As in, “not be used”
we ought to live in ways that bespeak the uniquely authoritative, aniconic, useless God of whom the commandments teach.
If we target “justice†or “freedom†or “openness†as the characteristics of our people, the dominant culture can comfortably ignore us; they know all about justice and freedom and openness, and our protests that “that’s not what we mean by justice†or “that’s not true freedom†will fall on deaf ears. But godliness names a characteristic that the nation-state cannot as readily simulate and co-opt; we have a few more seconds of a fighting chance to define our own terms.
Good stuff. I would, however, notice that there IS much more to “justice” than what people know, especially those who live outside of Kingdom notions of justice. There are those who also feel they “know about what is “church” and what is “Christian” and what is “Biblical”. Of course, we have much to do to “fill in” the gaps and defintions, and the task is never-ending. But this does not mean we should eschew using that language altogether. As I have insisted before, this simply abandons the world to chaos; what WE mean (and hopefully, something of what is meant in The Kingdom of God by those terms, we have SOME responsibility to insist upon meanings that lie either beyond or in sharp critique of how our culture have appropriated them.
What is most important in all of this, however, is the representation/demonstration/embodying of what is meant by these things. If we’re not doing that, nothing we say is trustworthy.
