Monthly Archive for August, 2009

So I was hav­ing one those nor­mally awk­ward con­ver­sa­tions, when all the talk­ing hap­pens in a lan­guage that isn’t flu­ent for at least half of the peo­ple in the cir­cle.  We were talk­ing about movies that we’ve seen and ones that we would like to see.  One girl,who was not a native Eng­lish speaker as the two of us who were if we liked a par­tic­u­lar movie.  Before I was able to under­stand the title she had said, the other guy started to answer.

“Yeah, I would like to see it,” he said, “but I don’t like how they have the word Sal­va­tion in there.”  This was con­fus­ing to every­one, since by now we all had gath­ered that she had said “National Trea­sure”.  I gath­ered from his answer that he’d heard “Ter­mi­na­tor” and was refer­ring to “Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion,” the fourth instal­ment in that fran­chise of movies, which was play­ing in the the­atres at that time.

We stayed on the topic of movies, but I was more inter­ested in the impli­ca­tion made by the answer he gave.  Are there words that should only be used in a Chris­t­ian context?

I didn’t see Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion, but I’m guess­ing the theme is con­sis­tent with the oth­ers in the series, that the world is saved from utter destruc­tion.  I feel like that would meet the cri­te­ria of at least one def­i­n­i­tion of the word sal­va­tion.  But does some­one have to pray the sinner’s prayer in order for the word ‘sal­va­tion’ to be used appro­pri­ately?  Obvi­ously, this word has a spir­i­tual mean­ing, and that def­i­n­i­tion is likely the most com­mon use of the word.  That’s fine, but does it have to be the exclu­sive use of the word?

Ini­tially his state­ment put me off because it reeked of the kind of elit­ism I want Chris­tians to avoid.  Was he sug­gest­ing that only Chris­tians could use this term?  Per­haps he thought that the pro­duc­ers of this movie used the term to belit­tle Chris­tian­ity.  Cer­tainly the word wouldn’t have the same appeal to it with­out the reli­gious sig­nif­i­cance, but it has other meanings.

The nature of the Eng­lish langue is that it is in many ways a Chris­t­ian lan­guage.  It was devel­oped and adopted as an offi­cial lan­guage all within the con­text of a Chris­t­ian coun­try.  This makes it dif­fi­cult to say a word isn’t inher­ently reli­gious, when the whole lan­guage came into being in a national and cul­tural sit­u­a­tion that was dom­i­nated by the Catholic and then Angli­can churches, but all of these words have other meanings.

Now, gen­er­ally I’m happy to say that the church should accept its declin­ing sta­tus and this may sound like one of the issues where I would get on a soap­box and say that.  My point this time though is that when we give up our hold on cer­tain terms, they will mean more to us.

Bap­tism is a purely reli­gious word, but what if we also had the option of using the orig­i­nal mean­ing of the greek root?  Since it only means to plunge or to dunk, we might have a bap­tizer beside every toi­let, or multi­na­tional cof­fee chain called Bap­tizin’ Donuts.  If the same thing had hap­pened in other lan­guages, like Ger­man, I guar­an­tee that the rad­i­cal wing of the Ref­or­ma­tion would have turned out differently.

We can sing that we’ve been redeemed by the blood of the lamb, but it sounds like a fairly abstract con­cept.  Good thing we redeem coupons every now and then, or else we might not know what it means.  I won­der about the effec­tive­ness of call­ing oth­ers to ‘repent’ since I don’t think peo­ple really know what it means.  If oth­ers knew it meant to com­pletely turn around from it might be a lit­tle more acces­si­ble, or if they under­stood it also meant we were claim­ing to have turned away from a sin­ful life, it might keep us more account­able.  If ‘born again’ wasn’t such a com­monly used phrase, it might sound as shock­ing to us as it did to Nicode­mus, and it might actu­ally have mean­ing again.

I actu­ally think that “Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion” is a pretty clever title.  Out­side of the reli­gious con­text we want to know who is saved from what, by whom, and how.  In a reli­gious con­text, peo­ple often assume either that they already know, or they don’t want to ask.  Often we try to use other words, and I think that’s prob­a­bly wise, but I some­times wish we could use the same words, just carry less reli­gious bag­gage with us when we use those words.