Abandoning the vocabulary of faith

I've been meaning for some time to write about Michael Spencer's thoughts on what happens when Christians "abandon the vocabulary of faith." There is a reason the church has used a distinctive vocabulary to describe the relationship between God and man. Giving up that vocabulary for the sake of seeker sensitivity has greave consequences. Here's Michael:

When the history of modern evangelicalism is written, I predict that the abandonment of the vocabulary of faith will loom large as an explanation for the demise of Christianity in American culture. Despite what the Willow Creek-ologists tell us, "seeker sensitive" Christianity is not a surging cultural force, but a movement leading masses of Christians into retreat and cultural surrender. Islam is surging in America, and you will not come across many "seeker-sensitive" mosques. Cultures and sub-cultures that retain their distinctive vocabularies retain their distinctive identities. Just ask rap musicians, who don't feel the need to talk like everyone else to sell their music. If you don't get it, you're going to have to ask. Meanwhile, the slogan of American evangelicalism might be "Prepare to be assimilated."

What I find stunning is the inability of the advocates of vocabulary abandonment to see that there is a genuine difference between a church that proclaims a message of sin, justification and redemption and a church that seeks to produce the feeling of "a big hug from God."

The vocabulary of faith includes words such as "Trinity," "justification," "sin," and "imputed righteousness." The church has struggled through the centuries to define, refine and sustain
that language of faith. Giving that language up in an overzealous effort to speak on the level of the lost can be costly, Michael points out:

I will put forward another view: The Christian vocabulary should be fighting words. It should purposely be contrary to the vocabulary of the dominant culture and it should never submit to any vocabulary but itself. When we desert the vocabulary of scripture, and I would also include the vocabulary of the church as a community of faith, we surrender our essence and our content to the culture for dilution or extinction.

Amen.