addictionary
Well-Known Member
That, of course, is merely Johnstone's interpretation of what he constitutes a 'church' to be. There are many other interpretations of it-- I am not trying to convince you that it is objective, or the 'best' way of defining it; I am merely pointing out the etymology behind my usage of the word (although personally, using church in this context is something that makes perfect sense to me)
I like people who care for the linguistics and etymological roots of the words and concepts. Not only for showing off how cool you are for knowing all that crap but kinda trying to set a point about how crazily the cultural perception and conceptual contents have been evolved through daily usage and other probable effects.
Thinking about the word church that I only judged through my personal experience and knowledge of it which doesn't include any of the above mentioned disciplines, I always thought of it as a concept that has been given birth by Western civilizations (Yeah I know if you go West enough you will reach East but you dig me). Also e.g. PC game Fallout and same type of popular productions that included pop-culture references had non-Christian "church"es that looked exactly like Christian Cathedrals with Gothic architectural designs. I have never seen a Muslim temple/worshiping building ever called a "church" before. This leads us to a question of when it is smart to care for the etymological roots of the words in order to strengthen our point of views about the meaning we use them in. If there is no practical example of it we can hold on to, should we let it rot? Or should we give it a chance in a conversation we think it would have some degree of value? Why do we have languages anyway? Is the first aim of it is to make sense about what you think? Or should we praise a sacred status of the meaning of a form of letters that had a sacred meaning in an ancient time?