The Meaning of Words

The Pastor's Letter
(July-August 1973)

Dear Friends,

We live in an age when the meaning of words doesn't really seem to matter very much, and when the accepted meaning of terms has been so violated that it is hardly possible to tell when a person might be agreeing or disagreeing with you. Thus we find that an old-fashioned world like “obscene”, which used to stand only for those things associated with sexual uncleanness, is now bandied about and applied in a hundred-and-one different contexts, so that “the housing problem,” or “the famine in India,” are both looked upon and expressed as being “obscene”.

The devil is at work, of course, for if we learn to view almost anything as being obscene, then it will be a but a short time when we come to accept nothing as being obscene. There is nothing new, of course, in the process, but we would probably all have to acknowledge that it has become, and is becoming, more and more widespread in our own day and age.

As is sadly true in a great many areas of the church's life and thinking, what has become fashionable in the world soon becomes acceptable to the church; and this meaningless use of words and terms gathers volume, it seems, with every passing day. Again, as in the world, this is no new thing for the church, and we find even an ultra-modernist like Bultmann using phrases like “the conversion experience,” and “being born again.” Needless to say, his use of such terms stands in complete violation, not only to the scriptural meaning of them, but even to the historically-accepted usage of the words.

Now, at this present time, we have seen emerge one such violation and misuse of accepted terminology when people choose to describe their doctrinal position and standing as being “Reformed”, or even “Calvinistic”. It only requires a very few words of conversation with many of these professed “Calvinists” to show that they have either totally misunderstood what is meant by being doctrinally reformed, or else, that they have some motive for latching on to what appears to be the new hallmark of intellectual acceptability or “soundness”. As far as the “intellectual” part is concerned, there is, in fact, hardly another system of theology that more insults the natural mind of man. How could it do anything else? If it is as Biblical as we would claim it is, then nothing should be less acceptable to the carnal mind of man which “receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God,” because thy are “foolishness” to it. To embrace “Calvinism” for the sake of intellectual satisfaction is, in fact, a complete denial of its very nature which is calculated to make the wisdom of this world as foolishness in the eyes of the Lord. We wouldn't for one minute deny the satisfaction of mind, as well as of heart, enjoyed in the great doctrines of grace, but such enjoyment is only indulged in with the “renewed mind” and has as its end only the glory of the God that the doctrines so clearly display.

Again, as far as “doctrinal soundness” goes, we would hold that the doctrines sometimes called “Calvinist” or “Reformed” are the very essence of biblical truth. But, again, we would appeal for a right and honest understanding of the content of the words and terms before they are ever used by Christians at large. We must be in no mistake that to refer to ourselves as “Reformed” or “Calvinist” in the historically-accepted sense of the terms is to hold a view of God, and man, and salvation, which is in complete and total contradiction to what has become the normally accepted evangelical orthodoxy of our day. Right at the centre of Reformed and Calvinist thinking and practice is a worship of God that stands at the very opposite end of the pole to the modern man-centred type of church “meeting” which is calculated to “get that decision” at any cost – either to God or His Word! The Reformed doctrine of salvation presents man as a creature who is in complete alienation to God his creator; he “fell” in Adam in such a way that he was totally robbed of any “saving” motives or desires within himself, and he is “blind”, and “deaf”, and “dead”, and unwilling and incapable of contributing one ounce to the salvation that will make him at peace with his God. Calvinists (in the honest use of the term) believe that God – without being influenced in any way by what men would do or would not do – elected a certain number of hell-deserving sinners to eternal life in Christ His Son, and that Son died on the Cross to procure all the benefits of that election. He died only and solely for these; He didn't die for any other; He died for His Church, His Bride, His people, and when He “finished the work” that his Father gave him to do, He then sent forth the Holy Spirit Who, through the preaching of the gospel, irresistibly “calls” that elect number – purchased by the precious blood of Christ – into the glorious “embracing” of that Gospel. Once “called”, then they are “kept by the power” of this God of their salvation so that they “shall never perish” and, by the grace of God, learn to sing here below what they will eternally sing in the Glory, “Salvation to our God who sitteth upon the throne.”

This, then – if words mean anything at all, and are to be used with any degree of honesty at all – is what is meant by “Reformed” or “Calvinist”, or indeed, “the Doctrines of Grace.” We are reminded of what E. J. Poole-Connor wrote with regards to the old Liberalism of his day that was beginning to take up the terms of evangelicalism, for the principle of his statement holds good in the present context; “For latecomers,” he wrote, “to take up a word consecrated by long association to a particular form of teaching and to give to it a meaning wholly at variance with its original content, is not only ethically improper, but lays the offender open to the suspicion of seeking to disguise his own belief. Let there at least be frankness.” With that we absolutely concur.

If a person has no real heart or mind for those things which are at the very basis of the Reformed and Calvinistic doctrine of salvation, then, let him not take the words, terms, and phrases and use them and abuse them to his own ends. One of the disturbing elements that has also emerged is this, that whereas, it used to be stigma enough to be classified as “A Calvinist”, it seems that the new term of abuse for those who simply hold what the Bible teaches with regards to God and man will be “Hyper-Calvinists.” We are not ignorant of the same devilish process, however, as mentioned earlier concerning the corruption of words in general: when there was but a handful preaching and teaching the Biblical doctrines of salvation, it was enough for the devil to have them branded as “Calvinists.” Now that “Calvinism” has gained somewhat, he must adopt another ploy, so he will make “all the Lord's people Calvinists,” and drum up a new stigma for those who will preach the truth as it is in Christ Jesus the Lord – namely, “Hyper-calvinists.” “Oh yes, we are all Calvinists,” says the average evangelical thinking today, “but” ‘these others’ are ‘Hyper-calvinists’.” How sad to see the Lord's people employed as the devil's dupes as he turns his stigmatising wheel once again in our own day.

But, the course is clear; if it be Hyper-calvinist to hold to those things already mentioned, then hyper-calvinist we will be and gladly accept the term. We will preach hyper, pray hyper, and govern our church hyper, for we perceive that this new hyper-calvinism is only the old ordinary calvinism under the new stigma given to it, and that the old calvinism was only the old gospel of a glorious and Sovereign God.

Yours Sincerely,
   W.J. Seaton