“Spin”
Our recent One Day Lectureship highlighted novel definitions for words or phrases already in existence, such as replacing pornographic paintings and sculptures with the term art or calling homosexuals gays. But congratulations to Harvard on their ability to twist words better than most. Their current president was discovered to have plagiarized from other writers more than 40% of her work. Once upon a time, students were expelled for this practice, but now they become university presidents. And if it is brought to the public's attention, they double down in defense of the offender. Now they specialize in creative definitions. The person in question did not actually plagiarize; she only used “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” Oh. That doesn't sound nearly as bad as being a plagiarist. [She has resigned but retains her $900,000 salary.]
That may work among “intellectuals,” but it is doubtful that calling a horse thief an animal liberator in the wild west would have worked. Stringing him up on the spot might be referred to as fast-track, taxpayer saving justice. People have become particularly adept at redefining sin. Adultery carries with it bad connotations; so a couple just has an affair. It still involves cheating on one's mate and breaking one's wedding vows, but these descriptions seem so harsh to describe someone who is faithful to his wife with intermittent indiscretions. And if two people divorce, the reason is not that they failed to honor their commitment to each other. No, they just fell out of love, or circumstances strained their marriage to the breaking point.
People are not lazy; they just like to conserve their energy for a time it will really be needed (maybe in five or ten years). When he came down from the Mount, Moses may have thought the people were acting in an immoral manner and worshipping a golden calf, thus violating the second commandment, but the Israelites might have described it as letting off a little steam in an unorthodox way. Balaam advised the Moabite women to seduce the Israelite men so that God would curse His people, but the guilty might have said, “We were just trying to show that we were gender friendly and not xenophobic.”
The one-talent man tried to “spin” his way out of accountability. He knew his master was both austere and opportunistic (reaping where he had not sown); so, knowing that he would have to give a reckoning for the money, he claimed to be a cautious preservationist, hiding the wealth in the ground. To expose him and his evil motives, the master told him that if those things were so, he could have at least drawn interest from a bank. God has a way of unspinning excuses. None of them will hold any sway in the Day of Judgment. We may fool others—and even ourselves—but God discerns between good and evil, light and darkness, sweet and bitter. To paraphrase Shakespeare, “A plagiarist by any other description is still a cheat.”