Words are silent soldiers. They do far more fighting than feet and fists. The trouble is, we don’t look into them as often as we look at them. We see their graphic surface, recognize their sound . . . but the meaning often marches by unquestioned, crossing back and forth over the borders set by discourse partners—or, in our time, discourse enemies. And that’s precisely where their power lies, a great power, a revolutionary power.
In a virtually unknown work from the Christian linguist Kenneth L. Pike, I came across words that sound hyperbolic to many readers: “With language, by language, through language we act on our families, our friends, our nation—and revolutionize the world” (Tagmemics, Discourse, and Verbal Art, p. 4). That phrase, “revolutionize the world,” gave me pause. Words aren’t just vehicles of expression; they change things. They shape and redirect how people think, which then informs how people speak, which then influences what people do. Kenneth Pike wasn’t being hyperbolic. Words start revolutions. And we’re mostly unaware of how.
Words start revolutions.
But J. Gresham Machen saw this, and he identified one of secular culture’s most popular discourse tools: the condition of low visibility. Once we know what this is, we can engage with people in the secular sphere based on the words they use, digging beneath them to see the meaning hidden by an uncritical haze. As followers of Christ, we have a duty to show that people always use words to fight for or against the Trinity. There is no neutral speech. And if we can master this semantic digging as an apologetic tactic, we might just be able, by the Spirit, to start a revolution in the other direction—the direction of truth.
The Condition of Low Visibility
In Christianity and Liberalism, Machen wrote about the language habits of his Liberal opponents:
Presenting an issue sharply is indeed by no means a popular business at the present time; there are many who prefer to fight their intellectual battles in what Dr. Francis L. Patton has aptly called a “condition of low visibility.” Clear-cut definition of terms in religious matters, bold facing of the logical implications of religious views, is by many persons regarded as an impious proceeding. May it not discourage contribution to mission boards? May it not hinder the progress of consolidation, and produce a poor showing in columns of Church statistics? But with such persons we cannot possibly bring ourselves to agree. Light may seem at times to be an impertinent intruder, but it is always beneficial in the end (1).
This “condition of low visibility” is a way of using words without “clear-cut definitions,” without specified meanings. It prefers semantic haze—that gray, cloudy aura that hangs around words like traveling smoke from a ghosted wildfire. Clear sight and keen understanding are backgrounded, while the vague and vogue meanings of popular usage stand in the foreground. We know that words are polysemic, that they have multiple meanings. But the condition of low visibility intentionally exploits this feature of language. It relies on multiple or subjective meanings and depends on uncritical readers to skip by borders of discourse. We’ll look at some examples in a moment. But before that, we need to establish something very mysterious and yet foundational for our understanding and use of everyday words.
Word Meanings Rooted in the Trinity
Our culture lives in what Charles Taylor called “the immanent frame” (A Secular Age, pp. 539–593), a place where earthly human flourishing is the end-goal of all living. The here-and-now is ultimate. Our little circle of time and space is all there is. The meanings of words, in that context, must only be grounded in human usage. And yet Christians are different, we are what Cornelius Van Til called “two-circle people.” We believe that this immanent world isn’t all there is. In fact, this immanent world is unintelligible and meaningless if not upheld by the word of God’s power at every moment (Heb. 1:3). Our little human circle (creation) would be a void without the support and meaning given to it by the greater divine circle (the triune God).
Here’s what that means in terms of language. Brace yourself for mystery and majesty: the meaning of every single word must go back to the Trinity. More specifically, what a word means must relate to what God has revealed about himself in history, especially with reference to the divine Word that came, lived, died, rose, and ascended to the heavenly Father. Meaning is a matter of relation to God, not simply a connection to human usage.
Let’s be more specific. A word’s meaning has stability. We can rely on it and trust it. But that word also has variations, multiple uses and shades of meaning. And every word has a context—situations and relationships that help us understand them. These features of language are good gifts: they help us understand what people mean in everyday life. And because all good created things have their origins in the Trinity, we can say that these features of language are somehow rooted in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the triune, immutable creator and the original Speaker. God is the foundation for all meaning in language, because he's the foundation for language itself.
Love, as revealed in the Trinity, doesn’t mean accepting or celebrating anyone for any reason a person chooses.
