Orthodoxy vs. Orthovoxy

I have coined a new term. The word is “orthovoxy.” Orthodoxy means “right belief,” so what is Orthovoxy?

It is easy to sound orthodox when really one is simply using orthodox language. By using proper terminology in an improper way it is easier to hide errors. I am calling this orthovoxy – “vox” being Latin for voice or word.

The problem with many faulty teachings is that they are not using new language to communicate their new teachings. There is controversy over T. D. Jakes for example. He claims to believe in “The Trinity” but when he describes what he means by “The Trinity” he describes it the way a heretical Modalist would (refs.). Statements like “We have one God, but He is Father in creation, Son in redemption, and Holy Spirit in regeneration” (cit.)  are clearly non-orthodox.

The Apostle’s Creed affirms that Jesus “descended into hell.” Whatever that means, it most certainly is not the Word Faith idea that Jesus suffered and was reborn in hell (refs.)! Although WF teachers like Kenneth Hagin or Kenneth Copeland might not be verbalizing something false when they preach that “Jesus went to hell,” they mean something false.

So orthovoxy does not always indicate orthodoxy!

Nor is this practice limited to heretical notions. William Lane Craig, a brilliant and able defender of the faith, describes God’s eternality as “existing changelessly alone without creation.” So far so good but then he says that God “enters time at the moment of creation in virtue of His real relation to the temporal universe. ” (cit.).  Right or wrong, this is not the orthodox understanding of God’s relation to time.

The doctrine of God’s “Impassibility” is another good example. Impassibility has been classically understood as God’s being unable to suffer or be affected – that He is never passive, the effect of a cause. Aquinas takes this to mean that God does not have emotions/feelings, for these are by nature effects requiring a cause (not to mention a body to have them in – see Summa Contra Gentiles I 90. 4-91. 2). Paul Helm says, “we may think of God’s ‘feelings’ as simply his attitudes to what he knows” (Divine Impassibility: Why Is It Suffering? cit.). Yet Norman Geisler says that impassibility means “God has no changing passions, but he does have unchanging feelings” (Creating God in the Image of Man? p. 29). And Ergun Caner defines impassibility as God “never losing control” (The Popular Encyclopedia of Apologetics, God’s Attributes). Which is it?

What are we to make of this? It would be good to remember that we cannot trust the vocabulary of theologians unless we know the theology of theologians.