According to Elizabeth Prata of The End Time, the word broken is being used by Christians to change perceptions, even to redefine sin. “Is it acceptable to use the word broken when referencing already-saved Christians? Or even non-saved people?” inquires Prata. No! “The truth is, we are not broken. We are sinners WITHOUT righteousness. We are totally corrupt. We need HIS external righteousness. We are not just broken, but beyond repair. We’re dead! That’s why the Bible says when we’re saved, we are a new person, from a new birth, regenerated, born again, given a new heart.”
Elizabeth has more thoughts on substituting the word brokenness for what the Bible calls sin. She writes:
Are we broken?
According to the dictionary definition of broken, are we “fractured or damaged”? As humans, do we need fixing?
Christians know that there is something wrong with the world, indeed. Even unsaved people mutter and wonder what in the world is going on. Why is the world like this? they ask. Why has it always been like this? they wonder.
I hear and read the word ‘broken’ a lot now in reference to this issue. The word has come into popular Christian use. Here are just a few recent published essay titles-
- The Meaning of Brokenness: Being Broken in the Sight of God
- How to Find Beauty in Brokenness
- Brokenness is Seeing My Sin BIG
Is it acceptable to use the word broken when referencing already-saved Christians? Or even non-saved people?
It’s my stance that it is not. As was stated so well here,
For Christians, it is vital that we be open-eyed and discerning about the destructive ways that language is being manipulated. We need to recover the biblical view of words …
We well know that language gives words meaning, but that meaning can be fluid. For example, the American definition of marriage, of a legal union between one man and one women, had been stable for centuries. The over the last few decades, marriage has come to mean any civil union between any number of people of any (or no) gender or sexual orientation.
Or this from the website Darrow Miller and Friends
In the old dictionary, justice was defined as equal treatment regardless of race, sex or religion. In the new dictionary, justice is equal outcome, regardless of personal action or behavior.
In this example, Tolerance in the old definition meant “ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with.” Nowadays the word tolerance has come to mean rejecting all moral absolutes, including biblical absolutes.
When we use important Christian words, we need to say what they mean, too. Just because we say the word sin, doesn’t mean who you are speaking to will have the same understanding of what sin is that you do. It seems basic, but that’s where we are now.
Manipulation of words to change perceptiopn or to catalyze movements is an entire academic field of study. It’s called Linguistic Anthropology. Satan changes word meanings in order to confuse both believers and non-believers, and to push forward his agenda.
I argued that a new religion has taken root in the West, and it advances by redefining words — vacating them of their true meaning, and hijacking them to serve new purposes. (Source)
For example,
… As John Stonestreet reminds us, “there’s a long history detailing the manipulation of language for the purpose of social control”. George Orwell described the process well in his book 1984. The language was forever being altered, “to make all other modes of thought impossible. … This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings….” Source