This entry initiates a series that will examine the nuances of important concepts in Christianity as represented by the pertinent terms used in the Bible. In general, words are astonishingly slippery. They have connotations: although skinny and slender, for example, denote virtually the same condition, they do not communicate the same thing when applied to one’s girlfriend. The outcomes will differ depending on whether one calls one’s wife plump or voluptuous. Translation from one language to another only complicates the problem of precise communication, of course.

The church regularly uses a number of words as though their definitions are common knowledge. If one digs deeper, however, one soon discovers that Christians fill each of these “formal” terms with inadequate, sometimes idiosyncratic content. “Salvation,” “justice,” and even “love” come to mind as examples. I recall many times in my preaching ministry when people expressed reactions to my sermons as they shook my hand while filing past out the door that clearly indicated my failure to communicate a, or the, central point in my sermon.  I had relied too heavily on one of these “formal” terms without making unmistakably clear what I meant by it. Contemporary Christians are not versed in the ‘original,’ but the problem is not unique to the times: even Jesus had to define both “love” and “neighbor” through the parable of the Good Samaritan.

For most contemporary Christians, who presumably hope to use these terms in a manner consistent with the biblical tradition, the problem of translation compounds the effort. The roots of the biblical concept of “justice,” for example, begin in the Hebrew agrarian, communitarian, shame-honor based culture. In it, the connotations of “justice” share little with contemporary Western notions of punishment and deterrence. Very soon in its history, the church existed in a primarily Hellenistic context, speaking and thinking in Greek. Sometimes, the Hebrew concepts coincided largely with the Greek. Often, however, the church found it necessary to press Hebrew thinking into a Greek medium – with varying degrees of success. At the same time, the early church needed to communicate something new – the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus – and, therefore had to improvise new usages for existing terms and concepts in the Greek language.

Since no translation from any language to any other can successfully convey all the nuances and subtleties of the original, and since contemporary Christians cannot easily imagine themselves in either of the biblical cultures, it comes as no surprise, after all, that many of the English terms used to convey key biblical ideas only approximate them. Indeed, sometimes they carry so little of the original as to point in directions that the authors of the Bible would not have gone.

My explorations of some of these key terms in the weeks to follow will reflect the scholarly admonition of recent decades against the assumption that the “word studies” popular in the “Biblical Theology” movement of the mid-twentieth century constitutes theology eo ipso. Nor will they confuse etymology with meaning: we all use words everyday fully aware of their meaning but clueless as to their etymology.  Nevertheless, the distinctions between what Christians often mean by “peace” and the ideas associated with “peace” in both testaments of the Christian Bible, to take one example, are so great that redefining “peace” – and love and justice and salvation – for contemporary Christians promises to revitalize the life and ministry of the Church.