10 january 2015
A Friendly Reminder Regarding Literary Evangelism
Before you use a term in sharing the Gospel message through literature, you have to be careful in doing so. Before using it, you have to be sure of what it means exactly. It's even wiser to first define the term properly for the readers before the further use of it. Otherwise, an audience might just get uninterested, seeing that you seem to be ignorant about what you are talking about.
As a case in point, I read this post in a Christian forum about capitalizing the word "God" and every word that specifically refer to God because "God" is not a noun. While I also believe that every word - noun or pronoun - that specifically refers to God should be capitalize for the sake of formality, I think the post's author should have been careful with the statement "'God' is not a noun". Well, I don't know, but for me, the word is basically a noun; a proper noun, to be precise. Noun is properly defined as "the name of a person, place, thing, or an idea." Now, there are basically two types of noun: common and proper. A common noun is the general name of the entity while proper noun is the specific name of an entity. For example, 'man' is the common noun for an male adult human, while 'Phillip Joshua' is the proper noun (specific name) that refers to a specific man.
Another case in point is about a Christian vlogger who hastily generalized us fundamentalists as "worshipers of doctrines". While I do not deny the reality about some of us who unwittingly worship doctrines, it seems that he only looked at one side of the picture. It seems to me that he is unaware that among the fundamentalists, there are Christians who genuinely love Jesus and in their love of Him, do firmly uphold the fundamentals of the true Christian faith. I definitely agree with the most of his ideas (actually, I learned a lot from him). The only problem is, he unwittingly misused the term 'fundamentalists' to refer to only those who worship the teachings rather than the Teacher.
The point is this: if a Christian is to share something about God, he ought to be wise in choosing the words that he uses in communicating the message. Because if he is not careful, his audience might use anything that he says against him.
- Shim'onai :D