Thoughts on Discipleship by Dr. W. A. Dillard - HTML preview

WHAT’S IN A WORD?

“Yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.” I Corinthians 14:19.

What is in a name? A rose by any other name would smell the same, but words are meant to discriminate in precise idea identification. Often, terms become polluted.

The United Kingdom has been around many times longer than the U.S. Consequently the extended time produced verbal corruptions and contractions that appear strange to most Americans. Let’s look at a few.

Most states in the U. S. are made up of parcels of land called a county, with the exception of Louisiana which has parishes. In England the term is “shire” and it appears as a suffix to many words denoting a particular region. Of keen interest is the way those names came about. There is “Norfolk” and “Suffolk” both contractions of the original “North Folk” and “South Folk.” It goes on. A river is an “Avon,” a biscuit is a cookie, and a napkin, a serviette.

The hood of a car is a bonnet, and the trunk is a boot.. One must drive on the left side of the road, and to pass a car is to overtake it. One may walk, but not on a sidewalk. It is called a footpath. It goes on!

So, when visiting Cambridge University, curiosity arose as to how the institution of learning derived its name. It seems that a couple of hundred years ago their college of engineering undertook to build a small bridge over an Avon that ran through the campus (most southerners would call it a creek). Using their ingenuity, they built a beautiful wooden bridge out of hundreds of cam-shaped pieces. all without a single fastener. So the university took the name Cambridge as a result. Later their same engineering students were determined to learn how it was done all without fasteners. They took it apart, but were never able to put it together again without using fasteners. The bridge still stands, but not in its original state.

Unlike that are the ways and Words of God: past finding out by natural men, but true, never changing, they hold fast. They are as powerful and plain now as they were thousands of years ago. Moreover, it is the joyous privilege of those who trust in the God of those words to view them from many angles, but they are always in the perfect unity, harmony, and symmetry that graced them when first breathed by the Holy Spirit!

FOR THOUGHT: Do you think language continues to suffer in various cultures because people want to express more with less verbalizing? How does this tendency affect faith? How has it affected paraphrases of the Bible? Do you thing first century Christians would be comfortable with a lot of 21st century terms?