“Modernists will usually betray pretty clearly that they use Christian terminology before a pagan background . . . Modernism is the use of Christian terms for the purpose of conveying pagan thought . . . All the words that we daily use and give a Christian meaning must now receive a pagan meaning.
“What Do You Mean?” The Banner, Vol. 67
This is called linguistic deception and we are seeing it ALL THE TIME now. Linguistic deception treats words like eggs which can be cracked open and emptied of their content and then filled with new content. What these people do is they empty words used by Christians that have traditional meanings and then fill them with other meaning.
This is what J. Gresham Machen was fighting in his classic “Christianity and Liberalism.” The premise in that book was that the Liberals were using the same language as the Christians in the Church but they were filling it with such utterly different meaning that the words used were no longer the same words that the Christians had used for centuries. Van Til himself wrote a book titled “Christianity and Barthianism” which teased out the same theme only as applied to Neo-Orthodoxy. Machen complained about this linguistic deception in his “Christianity and Liberalism,” continuously. He complained that Modernists (Liberals) where cracking open the words, emptying out the meaning, and then filling the words with new meaning, while still insisting that they were “Christian,” when in point of fact they were liars, just as the R2K chaps, the FV chaps and the Full Preterist chaps are liars when they do the very same thing.
We see this w/ R2K for example. All R2K fanboys will affirm that Jesus is Lord, but eventually one learns that the word “Lord” for R2K fanboys means “Lord,” except for where Jesus is only “kind of Lord in a spiritual sense.” When the R2K fanboys likewise talk about “covenant” they have so redefined the word “covenant” that it no longer bears any resemblance to previous Reformed definitions of “covenant.” When the R2K “geniuses” talk about God’s law it is a law so redefined that the Westminster divines would never recognize God’s Law vis-a-vis how they dealt with God’s Law.
We see this w/ Federal Vision types. They assert “Justification by faith alone,” and then they teach that there are two justifications and not all who are initially justified are finally justified. What’s the difference between the those who are initially justified and also finally justified and those who are who initially justified but not also finally justified? Well, what else can the difference be but the contributory dynamic of our works to that final justification?
We see this technique in those “Christians” denouncing “Christian Nationalism” insisting that a truly Christian nation has tolerance in the public square for all the gods and that the God of the Bible should not be given preeminence. By tacking in such a way they have along the way redefined idolatry as well.
Perhaps it is the case that some of the examples above are not epistemologically self conscious about their lying and so are merely guilty of being useful idiots. However, there are always some who know what they are doing. They know they are playing fast and loose with the language. They know they are being deceptive. They know that they are offering up a stew that would have never passed in centuries past for Christianity and yet they just keep serving it up.
I don’t envy these types on that final day.
