The Peculiar Character of Religious Language
The language of religion, like the language of poetry, conveys truth and meaning differently than does prose. The poet Joyce Kilmer says: ‘I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree, a tree whose hungry mouth is pressed against the earth’s sweet flowing breast…’ It would be ludicrous for the reader to complain that there is something wrong with Kilmer’s language, that what he says is not true, that trees do not have mouths and the earth does not have breasts. That sort of inappropriate observation would show that the reader had failed to grasp the fundamental difference between the functions of language in poetry and in prose.
Poetry is no less true than prose but it conveys truth in a different way. Poetry speaks to the intellect but it is an evocative language that also speaks to our emotions and feelings. You do not ask of poetry whether it is true in the same sense that you ask whether a declarative sentence is true. Poetry is a medium for expressing ideas and images that are not easily expressed in prose, and poetry may be better able to convey some truths than prose.
The languages of myth and poetry are similar in their structure and function. When we say of a story that it is a myth, at least as the term is used in history and theology, it does not mean that the story is not in some sense true but rather that the truth of myth is not literal.
Take, for instance, the mythic story of Oedipus, a Greek tragedy you may remember from school days in which unknowingly the son killed his father and married his mother.
You do not say about the story of Oedipus that it is not true because Oedipus is not a real person or you would betray yourself as a simpleton. Of course it is true, and of course it does not describe a historical event, but that is not the point. The Oedipus story describes a truth of human nature with mythic images that are more pregnant with meaning than can be contained in simple prose. It makes no sense to ask of a myth whether or not it is true, but only to ask 'in what sense' it is true.
Myth, like poetry, expresses its truth in images. We must listen carefully and thoughtfully to discover for ourselves the sense in which a myth speaks truly. Like poetry, myth conveys more than can be expressed easily and exhaustively in prose and its great value is that it continues to speak to us whenever we go back to it.
Religious language, including language about god, shares the characteristics of the languages of myth and poetry. Much of our difficulty in communicating with each other on the subject of religion comes from the lack of clarity about the meaning of the words we use, yet clarity is essential for meaning and communication.
When she was about 10 years old my granddaughter Ashley asked me if I believed in God. We were traveling by car from our home in Vero Beach to our vacation home in Western North Carolina. We had a long drive ahead of us and sometimes that long drive provided an opportunity to talk about things that mattered to her or to me. I thought this might be such a time.
I thought quickly about what might have led her to ask such a question. Did one of her friends say something that was disturbing to her? Was she looking for information? For assurance?
It seemed like a “teachable moment” that could lead to a useful discussion, so I asked her what she thought about God. She replied that she was just curious, she hadn’t thought about it much, she just wondered if there really was a god. I don’t recall what I told her but it seemed to satisfy her and after some more conversation she became absorbed in her hand-held electronic game.
It is a question that many of us ask ourselves and for me there is no clear easy answer. Do I believe in God? Yes. And No. Both answers are true and yet neither is true, which leads me to conclude that I don’t think the question gets us very far if it is asked that way.
At least part of the difficulty I have with the question of whether or not I ‘believe in’ god is that it is not clear what the questioner means. Specifically, I do not know what he means by god. Does he mean, do I have the same view of god that he has? If I do not know what he means by god, how do I decide that No is a better answer than Yes?
If I say Yes to his question, what does that Yes mean? Is the god of his question the same as the god in my reply? I may say No because I do not think that the word god in the question has any clear meaning or any meaning that I can agree to, or because I am reasonably sure that the questioner and I do not share a common meaning and I do not wish to add to our already considerable confusion in talking about god. However, the questioner may assume (wrongly, in fact) that my No means that I reject god as a useful religious concept or that I reject the notion that the word god refers to any meaningful ultimate reality.
Here’s the point: answering either Yes or No assumes that we share a common meaning for the word god and that is almost certainly not the case. So whether I answer positively or negatively, either answer misleads the questioner and I have not communicated anything that gives him any information about me or my religious views or even a rough answer to his question. If I do not know what he means when he uses the word god and if neither answer communicates any useful information, common sense tells us that the question has no meaning when it is asked in that way.
