Linguistic Gap Analysis

Because English is the source language, this Language Package has no lexical gaps in the ordinary sense — every term already exists in English. The “gap” here is instead a meaning gap: the distance between a word’s dominant contemporary usage and its Pauline theological sense.

Terms with the widest meaning gap (false-friend drift)

• Justification: dominant sense is “giving a reason for an action already taken”; Paul’s sense is a forensic declaration of righteousness. The gap is wide because both senses are common, plausible, and confidently held by nearly every reader.
• Election: dominant sense is “a political vote”; Paul’s sense is God’s sovereign, personal, prior choice. The near-total lexical capture by the political sense makes this the widest gap in the registry.
• Covenant: dominant sense is “a binding clause in a legal document”; Paul’s sense (inherited from the Old Testament) is a relational, promissory bond between persons.
• Providence: dominant sense is either a rare, archaic word or a proper noun (a US city name); Paul’s sense is God’s personal, ongoing, purposive care.

Terms with denominational rather than secular gaps

• Grace, salvation (“being saved”), assurance of salvation, sainthood: the gap here is not between religious and secular meaning but between different English-speaking Christian traditions’ settled theological readings of the same word. This curriculum resolves the gap by stating its own position transparently rather than picking a side silently.

Terms with a narrowing gap (obsolescence, lower risk)

• Sanctification, intercession, exhort, imputed: these words have largely dropped out of ordinary contemporary speech, so most readers arrive with no confident wrong definition to unlearn, only a blank to fill. This Language Package treats these as lower risk than the false-friend category above, even though they require more up-front definition work, because a reader who doesn’t recognize a word is more likely to ask what it means than one who confidently (and wrongly) already thinks they know.

Gap-filling strategy

Because no lexical substitution is available (there is no other English word to swap in — “justification” cannot be replaced by a better English word without losing its established theological and translation-historical weight), this Language Package’s strategy is exclusively explanatory: pair every Critical and High-risk term with brief, explicit, repeated clarifying context on first substantive use in each document, rather than attempt to solve the problem through word choice alone.