The following from Buechner makes the distinction between Christian words and the concepts behind them. Many of us who follow Jesus need to examine the exclusivist language we use that for many non-Christians forms a barrier to their inquiry into what it means to follow Jesus.

"I shall go to my grave," a friend of mine once wrote me, "feeling that Christian thought is a dead language - one that feeds many living ones to be sure, one that still sets these vibrating with echoes and undertones, but which I would no more use overtly than I would speak Latin." If the language that clothes Christianity is not dead, it is at least, for many, dying.

Take any English word, even the most commonplace, and try repeating it twenty times in a row -

umbrella, let us say,

umbrella,

umbrella,

umbrella - and by the time we have finished,

umbrella will not be a word any more.
It will be a noise only, an absurdity, stripped of all meaning. And when we take even the greatest and most meaningful words that the Christian faith has and repeat them over and over again for 2000 years, much the same thing happens.

There was a time when such words as

faith,

sin,

redemption and

atonement had great depth of meaning, great reality; but through centuries of handling and mishandling, they have tended to become such empty banalities that just the mention of them is apt to turn people's minds off like a switch.

But I keep on using them. I do not know any other language that for me points to the realities that underlie them so well. Certain branches of psychology point to them, certain kinds of poetry and music, some of the scriptures of Buddhism and other religions. But for me, threadbare and exhausted as the Christian language often is, it remains the richest one.