Old Words in New Word-Skins?

Words shift. They wiggle and slide and flow. But they do it slowly, so that you might not even notice them moving at all. Then one day you're 65 and the kids are wearing shirts with slogans about flying monkeys, and you're sure they've ever seen the Wizard of Oz, and you don't know what the monkeys mean to them. And they use the word "respect," and you do know what that means, but they certainly don't seem to. And, for some reason, they don't understand Mark Twain.

The words have shifted. The flying monkey's habitat went neglected, so they moved to a new habitat and evolved new meanings for their old word-skins.

Over the past couple of hundred years or so (We'll call that time period "modernity" for convenience.) the definitions of most words in English have shifted some. Some very important terms in religion and science have shifted a great deal. And now words are shifting faster than they have since the early 1800's, and we're caught in this in-between place where many people still mean the words like moderns used to, and many other are searching for new habitats for our favorite words.

I thought I would spend some time on words that I think are shifting significantly, and explain them in their new contexts. I don't have good definitions for all of them yet, so I'll come back to this periodically and fill in the blanks as best I can.

Modern:

Post-modern:

Theology: In modernity, they simply called this "The study of God," as if that said it all. And it did, because the word "study" in modernity was pretty well loaded, and because there was only one thing to study about God: Does He exist? So, let me add to the four words. When Moderns said "Theology," they meant: The attempt to scientifically and logically explain the existence of God, so that the hearer would understand and agree.

Theopoetics: I know what you're thinking, but I really didn't make this up. I first read it in The Moral Vision of the New Testament, which is a excellent look at each book of the NT. It's huge, but toward the end Hayes (that's the author) calls Revelation "theopoetic." This word rocks, trust me. It's sort of the post-modern counterpart of theology, because--well, you'll see. It's the attempt to artistically and imaginatively describe God, so that the reader will see him in the world. Cool stuff, huh?

Truth

Meaning

History