If I ask the questioner what he means by god he may take offense because he does not know that there are as many possible meanings as there are persons who use the word and he may think I am toying with him, or he may answer with phrases such as ‘the creator of the universe’ or a ‘very powerful being who is Lord of all that is,’ or ‘the father of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ or some other description that suggests an anthropomorphic being, a divine Person who acts, loves, forgives, punishes, performs miracles, answers prayer or otherwise acts very much like a person writ large who interferes with natural law or manages the events and course of history.
In response to each of these attempts to say what the word god means to him I could say, "No, I don’t believe that." Alternatively I could say "Yes, I believe in god but as I understand him, which apparently that is not the same thing that you mean by god," or I could say "No, I don’t believe in your god or share your conception of god, and when I use the god I mean something different than you mean." I would have communicated substantially the same meaning with any possible response. The difficulty arises because the term god has no acceptable agreed common meaning. Each of us uses the word to mean whatever we want it to mean and we mistakenly believe that others have the same view of god as we do.
This leads us directly to the peculiar dilemma posed by our use of “religious language” that we do not often think about, which is that we use various words and expressions to discuss religion and religious concepts without considering whether we and our conversational partner have the same thing in mind when we use a particular word and consequently we proceed with our conversation (or our argument) unaware that we may be miscommunicating or misleading rather than informing.
We use words to communicate meaning. In order for us to communicate clearly so that we understand each other when we speak and write, the words we use must have a commonly agreed meaning. Without agreeing on the meaning of words it would be impossible for us to communicate.
If we are unclear or disagree about the meaning of a word we can look that word up in a good dictionary and the dictionary then becomes the arbiter of what that word means. If there are several possible meanings of a word we will agree that we are intending to use a particular word in a particular way, or we will understand why we have disagreed and then we will seek words more appropriate to our respective meanings. It is a social convention fundamental to communication that we agree to use words this way. If we did not do so we could not communicate with each other.
Those engaged in discussions about god or religion (as well as politics, ethics, values and other abstract subjects) often are not aware that they are using words differently and therefore that they are not communicating. That makes discussions about religion frustrating to the participants and considerably more difficult emotionally than conversations about ‘things’ where we share a precise understanding of the meaning of the terms, such as cars, or tables or atoms, for example.
If I say to you ‘look at that horse’, you must have the same general picture in your mind of ‘horse’ as I do in order for you to understand that I intend for you to look around and locate an animal that resembles what we both have agreed to call a ‘horse.’
If we are at the zoo and I say to you, ‘look at that velocipede,’ you may not know what a velocipede is but you would certainly be forgiven if you assumed it was an animal, since you were surrounded by various animals that you had not seen before the names of which you did not know, but the context of our conversation suggested to you that most likely I meant a particular animal previously unknown to you. [The miscommunication is resolved by an explanation that velocipede is an antique term for a bicycle, but we use it to illustrate the point that much of our conversation about religion is carried on with a presumption that we know and agree about the meaning or referent of the words we use to discuss religious concepts.]
Regrettably for clarity, the vocabulary we use in our ordinary conversation about religion does not communicate very clearly what we intend to say. In fact the opposite is true, our ordinary religious language tends to conceal more than it reveals. If you doubt this is so, try asking several different people to define or describe god. You are likely to find that not only do different people describe god in different ways, but you may also find that you do not have the same thing in mind as others do.
We could try a different approach and ask whether god exists. This approach doesn’t get us any farther down the road of clarity and provides us with additional troublesome difficulties in meaning. We still must wrestle with what god means in this sentence, but more important, we must also consider what exists means and whether the implications of existence can reasonably be applied to traditional concepts of god. To exist means to be a part of our world of experience, to be a thing among other things, to be tangible, to occupy space and time, to be measurable. Whatever else we may or may not believe about god, surely we must agree that god is not a thing.
That is why it does not make sense to say that god is a “being” even if we intend to say that god is not just a being like other beings but is the Supreme Being or is the highest form of being because a “being” by definition is something that is, something that exists, something real and tangible that necessarily occupies a particular place in space and time. That is what we mean when we say that something “exists.”
I do not see how a concept of god can have any meaning that is more than trivial if that god exists in the world of space and time, of things, of beings, of the universe, of existence. So I reject the notion that god exists, that god is a part of the universe, a thing among other things, a being in any sense of what that word means. It makes no sense to say that god is or exists, because if god exists he is not and cannot be god.