Consequently, whenever people say something about anything, they rely on the Father, Son, and Spirit—even though they’re likely unaware of this. But Christians should be aware. We must be aware, precisely because those exercising a “condition of low visibility” are hoping we won’t be. They don’t want us to have “clear-cut definitions” for words based on the revealed truth of the Trinity. They don’t want us talking about the Father sending his Son when the word “love” is mentioned (John 3:16), or the Son governing who we are (Gal. 2:20; Rom. 8:17) whenever “identity” is dropped in a tweet. They don’t want us to wax on about the Spirit of Christ as the standard when someone pleads for “justice” (Deut. 32:4). They want a condition of low visibility. They want human meaning without a divine measurement. It matters little that words such as “love,” “identity,” and “justice” have myriad meanings in circulation. In fact, that’s part of what makes the condition of low visibility so effective: everyone can claim a meaning for a word without questioning whether that meaning aligns with anyone else’s—let alone alignment with God’s revealed character and truth. But if we grant this low visibility, if we let words slip by without drawing out their meaning, we give our discourse partners the opportunity to revolutionize the world, to change how people think, speak, and act. And it’s already happening.
Case Studies: Love and Identity
Let’s consider a pair of examples. For each one, we’ll look at what the condition of low visibility has tried to accomplish and how the meaning of the word must be brought into semantic submission to the Trinity. We’ll use two words we ended the last section with: love and identity. These words are pervasive in our culture, so understanding their God-given meaning is essential.
In June—ubiquitously hailed as Pride month—someone on Instagram posted the message, “Just love people.” Within minutes, droves of likes and comments settled on it like dazed pigeons. Why? Because of the condition of low visibility. Few, if any, questioned what the words meant. Instead, they relied on vague and vogue understandings, on how the words made them feel, which is the trademark of the internet age and the era of psychologized identity. “Love” here likely means “accept” or even “celebrate.” And the word “people” for this post doesn’t mean “image-bearers of God”; it means “those trapped inside this godless immanent frame along with you.” As a whole, the low-visibility meaning of the message might be, “Just accept and celebrate those who are different from you.” Sounds like a positive message, doesn’t it? That’s why it garnered so many likes. And if words are neutral—carrying meanings neither in support of God nor opposed to him—this isn’t worth critical attention.
But remember that words are always used for or against the Trinity. Given that this was Pride month, the message was meant to defend the LGBTQ+ community. What we’re being asked to “accept” or “celebrate” is a sexualized identity at odds with sound biblical teaching. So, let’s be clear-cut with the meaning: “Just accept a non-biblical ethic of sexuality and identity rooted in Godless paganism.” You can see why a condition of low-visibility is preferable. The clear-cut meaning wouldn’t glean as many likes.
Love, as revealed in the Trinity, doesn't mean accepting or celebrating anyone for any reason a person chooses. In fact, love is self-giving, as shown in that Sunday school passage, John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave.” Gave what? Not what—who. He gave his Son. He gave himself. And yet what does it mean for us to give “ourselves” for others, and thus to love them?
Well, look at the grand gift that the Father gave as an expression of his love. In John’s Gospel, Jesus identifies himself as the gift of truth. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Do you feel that sting of exclusivity, that idea that real love means God’s truth, and that God’s truth means I don’t get to prioritize “my truth”? For God, love means truth-giving in a divine person who must be accepted by faith—and here’s the rub, submitted to as Lord. In what we might call a condition of high visibility for Christian discourse, love is the self-giving truth of God meant to save a people lost in themselves. Real love isn’t about accepting yourself or even accepting others; it’s about accepting God and living in faithfulness to him.
What about identity? The term has meaning that runs deeper and wider than we could imagine—touching on thought, action, passion, memory, society, and so much more. But let’s look at just one facet: the idea of identity as passion.
A Christian influencer recently posted a video calling all Christians to “claim your identity right now.” By identity, he was referring to the gifts they had as musicians, singers, dancers, writers, artists, and filmmakers. The meaning of low visibility for “identity” here is something like “God-given passion or talent.” Humans are masters at reducing something as complex and multifaceted as identity to a single component—largely because this makes it easier for them to control, and people are always seeking control. So, once again, many people resonated with the message and claimed they “needed to hear that.” The problem is that the meaning of the word “identity” wasn’t rooted in the Trinity. And when it’s not, identity is inherently unstable, misleading, and damaging. For instance, I’m a writer. Aside from writing books and articles, I even have the word “writer” in my job title. But that’s not my identity. Why not? It places my value and meaning primarily in what I do and not in who I know. What I do is certainly a facet of my identity, but it’s not the whole thing.
