By Tim Matheny
Synopsis: Down through the years, individuals have adopted erroneous concepts by defining and applying biblical words in either too narrow or too loose a fashion.
Upon seeing the title of this article, you may have wondered how such an august periodical as this would fail to catch a straightforward spelling mistake in the title of an article. I would hope to restore your confidence, however, by revealing that this is a deliberate play on words on my part. When I was in elementary school, we had vocabulary books titled “Wordly Wise.” At the time, I was not worldly wise enough to get the pun, but I’m sure my parents did. I believe it fitting to use such a grammatical invention again to describe a type of mistake in interpreting God’s word, which leads Christians to behavior which is inconsistent New Testament revelation.
The error I am describing is the over-reliance upon a single definition of a biblical word or phrase, without respect to its context in the passage in which it is found. Such approaches have historically been used, as they are today, to justify radical innovations—which, of course, are hailed as “progress.”
Take, for example, much of the current discourse about worship. It has come into vogue to take the sense of the word as it occurs in Romans 12:1 regarding using our bodies as a living sacrifice being our “spiritual service of worship” and boil it down to the catchphrase, “Our whole lives are worship.” Then such claims are used to suggest that our worship services are too formal, or too rigid. Furthermore, these self-appointed experts tell us that we will fail to reach any visitors with the truth because they will “feel like they don’t belong here.” We are told that we fail to recognize that our collective worship is simply “practice” for the worshipful life.
It is declared that anyone who dresses nicely for worship must be attempting to be ostentatious; why should one dress that differently from any other time in their worship-filled life? Pressed to the extreme, this single-definition approach is used to ask why actions that are normally part of worship on the first day of the week can’t happen anytime during the week.
Like so many other errors, this one begins with a misapplication of a true statement. Of course, it is true that our whole lives are a “service of worship.” The problem comes with the assumption that all worship is the same thing, yet both careful reading and common sense tell us this is not so. Is collective giving, for instance, an act of worship? We are told to do so on the first day of the week in 1 Corinthians 16:2. Is taking care of widows and orphans worship? I would argue that given James’ statement in James 1:27 and the aforementioned Romans 12:1, it absolutely is. Do we only give to take care of the needs of the helpless on Sunday, then, or simply choose to ignore what Paul commanded and take up congregational collection on any day of the week? I have never known a fellowship of Christians who would take such a stand. How about Bible classes? Are they acts of worship? Yes, to such a point that I am slightly troubled by our accommodative distinction between “Bible classes” and “worship services.” Yet, if one presses the idea that worship in the Bible class is of the same nature as our collective services, one would be led to conclude that women could not sing in our worship because that is, by the Spirit’s command, teaching. (This erroneous conclusion, by the way, has been reached from time to time throughout the church’s history.)
On first blush it might seem that a position judging the hearts of those who dress a certain way for worship is on the Pharisaical side of conservatism (and it is), and that an “any day of the week for the acts of worship” position is on the heretical side of progressivism (and it is), and that those two positions could not be held within the same Christian’s heart. Yet for those who would express such ideas, they are simply logical outcomes, conclusions which must be reached from the nature of worship, and their position on ends of a scale which involves a philosophical approach to understanding Scripture in general is incidental and pointless.
Such apparent but explainable “pendulum swings” are not without historical precedent. In the 1950s, two brethren, Carl Ketcherside and Leroy Garrett, first declared that churches should not have a regularly paid evangelist who stuck around and filled a pulpit, which seemed at the time to be a hyper-conservative declaration; yet within a decade they were both advocating that churches should not refuse fellowship to anyone who believed in Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, and soon began to advocate that churches have an ecumenical bond with “Christian” denominations. Once again, these two claims would seem to involve far ends of the philosophical spectrum, yet they are easily understood when we realize that they are really both results of another “wordly” stretching of the truth. They came about because the two preachers were taking the position that there is a firm and irreconcilable difference between the terms “gospel” and “doctrine;” that neither of the two can be used either to represent the other or even a mixture of the two.
The result: A preacher who was “located” was not evangelizing, but rather teaching when he talked about things other than the gospel, which they defined as always meaning the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. This, they said, could not be. Later they would reuse the same distinction and say that anyone who believed in the gospel—again, the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ—should be in fellowship with others who believed the same way and accept them as Christians, and that those Christians in fellowship could differ and continue to study about doctrine. The pressing of each word into a single mode generated logical outcomes irrespective of where they might fall on some other scale, describing the position of an outcome in a belief system. My intent here is not to address those specific issues—brother Bill Humble did so in fine fashion in debate with Garrett all the way back in 1954—but simply to point out that what we from the outside might see as inconsistency can, in fact, be conclusions based on the “over-consistency” of pressing words into single definitions.
Sometimes these singular definitions do not even come from the Bible at all. Such has been the problem with the Greek word translated “sing.” It is asserted that the word meant “to pluck” and thus authorized the use of any instrument. Even if we do not address the inherent question of why everyone commanded to do such doesn’t play an instrument to accompany or replace singing for every single song we sing in worship, this pressing of a single definition ignores the fact that this word is, as my old English teachers would say, transitive—that is, it has to have an object. In this case, that object is “your heart,” and the term therefore is a metaphor for creating music within the heart, and the text goes on to tell us that the product of “plucking the heartstrings” is singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs that teach and admonish (Eph. 5:18–19; Col. 3:16–17).
The antidotes to “wordliness,” happily, are quite simple.
First, we must allow for the simple fact that in virtually every language, a single word can have multiple, and sometimes even contradictory, meanings. Using the Victorian language of the King James Version, one can cleave to a spouse (meaning to be stuck like glue), but an animal can have a cloven hoof (split apart into two or more pieces). These two meanings are nearly perfect opposites, yet the word is the same, and those opposite meanings continue to live on in that way in English to this day.
A corollary to this recognition is that, as we attempt to understand any word in Scripture, we must strive to understand how that word fits in contexts ranging from the sentence, to the overall story or argument of which it is a part, to its use within its book or epistle.
Finally, we must shed our pride when we read the Scriptures. There is a certain feeling of superiority to believe that you understand words better than either those who surround you or those who have gone before. This is, however, sinful folly, as Paul points out in 1 Timothy 6:3-4 and 2 Timothy 2:14.
May we all reject the wranglings of “wordliness” for the comfort of godliness.
