isn’t re-definition, or definition at all. Rather, we need the great men and women among us to circumscribe these higher-order ideals. Circumscription is the act of understanding an idea by examining its constraints: to put it within limits. My pastor does this really well. He explores, for example, the limitations of love. There is a kind of love that establishes boundaries, guards against abuse, defends the defenseless, maintaining order and peace. Without such limits, love runs amuck. We’re not called to unconditional love of all people at all times, in all places. Such a thing is possible only for God.

No, and I mean this with all sincerity, though it sounds awful: We’re called to conditional love. We love the poor, needy, orphaned, widowed, anxious, ill, imprisoned, and oppressed, and our highest aim is to right those wrongs and to serve those needs. We love them as often as we’re able. But an anxious man with a gun? An ill woman shaking her baby? An oppressed group leading a murderous uprising? A prisoner who is remorseless, even after proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? A poor man who robs others? A young widow who, in her grief, causes abuse to her children? 

There are limits, boundaries, to everything. Even Jesus Christ himself taught a love within limits (Sermon on the Mount says it’s ok to divorce in cases of un-chastity, that’s one example of a condition on love). Circumscription is the exploration of those boundaries.

I think it’s time we leave our definitions alone, trusting that everyone has a surface-level, basic understanding of these big words. Stop re-defining ‘love,’ for example, because we all know true love when we see it. But that’s just it: True love. Circumscribe the word. Explore its limits. If it strays too far out one way, it is no longer the word, it’s no longer ‘love.’ If it veers off too far another way, it’s no longer the word.

Another alternative to re-defining is, we can paint new pictures of the thing, which I explored in a previous blog post entitled, “Painting new pictures.” In that post, I used the word ‘truth,’ and I painted the picture of a tree. Truth is like a tree. It’s rooted, and static, unmoving. But it’s dynamic: It grows and it changes. It has hard edges, but it has soft leaves that fall away in the winter of our pain. Spring comes, and truth shows you new colors.

Let’s leave our definitions alone (we have enough dictionaries), and instead engage in the wonderful works of circumscription through reason and exemplification through art.