Identity is fundamentally about a God-relationship.
God has always revealed that identity, at its deeply mysterious roots, is a matter of relationship—of those to whom we are bound—with all the attendant mystery and lack of control that entails. At the foundation of our lives is our relationship to the triune God. Above that lie our relationships with other people. In this foundational sense, it’s not what I do that establishes my identity; it’s who I know. That isn’t to say that actions aren’t important, but it does mean that actions emerge from and take shape in relationships. That’s hard for people to hear in “the immanent frame,” especially in the individualized West, who want to define themselves in isolation from any reliance on anyone or anything else. But that’s the divine and mysterious truth.
The fulfillment of identity, in fact, is a relationship so intimate, so deep that Jesus refers to it in John 17 as being one with God. This is the climax of the biblical story, which is always talking about God’s people being known (identified) by a relationship of faithfulness and trust in him—from Adam and Eve to Abraham to Moses to David and to Christ. We live in a world that tells us to boast in ourselves, in our self-made identity, when the Trinity tells us to boast in our relationship. “Let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me” (Jer. 9:24). And yet Jesus goes even further. He says we are most ourselves, most fully known and fully loved, not only when we know God, but when we live in him, when we are one with the Trinity through Christ, by the power of the Spirit. (John 17:11, 21). Identity is fundamentally about a God-relationship. It’s not centered on what your passions are, or your sexuality, or what issue makes you an activist. Identity goes deeper and broader. It’s a matter of divine relationship, not earthly individualism.
Conclusion: The Condition of High Visibility
In the spirit of Machen, but really in the Spirit of Christ, Christians need to reclaim a condition of high visibility. That means digging beneath the words we see treading across the borders of our daily discourse. The world is going to keep shouting about “love” and “identity.” And if we let them do so without asking what those words really mean, we’ll be losing the battle.
This happened in Machen’s own day with Liberalism, which often used the same words as orthodox Christianity but meant something completely different by them. How did Liberalism gain its power and start revolutionizing Christian faith? There are many causes and many mysteries. But a condition of low visibility was certainly one of them. Liberalism relied on people not thinking like Machen did, on them not looking more deeply into the meanings of the words in context. Liberalism could talk about Jesus as “Savior.” The real question was, what do they mean? Is Jesus a savior in the sense that he saves us from poor moral examples (Liberalism of Machen’s day) or because he saves us from imprisoned versions of ourselves (contemporary Liberalism)? Or is he the savior because he crushed an ancient and hideous blackness that we have nearly forgotten how to name: sin? Jeremiah calls our hearts “desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9)—doomed to death. God reveals that Jesus is a savior because we all need heart surgery, not because we need moral guidance or a psych evaluation. Jesus is a savior because of sin—a category which Machen decried as being lost by his own culture, and is certainly lost in our day. Machen called that out. Will we?
Christians need a condition of high visibility, fronting the Trinity and his revealed work in order to expose the meanings of the words around us. In the end, this is a matter of maturity, but it’s also a matter of pointing the world beyond “the immanent frame,” to the shaper of souls. In a poem on vanity (The Complete English Works, p. 108), George Herbert wrote:
If souls be made of earthly mould,
Let them love gold;
If born on high,
Let them unto their kindred fly:
For they can never be at rest,
Till they regain their ancient nest.
Then silly soul take heed; for earthly joy
Is but a bubble, and makes thee a boy.
Many people today play the child. They lack the courage, knowledge, and maturity to question the meanings of the words they use. Our world is full of “silly souls” content to drift in semantic haze, never dreaming that their speech could be for or against a triune God, the grand weaver of Herbert’s ancient nest.
Our call is to take up the one thing that burns away haze: light. Machen called light an impertinent but beneficial intruder. We can go further. Light is our savior and the world’s salvation (John 8:12). It’s also the truth (John 14:6), in all its multifaceted, Trinity-honoring complexity. With the light of Christ, clinging to his redeeming truth—his person—we go to create a culture of high visibility, doing what S.D. Smith in The Green Ember called his characters to do: bear the flame.
Light is our sword in a semantic revolution. And truth is our country. May we show a watching world that every syllable is tethered to the Trinity, whether they like it or not. This is our condition of high visibility.