by Travis Montgomery
Do Christians really need to use words like “ontology,” “impassibility,” and “quiddity”? Can’t we just stick with Bible words? Isn’t jargon simply linguistic arrogance?
Even highly educated and highly skilled scholars in the field of biblical studies will argue from time to time that Christians are better off avoiding theological jargon. Who can deny that all Christians ought to read the Scriptures more? Who can deny that systematic theologians have sometimes veered from biblical truth? Better to use Bible words for Bible things, right?
This sentiment has a certain sort of appeal to ‘low-church’ Protestants like me. After all, Baptists are Bible people, even when our study of Scripture leads us to reject a widely held, historically entrenched belief or practice.
But good exegetes of Scripture, Baptist or otherwise, are not therefore simpleminded anti-intellectuals.
As a student of exegesis, an admirer of linguistics, and a believer in God’s inerrant Word, I have to insist that sound exegesis of Scripture necessitates the use of technical theological terms.
Here are three reasons why students of the Scriptures should embrace theological jargon:
1. The Word-Concept Fallacy and Semantic Range
We commit a multitude of exegetical fallacies when we fail to distinguish between word and concept. Students of biblical studies have been rightly warned of the ‘word-concept fallacy’ by the likes of D. A. Carson,[1] James Barr,[2] and John Barclay.[3] Is every instance of charis referring to what we might call “saving grace”? What, then, do we make of Paul’s claim in Rom 12 to have received a very unique “grace” that makes him the Romans’ teacher (v. 3)? Or that all Christians have “gifts (charismata) that differ according to the grace (charin) given to us” (v. 6)?
Every word has a semantic range, a variety of potential meanings that depend upon its usage and context. Not every instance of a word refers to the same concept. So, we ought to train ourselves and those whom we disciple not to assume a ‘technical’ meaning for every use of a ‘churchy’ word.
The flipside to this reality is that using technical words that are not found in common English versions of Scripture actually benefits our exegesis of particular passages. We are less likely to mistakenly assume the presence of a theological concept in a text if the concept is not named in that text. We exegete Scripture more carefully when we modify theological terms with adjectives (e.g., saving grace or effectual calling) or use completely extrabiblical language (maybe Latin, as in quiddity).
We especially note the acute danger of the word-concept fallacy when relating a given word or passage for our theology proper. God has revealed His ontological nature and immanent relations in Scripture remotely; creation, history, and Scripture more immediately reveal the economy of the Persons of the Trinity, God’s “outward works.” While the economic Trinity does “mirror” the ontological Trinity,[4] we should tread lightly when our minds move from economy to ontology or from metaphor to metaphysic. Figurative uses of a word carry a far more narrow, idiomatic semantic range, making the possibility of the word-concept fallacy all the more possible. For example, for a Christian to be like a child that desire milk is good in the sense that we should never graduate from the Gospel (1 Pet 2:2) and bad in the sense that we should not need to be constantly reinventing and rethinking basic truths (Heb 5:13).
So, when Arius read that Jesus was the ‘begotten’ (monogenes) Son of the Father (John 1:14) and assumed that there was therefore “a time when He was not,” he assumed that certain elements of literal ‘begetting’ should be applied metaphorically to the Son’s ‘begetting.’ In literal begetting, there is a time before the begetting in which the begotten does not yet exist. But is this the only concept that the word can communicate? Is this the only element of literal ‘begetting’ that could meaningfully be applied to the Son in a metaphorical way? No! The organic, familial, generative, and imaging elements of begetting are equally meaningful and possible, and a metaphorical instance of monogenes could communicate any of these. As Alexander of Constantinople wrote of John 1:14 against Arius, John “intended to show that the Father and the Son are two things inseparable the one from the other.”[5] Alexander rightly narrowed the metaphorical range of monogenes by its collocation with another metaphor: the Son is “in the bosom” of the Father (John 1:18 KJV). Familial unity and closeness are John’s point, not sequence of time.
Sound exegetes need to avoid the word-concept fallacy and rightly narrow semantic range by adopting theological jargon like that of the Nicene Creed: the Son is homoousios (the same substance) as the Father, “begotten not made.” In a sense, Arius could claim to be more ‘biblical’ than the Pro-Nicene theologians because he was using biblical language while they were ‘going beyond’ the exact wording of the text. Yet the addition of extrabiblical terms did not impose a theological system onto John 1:14; they defended the right reading of John 1:14 in context.
