The meanings of the words tolerance, freedom, authority, authentic, relevant, culture, equality, emotion, taste, and hate are not arbitrary and purely subjective. Nor are they unimportant. These words are currently the words at the very center of our culture and at the root of disputes about worship, ministry, missions, social justice, morality, economics, and Christian living. To get the wrong meaning about these words will likely be to court failure or disaster in ministry. Christians cannot afford to live with the mangled form of these words.
Words are more than names. Words are things that either correspond to something in reality or fail to. When words fail to correspond to something true about God's reality, they become part of the darkening of human understanding. Like a sign pointing the wrong way, like a faulty map, the mangled word gives the human mind a false inner reality and distorts the truth.
In this insightful book, David de Bruyn earnestly contends for the true meaning of these ten mangled words.