Introduction: Semantic Alchemy

Religious language often trades on terms with powerful emotional resonance—love, justice, patience. But within certain strains of Christian apologetics, these terms undergo a troubling transformation. When confronted with clear tensions between the actions attributed to God and the human meanings of these terms, apologists frequently claim that God’s nature transcends human language. They suggest that what appears to be hatred is actually love, that what seems unjust is ultimately justice, and that divine patience is not bound by human temporal or psychological standards.

This maneuver effectively decouples denotation from discernibility. The apologist no longer defends God’s actions as consistent with the shared meanings of these predicates. Instead, they assert the right of the divine to invert semantics—to wrench meaning away from communal reference and relocate it in inaccessible metaphysical authority.

What follows is not theology, but semantic alchemy, in which contradictions are renamed “mystery,” and ordinary words are stripped of their grounding. This section examines three such inversions—of love, justice, and patience—each a case study in the erosion of predicate coherence.

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Summary of Predicate Collapse

Each theological maneuver reframes the predicate not in terms of observable or communicable features, but in terms of who performs the action. This leads to:

…for any predicate (love, justice, patience). But such a formulation destroys the evaluative power of the predicate. If loving means “whatever God does,” then loving means nothing determinable.

These are not reinterpretations—they are inversions. And when inversion becomes the norm, language dies at the altar of theology.

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The Consequences of Semantic Inversion

When Christian apologists claim that God’s terms must not be interpreted according to human semantics, they invite a dangerous ambiguity into the very terms they wish to preserve—such as love, justice, and patience. Below are three analogies that expose the breakdown of communicative and conceptual coherence that results from such redefinitions.

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1. Color Inversion: When Blue Includes Orange

The term blue has a fuzzy but functional semantic range—it may blur into teal or indigo, but it never encompasses hues of orange. If someone insists that blue includes orange simply because both are “colors God created,” the term blue loses its contrastive utility. You can no longer distinguish what blue picks out in discourse or perception.

Or more formally:

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2. Dim Brightness: When Bright No Longer Contrasts

The term bright gains meaning only when contrasted with dim or dark. If someone uses bright to refer to twilight, foggy mornings, and dim rooms—anything not pitch-black—then its semantic contrast dissolves. Without contrast, semantic significance vanishes.

But if:

Then:

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3. Height Collapse: When Everyone Becomes Short

Suppose someone redefines short to mean “not the tallest human alive.” That would include nearly every basketball player. By measuring everyone against an extreme outlier, the term short loses all functional specificity. It no longer refers to a range that distinguishes. Similarly, if God’s love simply means “not the worst hatred,” it ceases to guide our understanding of actions.

Thus:

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Summary

Each analogy demonstrates a core semantic principle: contrast, consistency, and category boundaries are essential to meaning. When apologists claim divine terms transcend human categories yet retain semantic force, they risk semantic self-destruction. If love includes hatred, justice includes absurdity, and patience includes hair-trigger retribution, then these words point to nothing discernible—just fog dressed in divine authority.

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The Violation of Coherent Predicate Application

In both natural language and formal logic, predicates must apply coherently to members of a domain. For any term to function meaningfully—whether is loving, is just, or is patient—it must admit a criterion of application that is neither vacuous nor self-subverting.

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The Principle of Predicate Coherence

A predicate PPP applied to a domain DDD must:

1. Discriminate: Pick out a subset such that not all members of fall within .
2. Be Consistent: Apply based on identifiable features, not arbitrary or contradictory associations.
3. Be Testable (in practical use): Admit of counterexamples that challenge or affirm the application.

When a predicate is redefined so broadly or in contradiction to ordinary usage that it applies indiscriminately or incoherently, it collapses into semantic failure.

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Symbolic Framing

Let be the domain of all actions, and let be the predicate “is loving.”

If:

…then the predicate fails to discriminate and therefore ceases to function as a meaningful descriptor.

Worse, if:

…then the predicate fails coherence.

This violates the law of non-contradiction in semantic contexts: a single predicate cannot coherently apply to actions that are conventionally understood as mutually exclusive without either redefining the domain or invalidating the predicate.

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Application to Theological Language

When Christian apologists claim that God’s love includes the extermination of infants, or that God’s justice includes infinite punishment for finite beings, they are not merely appealing to mystery—they are violating predicate coherence.

