Being Clearly and Positively Evangelical

I wonder whether you have ever played ‘The Dictionary Game’. On holiday earlier this year I was reintroduced to this very simple, amusing, and brain-stretching pastime. All you need are a good number of participants, some paper and pens, and, of course, a dictionary. One player looks through the dictionary to find a word which is unknown to the others. Each player is then invited to write a dictionary-style definition for that word. The definitions are collected; the dictionary’s answer is added to them; they are all shuffled and read out loud. Then everyone guesses which is the correct definition.

When we played the game with friends earlier this year, there were moments of near hysterical laughter – some of the definitions were bizarre, some outrageous. It was all good fun. Of course it is even more fun when one or more of the players give up trying to guess the dictionary’s answer and just go for the laughs.

But sometimes in real life I get the feeling people are still playing ‘The Dictionary Game’. Some very important words are being stretched beyond the bounds of all credibility. You have recognized the same thing, no doubt. Sometimes, of course, it does not matter that a word is being redefined. After all, ours is a living, developing language. None of us really wants to go back to Elizabethan English. But at other times much, much more is involved; the redefinition matters.

If I am not mistaken there is a concerted attempt being made at present to redefine what it means to be an evangelical Christian. A number of prominent people around the world are trying to broaden the term, to encompass a variety of perspectives which were once quite alien to evangelical thought and practice. Read more