2. The Importance of Discourse for Meaning
You don’t even have to leave John 1 to see that Arius was misinterpreting ‘monogenes’: “[W]ithout [the Son] was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). The metaphor of ‘begetting’ could not have meant what Arius claimed in the context. This is a basic linguistic concept: meaning is not found strictly at the level of grammar or syntax but discourse. In other words, sentences and paragraphs and books and testaments and canons communicate with more clarity than single words. Take baptism as an example. Christians understand and practice baptism in light of the Bible’s teaching and instruction. In this instance, it’s worthwhile for Baptists to appeal to the basic meaning of the Greek baptizo: “immerse.” But a simple word study of baptizo in the NT and LXX warns us again of the word-concept fallacy: baptizo and its variants are not always used in a technical sense to refer to the Christian rite of baptism. The word can be used metaphorically (Isa 21:4 LXX; Lk 12:50; 1 Cor 10:2) or can refer to “washings” that do not imply a full-body immersion (Mark 7:4; Lk 11:38; Heb 6:2; 9:10).
Even if baptizo happens to be a word with a fairly stable “base meaning” (unlike English “trunk”), this meaning only gets us so far toward a doctrine or practice. The immersionist view of Christian baptism is neither won or undone by a word study of baptizo because immersion by itself is not the sum and substance of Christian baptism. The word “credobaptism” does not appear in Scripture, and there is no single verse in Scripture that explicitly states, “Thou shalt only baptize professing believers by immersion” (which is, in part, why differences over baptism are not first-order disagreements). Credobaptists are not credobaptists merely because of the meaning of a word but because of our interpretation of the Bible’s manifold teaching. Yes, we study passages that utilize baptizo, but we also study the promises of the New Covenant, the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament, the practice of the early church, and more. In other words, we build doctrine and practice on a reciprocal study of both the parts and the whole. What’s more, we don’t baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit because the lexicon tells us so. We baptize in the one Triune Name because Jesus commanded that we do so in a sentence (Matt 28:19).
Consider the benefit of theological jargon here. Like “credobaptism,” the word “Trinity” is also absent from the Bible. The concept is sometimes implied in single verses (as in Matt 28:19). But ultimately, the doctrine of the Trinity is not founded entirely on these kinds of specific instances but as a “good and necessary consequence” of the whole counsel of Scripture (WCF, 1.6). This being the case, the Trinity is present in all God-breathed Scripture, even where the doctrine of the Trinity is not directly implied or explicated. There is no single word in any particular part of the Bible that describes and defends the truly biblical doctrine of the Trinity. Thus, a ‘canonical discourse analysis’ necessitates the extrabiblical, technical term “Trinity.” Theological jargon is necessitated by a sound study of Scripture and for fidelity to Scripture’s Author.
3. The Inerrancy of Scripture
There are few (zero?) solid biblical scholars who would disagree with the need for terms like “saving grace,” “credobaptism,” or “Trinity.” But what about words like “impassibility”? For some, this Latin word represents pagan Greek thought and has nothing at all to do with the sufficient, authoritative, inerrant Word (especially the parts written in Hebrew!). But it is precisely because Scripture is inerrant that sound exegetes need theological jargon.
Impassibility is the doctrine that teaches that God is “without passions,” meaning that He does not fluctuate or vary emotionally, either in response to external stimuli or by His own decision. One might object that the Scriptures plainly teach the passibility of God. The Scriptures do say that God regrets and is grieved (Gen 6:6), and God directly states, “My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender” (Hos 11:8). These statements, taken at face value, imply the passibility of God. The systematician Thomas Aquinas, anticipating this objection, responds, “These things are said of God in Scripture metaphorically.”[6] More specifically, these are anthropopathisms. That is, they describe the emotional life of God as if He were a human.[7] They say something about the nature of the perfections of God by comparing that nature to the created things to which God is said to react.
Impassibility is an easy target for the jargon-wary. Is this not a theological cop-out? Are we not undermining Scripture and unduly minimizing the mystery of it all with our extrabiblical terms? Should we not use Bible words?
