The War on Words: Ten Words Every Christian Should Fight For

by David de Bruyn

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.

264 pages, Paperback

Published August 21, 2023

About the author

David is from Johannesburg, where he and his family reside. He is married with three children.

David received his Master's Degree from Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Minnesota, U.S.A and his Doctorate of Theology in Christian Spirituality through UNISA.

David has pastored New Covenant Baptist Church in Johannesburg since 2003, and has served as a frequent itinerant speaker and conference speaker. He is heard weekly on Christian radio in South Africa. He is also one of the lecturers at Shepherds Seminary Africa.

Reviews

[Christopher Desruisseau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gives good definitions of buzz words you hear all the time,like what people mean when they say the word authentic.

[Kaylah · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I hadn't taken 5 months to read it, I would totally write an in depth book review. The short version of the book review is: I wholeheartedly agree with what he says in his conclusion paragraphs, but I think he is very inconsistent in several of the chapters. I agree with his premises that we need to define words the way God defines them and to be consistent in our uses of definitions of words. However, the author completely violates his premise by using multiple definitions of a word in several of the chapters, most prominently the chapter on "Culture." I found the chapter on "Emotion" to be most thought-provoking.
The book is written by an intellectual, and the words used were so intellectual at times that I found myself having the same struggle to read this book as I did when learning to read in kindergarten.