Daily Inspiration Quote by Tryon Edwards

A theologian’s version of “show your work,” Tryon Edwards’ line is less a plea for politeness than an indictment of sloppy combat. He’s pointing at the oldest trick in argument: keep the key words fuzzy and you can keep winning forever. “Freedom,” “faith,” “justice,” “nature” - the grander the term, the easier it is to smuggle in assumptions, shift the goalposts, and mistake heat for clarity. Edwards frames the problem as procedural, not personal: controversies don’t persist because people are wicked, but because they’re imprecise.

The subtext is disciplinary. Coming out of a 19th-century Protestant intellectual world, Edwards knows that theological disputes often hinge on a single word - grace, election, inspiration - and that rival camps can talk past each other for decades while believing they’re defending orthodoxy. His prescription (“define, then adhere”) is basically an anti-hermeneutic improvisation rule. No mid-argument redefinitions, no rhetorical bait-and-switch, no using the same label to mean two different things depending on whether you’re attacking or defending.

It also carries a quiet moral claim: precision is a kind of honesty. To define terms is to risk being pinned down, to become accountable to what you’ve said. That’s why the advice still stings in today’s discourse, where ambiguity is often a strategy, not a flaw. Edwards isn’t promising that definitions will deliver harmony; he’s saying they will expose what the real fight is about - and remove the comfort of winning through confusion.