I accept labels that only describe my character. And of course social ones like gender ,work labels etc etc. Labing me as agnostic or Christian for example might be ok but not mecessarily true.
People can put labels on me . Couldnt care less. Its their decision. However if they engage in a conversatiom with me they might understand how wrong they might have been. Or the opposite. Me liking or not how they label me is irrelevant
On the other hand why dont you try my way right?
For example if i put the label “Christian” on you and call you that would you go out of your way to correct me and say" Ohhh nono im actually a Baptist Christian" . I dont think so
Or would you get triggered if someone says"I have a relationship with Christ but im not christian".Like who cares?You can call them a Christian ,that wont change how they “label” or view themselves.
Sure all. Fair and valid points. As I say, just something to think about. Some people really don’t like being mislabelled, good to hear you are able to be gracious when it happens to you.
I too like this idea of responsibility. I can understand bristling at labels – especially just looking at how “evangelical” has changed over the past few decades. It’s easy to fear that if given a label, people will make assumptions about you or become prejudiced based on those labels. But I’ve heard it from the other side too… someone goes to a church that looks to be nondenominational, but then realize after a while that their theology lines up exactly to a particular Baptist school of thought – that church just didn’t want that label anymore. I can see why someone in that situation might feel tricked. So in that sense, labels can promote straightforwardness – I’d much rather know where someone (or a church) stands on something first (and to what extent), and then make my own decisions about how I relate to that, but I also have a responsibility to treat others as I want to be treated, and not prejudge any more than I would like to be… which is hard.
Indeed. That is why I think labels should be thought of as a “first approximation” and a way of setting the stage for further questions to narrow down where you stand on the many different things we believe things about.
For example, on this question of being an evangelical, I usually add some caveats to that one like this… I am a liberal evangelical… or I am of the western strain of evangelical derived from converted Quakers rather than from the southern Baptists, and thus more about the experience of the saving power of Jesus rather than the aggressive pushing of dogmatic fundamentalist Christianity on other people.
Labels are often messy, and means different things to different people but over all they are very beneficial to set up some quick parameters. I think of it kind of like the term tomato. When I say tomato maybe you think of a cherry tomato, or a beefsteak tomato, heirlooms or even a green tomato. But we all are thinking of a tomato and none of us are thinking of a banana. So when i mention that I am in the denomination known as the Church Of Christ, those familiar with it don’t confuse it for being a Baptist or a Pentecostal. But it’s not an a perfect term. The majority of church of Christ members tend to be fairly conservative YECers who believe in eternal conscious torment. I’m a fairly liberal evolutionary creationist who is a conditionalist.
Labels also obviously helps lay out many things about us. I don’t use labels as a prison, but rather a street with a handful of houses to pick from.
Isn’t the use of labels unavoidable, at least to one degree or another? Words themselves are labels, and we have to make some kinds of generalizations to be able to communicate at all. Some labels are to be proud of and others eschewed, of course, and there are almost always elaborations and exceptions to be made.
At what are words at the end of the day? Squiggles on a page, symbols on a screen, and sound waves in the air. They are containers in which we dump information that has a shared meaning within our community. I guess in that sense, a label is only a label if more than one person agree on its meaning - even if they differ over its applicability. Without mutual agreement the label is nonsensical. Language is a amazing… and weird.
I just seconds ago finished listening to the podcast interview that @Christy did with Jim and Colin, and guess what one of the things she said , among several other maybe more important ideas:
…and a lot of fun, too. I like Tom Swifties, for instance (and Spoonerisms – “Our Lord is a Shoving Leopard!” ). Word play is something my wife and I do almost continuously, it seems. Did I mention homophones.
Apparently there isn’t total agreement about this but some think singing came first and referential language second. Pretty weird if that’s right but apparently no recording or video survives from so far back.
). Word play is something my wife and I do almost continuously, it seems.