Such claims imply:

• Either the predicates are arbitrarily reassigned and thus meaningless,
• Or they are secretly redefined to mean “whatever God does,” which turns all theological predicates into tautologies.

Formally:

Where = “God does x” and = “x is loving/just/patient.”

This renders terms like loving, just, and patient void of all meaning beyond “whatever God does,” making them circular and unusable in meaningful discourse.

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Why This Matters

If believers must abandon human semantic boundaries to affirm divine predicates, then they no longer have a meaningful basis for worship, evaluation, or imitation. One cannot aspire to be “loving” in the manner of God if the term is a black box. In this way, defending God’s character through semantic inversion not only dismantles theology, but disables language itself.

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The Abdication of Denotational Responsibility

Language depends on a shared contract: that terms refer to reasonably stable meanings within a language community. This is the foundation of all successful communication. To abandon that contract is to invite semantic anarchy, where any term can mean anything depending on the whims of power, authority, or ideology.

In theological contexts, many believers—especially those defending scriptural or doctrinal tensions—abdicate their responsibility to maintain coherent denotations. They surrender the task of keeping love, justice, or patience anchored to shared human meanings and instead grant God the authority to redefine these terms arbitrarily.

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The Mechanics of Abdication

Consider the predicate , where stands for some evaluative property like loving or just, and is an action or intention.

In normal discourse, we assert:

But in divine discourse, some apologists assert:

Where:

• = “God performs or commands x”
• = “x is therefore loving/just/good”

This theological model severs the tie between community-defined criteria and denotation. The term no longer tracks a property evaluable by the language community; it becomes a floating signifier, filled only by fiat.

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The Consequences of Semantic Anarchy

Once this epistemic surrender occurs, we no longer test concepts like justice or love against observable benchmarks or coherent standards. Instead, terms are retrofitted post hoc to conform to any divine action, no matter how repugnant, disproportionate, or contradictory by human lights.

Such an epistemology invites semantic totalitarianism: whatever the divine authority declares becomes the standard, leaving no room for protest, revision, or evaluation.

This creates a scenario where:

And therefore:

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Denotation as Communal Stewardship

Denotation is not the property of deities. It is a public good, cultivated and stabilized by linguistic communities for mutual comprehension. To allow any authority—divine or otherwise—to wrench denotation from community consensus is to undermine the foundations of language and knowledge.

It is not humility but irresponsibility to claim:

“We cannot understand what love means when God acts; we must defer to His mysterious definitions.”

This is not faithfulness. It is theological anti-semantics.

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Conclusion: The Cost of Inverted Meaning

When apologists claim that God’s actions redefine human concepts, they do not merely introduce mystery—they initiate a semantic coup. They unhook familiar terms from their shared usage and tether them to a being whose actions can no longer be coherently evaluated. This is not reverence. It is linguistic abdication.

In the case of love, we are told it includes actions we would otherwise deem cruel—such as the extermination of infants—not because the term has shifted through communal evolution, but because the speaker has outsourced its meaning to an inscrutable authority. If:

…then the predicate (loving) no longer refers to care, compassion, or concern—it refers to whatever God commands. The term collapses into a semantic vacuum.

In the case of justice, proportionality is discarded. Eternal punishment for finite transgression becomes just, and a three-day execution of an innocent becomes a full debt payment. If:

…then (justice) no longer refers to balance, restitution, or fairness—it becomes the rubber stamp of omnipotence.

In the case of patience, the claim is even more subtle but equally corrosive. A God who condemns upon a single transgression—a transgression flowing from the very nature he instilled—is still called patient. If:

…then (patience) no longer means measured restraint—it becomes a mockery of its own denotation.

Each of these reassignments destroys the contrastive and evaluative power of the term in question. When predicates like love, justice, and patience become divine autonyms—terms that mean only what God chooses them to mean—then the entire language community loses its grip on shared reality.

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When believers allow God to redefine words beyond all human coherence, they are not defending faith—they are enabling semantic abdication. The result is not just a collapse of human understanding, but a distortion of language into a servant of unchecked authority. If words mean only what divine fiat declares, then no meaning is safe, and no evaluation is possible.

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