Christian Words and Christian Meaning
By Ian McKerracher
I am a logophile. I am also a lexophile and a philologist. I have even been accused of logomania. All these words mean one thing; I love words. I like looking them up and finding their meanings. I like investigating their origins and the history of their usage (etymology), and I like using rare words appropriately, under the delusion that my hearers appreciate my effort to stretch their vocabulary. Full disclosure? They don’t! But I persist. I love to multiply ways of describing what I think, see and feel. Did I mention that I love words!
I also love Jesus and enjoy creating word pictures to describe his work in my life. In every realm of service I want my words to count for His glory, to increase understanding of the nature of our Great God and Saviour (For example: I would never describe the love of God as “reckless”). I want to serve God with my deeds AND my words. May we all aspire to do nothing less. In this blog I will concentrate on “religious”, “spiritual”, “mystical”, and “supernatural.” Multiple ideas and meanings emanate from these terms, but I will focus on where they intersect with biblical Christianity.
When sharing their faith with outsiders, many Christians have heard someone say, “I am spiritual but not religious.” And funnily enough, you often hear similar statements inside the church, exempli gratia (e.g.), “I’m not religious, I just love the Lord.” In the lexicon of Evangelicals religion is an uncomfortable word, mainly because they yearn to emphasise the relationship aspect of faith while downplaying the formal aspects of worship.
In the world, however, spirituality is utterly subjective; and the “spiritual" can mean whatever a person wants it to mean. Anyone can claim to be spiritual and no one can say otherwise. My observation is that most who wish to be considered spiritual are at a loss when asked to explain. In my view they have likely confused spirituality with emotion. If they feel deeply, they must be spiritual, right? But when the issue is building a relationship with the living God, feelings are a poor foundation for anything meaningful.
Being genuinely spiritual is only possible for those who have positively encountered the Spirit of God in ways prescribed by the Word of God. Pretending that subjective feelings inspired by the beauty of nature are in the same category as a direct encounter with God the Creator will not suffice. Christians are called to walk in the Spirit in such a way that we no longer fulfil the lusts of the flesh (Galatians 5:16). When you meet genuinely spiritual people, you will find them curiously specific about their faith. They “know the One [they] have believed in,” (II Tim. 1:12) and have full confidence that the One “who started a good work [in them] will carry it on to completion” (Phil. 1:6).
Christians also know that some spirituality is less than holy. For example, I remember a service call I once made as a plumber where the dried lizard hanging from the front door knob was my first clue there was something unusual about the inhabitant. As I worked, the lady engaged me in conversation about “spiritual things.” She was a Wiccan who wanted to control her surroundings by incantations and magic—using only “white magic,” of course. To my surprise, she agreed with me when I brought up sin and redemption through Christ. But then I realised she defined those words differently. She considered herself a spiritual person, but when I left she was still without Christ (though not outside His influence. Heh, heh, heh). Like many others, she had confused “spiritual” with its cousin, “mystical.”
Mysticism is spirituality for college graduates, or, to be more precise, for those who wish to be seen as having risen above the common herd, of knowing more than you. Mysticism is at the heart of the “Mystery religions” of history. The mystic believes one can find salvation by accumulating special knowledge about the spiritual world. In the past such people were called Gnostics, but today’s Gnostics are more accurately described as followers of “Scientism.” They believe that science is the only pathway to truth. Unfortunately for our lab-coated friends, they suffer from the same proclivity to sin as us proles, a fact they dismiss because it isn’t knowledge they want.
We now come to the final term I set up for scrutiny; “supernatural.” One definition is “of, or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible, observable universe.” Heady stuff, going beyond the “visible observable universe!” Until you realise that just thinking about this sort of thing is, in itself, invisible, unobservable, and outside the physical universe. It appears that in our minds we are continuously engaged with the supernatural. Naturalists have tried to reduce thinking to random atomic collisions in our brains, because their worldview will not allow it to be anything else. They are, after all, naturalists, and anything supernatural is beyond the vision of their mandate.
It turns out that when the discussion is about spirituality, mysticism and the supernatural, Christians have all three in their wheelhouse. Because the Spirit of God lives within (Rom. 8:9), we are spiritual beings in the only true sense of the term. And you can easily see the difference made by the Spirit’s presence. For instance, try loving your enemies apart from His gracious, transforming work. Because there are human beings who are empowered by the Spirit, the world is a better place.
We can consider ourselves mystical too, in the narrow definition of our “having the nature of an individual's direct subjective communion with the ultimate reality of God.” Of course, a personal, knowable, and involved Deity must influence our lives if we are to be considered Christian in any meaningful way. Outside of His involvement, we’ve got nothing of lasting importance. In fact, without the sense of God guiding our lives we are just bugs, one of eight billion tiny mites crawling around on a small planet lost in an endless ocean of space. The mystical experience of knowing God, having a relationship with the Creator of the Universe, and finding He loves us, lifts us from that overwhelming atomization of being. There is no life like it.
Finally, by the same metric we can be seen as supernatural beings. With God as an element in any equation, our expectations are almost limitless. Though He is constrained by His character, love, and holy purposes, He still finds the resources to provide us with supernatural life. Miracles are not out of the question because we have been freed from what Mike D’Virgilio, in his book Uninvented, called “the anti-supernatural bias.” C.S. Lewis said, “Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”
We live in a supernatural world filled with spiritual reality and mystical truth, centring on the God who created it all and set it in motion, who sees “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10). He was the One who arranged our life experiences, bringing us into the amazing conversation between the Creator and created, so we can walk in the Spirit, live beyond our naturalness, and search out the mysteries of Christ forever. As Christians, we can live, move, and find our being in the bigger story of God’s purposes.
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