Semi-Random Musings (49)

We evangelicals love to use words long past their best-before date. Perhaps the reading material we share in common influences us to sound alike, or maybe we hear other people using a word and pick it up by osmosis.

Here’s one I’d be very happy never to hear again: winsome. It’s not in any translation of the Bible I’ve ever owned, and I’m pretty sure we don’t need it to be.

Have you ever heard anyone but a Christian say it? I certainly have not.

Yet I hear it all the time, not only from older believers — whose use of the occasional antiquated, non-communicative in-group cliché may be forgiven, or at least grudgingly tolerated on the grounds we can’t help ourselves — but from the next couple of generations as well, many of whom insist on perpetuating it for reasons that mystify me and would probably mystify them if they had ever given the matter a single thought. In the last year or two, I have been repeatedly encouraged from the platform to deliver the gospel to a Christ-rejecting world in a “winsome” manner.

Really? Hang on a minute and pass the dictionary.

For all the efforts that we have made in the last decade or two to update our hymnbooks, ditch our “Thees” and “Thous”, and find our way into the last century from the 1800s, winsome has somehow escaped our dragnet. It’s still out there in the world, driving me crazy every time I hear it. I’m not sure even a fraction of the general population understands what it means.

Merriam-Webster online lists “cheerful”, “bright” and “optimistic” as the strongest synonyms for winsome. “Buoyant”, “sunny” and “cheery” follow right behind. Thesaurus.com lists “cute” and “delightful” among their top five. Is that what we’re trying to communicate? Are Christians to engage with the unsaved after the manner of the bubbly, vacant California high school girls in movies from the nineties? Surely not. More importantly, did Jesus, Peter or Paul take the gospel to an unbelieving world in anything remotely approximating that way? The question answers itself. If it doesn’t, maybe it’s time to re-read the book of Acts.

That’s the problem with hearing and repeating obsolete words we have picked up from an in-group and heard used only in an echo chamber. Nobody actually checks to see if he is using the language correctly. If we mean “appealing” or “engaging”, perhaps we should just say that instead. Those words have the virtue of being broadly understandable. And, heaven forfend, if we really do mean “cute”, perhaps we should just say that so somebody can call us on it.

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A debate is currently raging at one of my favorite Christian blogs. We might call it “If you could only save one”. Basically, it posits a situation in which both your wife and child are drowning and you have insufficient time or resources to save both. Which loved one should the Christian rescue? (Spoiler alert: Your answer should probably not depend on which family member most closely conformed to your fondest desires this week.) Scripture after scripture is trotted out to advance this position or that, and to insist the other side is wrong.

The endless back-and-forth on the question reminds me of my hatred of hypotheticals. The theological controversies of my youth were full of them. Learning to refuse the impulse to pose or answer them was the cure to all kinds of pointless irritation and needless insoluble conflicts. I still fail occasionally, but I try to keep the principle in mind: NO hypothesizing! The vast majority of imaginative scenarios prove nothing and help nobody.

Some crises you can (and should) prepare for in life. Some crises you can’t (and probably shouldn’t). In the case of a wife and child drowning simultaneously, I’m fairly confident it’s a problem one in ten zillion Christians will ever encounter. If you or I are ever among the unfavorably chosen, as in so many crises, we will not sit around and ponder theology while both our favorite people are on their last gasp. As men, I like to hope we will react. Then, if it’s genuinely impossible to save both, we will save the one we can and lose the one we can’t, and we’ll spend the rest of our lives asking the Lord to help us when we find ourselves obsessing about what might have happened if we’d done the opposite.

See the problem? There’s no win there. So don’t buy trouble.

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I’ve mentioned before in this space my affection and appreciation for astrophysicist Sarah Salviander and her improbable and wonderful journey to faith in Christ. This week she cropped up again in my inbox.

Sarah has not had an easy life. She has struggled with cancer as many as four times, if I have it right. She also loves things I don’t care about even slightly, like the Star Wars movie universe. But because I respect her intelligence and faith, I worked my way through this series of three posts here, here, and here, finding in them a connection I didn’t anticipate. To the pure all things are pure, I guess.

No, I know it. I am mystified by what others make of things I trivialize, but there is something sacred and worth preserving in the effort to find Christ in everything that crosses our paths and to make all that is good in this world about him, because it is. I share these posts here because we may have the odd Star Wars fan around. I put the emphasis unerringly and unreservedly on the word “odd”.