I read in two recent news magazines that the Oxford University Press editors of the newly released and updated Oxford Junior Illustrated Dictionary tried hard in this latest edition to reflect Britain’s modern, multi-cultural milieu. Accordingly, new words to the volume include blog, broadband, celebrity, and voicemail. Some evidently antiquated words that did not make the cut this time: empire, monarch, nun, and bishop.
I found particularly noteworthy the decision of these esteemed editors to omit another word - heretofore a rather important word for understanding human nature and the reality of the world: sin. While a dictionary for children and youth is necessarily not able define every word in the language, the decision to eliminate sin is as telling as it is perhaps unsurprising in our day and age.
Several years ago, Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas made this statement during a discussion between Duke University faculty and seminarians of that institution’s Divinity School where Hauerwas teaches: “The people who have the best background for becoming pastors in today’s church are high school foreign language teachers.”
“What?” his audience asked in puzzlement.
Hauerwas went on to explain that the most important job for church leaders in our time is to engage in “language instruction,” to try to help people learn a new way of naming the world, to teach a vocabulary that is distinctly Christian.
Of course, the presumption of Hauerwas’ remarks is that contemporary culture has lost the unique Christian language and grammar for speaking of the way the world really is. We live in a time having little familiarity with the vocabulary that so thoroughly shaped the consciousness of earlier generations of Christians. The new Oxford Junior Illustrated Dictionary merely reflects the times and continues down this path.
I would argue that to lose the language and vocabulary of biblical doctrine is to lose our direction to God as Christians. I am put in mind of another quotation, this one from Henri Nouwen: “Doctrines are not alien formulations which we must adhere to but the documentation of the most profound human experiences which, transcending time and place, are handed over from generation to generation as a light in our darkness.”
As far as sin is concerned, to downplay its gravity – or to deny the word altogether! – is the seed that gives life to all other sins: to be unaware or refuse to hear that we are in need of redemption from sin. It is simply part of our natures not to believe that we are in need of grace as much as we are and as much as the Bible and Christian teaching plainly tell us. To minimize sin is therefore to minimize God’s saving work in Jesus Christ. To remove sin from our dictionaries would seem to represent a cultural failure of Nouwen’s call to hand down “the most profound human experiences” transcending time and place to the next generation.
It is in the nature of sin that it leads us to denial about its reality, as this new dictionary unwittingly demonstrates. When foundational Christian words get excised from our vernacular, the church’s need for foreign language teachers grows greater still.