But if we avoid the arguments of impassibilists like Aquinas, we miss one very important Bible word: Not.
We read in Numbers 23:19 that “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.” So, we are faced with a choice: Either God contradicts Himself in His Word or we have misunderstood it. If we are sound exegetes who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture (as sound exegetes do), we must reevaluate the ‘plain meaning’ of these passages. Rather than undertaking this task as if we are rogue explorers discovering an abandoned civilization of ages past, we do well to consider how previous travelers, like Thomas and others, have synthesized these passages—and that consideration often means learning their jargon.
These exegetes discerned that the Scriptures describe God either apophatically (what God is not) or cataphatically (what God is). What the Scriptures say of God apophatically lead one to reject the idea of divine passibility.[8] So why should the negative take precedence? These negative statements of Scripture are to be considered before the positive, they argue, because if the Creator God is to be anything, He must be distinct from His creation.[9] His quiddity, who He is in Himself, cannot be known by us. He has “no form” (Deut 4:12, 15), and thus we must never take the truth that He is in a sense like something and turn it into a likeness; that equivalence is the definition of idolatry (Exod 20:4).[10]
What about the positive statements then? Are we picking and choosing which passages to believe? No, there is a genuine revelation and valuable meaning in the positive statements of Scripture concerning God’s nature and character. What the Scriptures say of God cataphatically, they say in metaphor. Some of those metaphors provide positive forms of the apophatic statements. For instance, the psalmist calls God a “rock” (Psa 18:2). What is said apophatically (that God does not change) must be stated cataphatically through metaphor. As Stephen Charnock has written, “As we cannot speak to God as gods, but as men, so we cannot understand him speaking to us as a God, unless he condescends to speak to us like a man.”[11] How else could we know the Great “I AM” (Ex 3:14)?
If we believe that all God’s Word is inerrant, we have to synthesize the claims that God never changes with the claims that He does, in some sense, change. All of us, at least so long as we intend to uphold the rationality of Scripture and the possibility of a true knowledge of God, have to apply some kind of logical schema to this synthesis, whether we develop it explicitly (and hold it consistently) or not.
We would be inexcusably amiss as exegetes if we interpreted the claim that “God is light” literally (1 John 1:5). And we are half-baked exegetes when we miss the meaning of God’s ‘lightlikeness’ in light of the negative (and, therefore, more direct) claim that God has “no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17).
Embracing Jargon for Christ’s Sake
There is a genuine benefit to distinguishing between theological disciplines like biblical studies and systematic theology. But the academics who contribute to each of these disciplines must do more than pay lip service to the benefits of the others. If we love the written Word of God, as sound exegetes do, we will collectively pursue all kinds of beneficial studies and individually encourage those outside our areas of expertise. There is much good work yet to be done in biblical studies areas like textual criticism, historical backgrounds, epigraphy, grammar, lexicography, inner-biblical exegesis, and discourse analysis. And each of these sub-disciplines depends on and benefits from the use of technical language in order to provide clarity and promote scholarly conversation.
Might we consider the benefit to the Body of Christ to distinguishing between word and concept, recognizing the validity of “good and necessary” implications of canonical discourse, and synthesizing the language of Scripture in keeping with its inerrancy? Sound exegetes will do well to both learn and love theological jargon.
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[1] D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1984).
[2] James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1961).
[3] John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).
[4] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation, Vol 2, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 318.
[5] Alexander of Constantinople, Epistles on the Arian Heresy and the Deposition of Arius, 1.4. CCEL.
[6] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Vol 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, n.d.), I.9.1.3.
[7] Stephen Charnock, The Complete Works of Stephen Charnock, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh; London; Dublin: James Nichol; James Nisbet and Co.; W. Robertson; G. Herbert, 1864–1866), 402.
[8] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation, Vol 2, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 153.
[9] Ronald S. Baines and Richard Barcellos, et. al., Confessing the Impassible God: The Biblical, Classical, and Confessional Doctrine of Divine Impassibility (Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2015), 74.
[10] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Vol 2, 33.
[11] Stephen Charnock, Complete Works, Vol 1 401.