Martoia: You’re tapping into the most important question. As I understand it there are a couple of solutions that we have. One is to do what you just mentioned – to take the language that we currently use and reclaim it. Let’s redefine that language so people are really clear of what we are saying, and rehabilitate it. That is one approach: to reclaim and rehabilitate.

I am not convinced that approach is very effective. Over the past number of years – and I am talking decades here – it seems like for all of our efforts to reclaim things we haven’t made much headway in public discourse. For instance, Ken Taylor came along in the late ’70s and develops the Living Bible that will not just reclaim the language but really actually alter the language. So two things happen. The hearer hears things that they may not have buckets or containers for – not have definitional phrases for – so that the author has the opportunity to help the reader along and redefine the language for the person.

This is exactly what we have with Eugene Peterson’s The Message. Instead of calling the book The Gospel he decided to call it The Message. This seems to be an illustration of the second tact: what if in our efforts to redefine this language so that people get it, we also use some different containers, some different buckets, so that we don’t have all the negative freight that we have to sort through before we finally get to the punch line.

Of course when this comes to preaching, if we had four hours on Sunday mornings to explain to people what we are trying to preach about that would be a rather lengthy task but we don’t have that. We are also swimming up stream tremendously when it comes to us thinking through how we communicate biblical concepts in this era – for example, when we might use the word “evangelist” and somebody’s got terribly negative connotations related to evangelist simply by what they see on T.V. So when we use different words, it is possible for us to communicate the concepts more clearly and quickly and not shut the conversation down before the conversation even begins.

Preaching: Moving past the concept of the use of language, do you believe that in many ways the church may sometimes be communicating not just using incorrect language but perhaps communicating the wrong concepts or the wrong reality?

Martoia: I think you are absolutely dead right. We don’t just have a semantic problem. What I have tried to articulate in Static and in its follow up volume (coming out soon) is that we have been telling an abbreviated message, a truncated message – a thin-sliced low-cal version of the message. In many cases, we may have a misunderstanding of the concepts that we are attempting to convey. As a result of that, at times we have been telling an abbreviated message of the Gospel that actually is more a construction of the modern world than it is a holistic understanding of the biblical world view. I think it is really important that we understand these terms we are using biblically and from a contextual standpoint before we even attempt to change the language and semantics of it.