It is precisely this difficulty with saying what we mean in a way that is clear, honest and helpful that made it impossible for me to remain in a parish ministry. Parishioners and I spoke a different language, which is to say that the meanings of the words that are most crucial to Christianity are not generally agreed.. Every conversation became an occasion of miscommunication. It became impossible to use words like god, creation, resurrection, and salvation in my conversations with church people without miscommunicating, knowing that what I said was misunderstood or was heard in a way different than I intended.
Religious professionals sometimes avoid the problem of miscommunication by ignoring differences in meaning or not calling attention to them, but I was not comfortable with keeping private meanings for these important but troublesome words and could not continue to use them with the knowledge that by using them without reinterpreting them I was giving the impression that I used them in the same sense they were understood (or misunderstood) by lay persons. This raised an issue of integrity for me that I could not get around.
Some of my theological school classmates and ministerial colleagues had less trouble with this issue than I did, thinking it better to adopt the admonition given to physicians as a guiding principle—‘do no harm.’ In this case, the presumed harm was to undermine the religious faith of some parishioners, and therefore (as I concluded anyway) to ignore the implications of their theological education and to carry on with the life of the parish as if their theological education was an interesting but irrelevant side trip on their educational journey.
Unfortunately, perhaps due to a conscience much too sensitive, I was not able to ignore those implications. I believed then and still believe that serious harm has been done to our understanding of Christian faith by ignoring the intellectual challenges to Christianity posed by modern secular culture. By failing to deal with the challenge of modernity in a constructive manner and by failing to translate the meaning of Christian faith into the language and culture of our secular world, we have diminished its value and relevancy to many thoughtful people in our generation and that has been a considerable disservice to the integrity and viability of Christianity.
Our failure to reinterpret Christianity as it was received from an earlier generation into language that was understandable and relevant to our modern world left us with an archaic and irrelevant Christianity that could easily be ignored. The practical effects of failing to deal with the related questions of meaning and relevancy worked to diminish the appeal and the intellectual vigor of Christianity. The brightest minds of our generation increasingly began to feel that Christianity is not so much wrong as irrelevant because it reflects a world view that is incomprehensible to the 21st Century.
One obvious effect of the failure to reinterpret Christianity for the modern world can be seen in the precipitous decline of mainline protestant denominations since the 1960s and in the related but counter-intuitive rapid growth and influence of the evangelical and fundamentalist churches throughout the 1980s and 1990s not just in the United States but also in the developing nations of the world.
Fundamentalism thrives as an escapist reaction to the intellectual challenge of modernity by providing simplistic but emotionally satisfying answers to difficult theological, existential and human questions. It gained its foothold through the decline of the traditional classical and humanistic liberal arts education, which in turn resulted from the failure of public education. It continues to flourish through an incomprehensible intellectual schizophrenia in which the 19th Century theological world view of fundamentalism is still held by contemporaries of our modern scientific world who are apparently oblivious of the logical inconsistency of these conflicting outlooks.
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Poetry is no less true than prose but it conveys truth in a different way. Poetry speaks to the intellect but it is an evocative language that also speaks to our emotions and feelings. You do not ask of poetry whether it is true in the same sense that you ask whether a declarative sentence is true. Poetry is a medium for expressing ideas and images that are not easily expressed in prose, and poetry may be better able to convey some truths than prose.
The languages of myth and poetry are similar in their structure and function. When we say of a story that it is a myth, at least as the term is used in history and theology, it does not mean that the story is not in some sense true but rather that the truth of myth is not literal.
Take, for instance, the mythic story of Oedipus, a Greek tragedy you may remember from school days in which unknowingly the son killed his father and married his mother.
You do not say about the story of Oedipus that it is not true because Oedipus is not a real person or you would betray yourself as a simpleton. Of course it is true, and of course it does not describe a historical event, but that is not the point. The Oedipus story describes a truth of human nature with mythic images that are more pregnant with meaning than can be contained in simple prose. It makes no sense to ask of a myth whether or not it is true, but only to ask 'in what sense' it is true.
Myth, like poetry, expresses its truth in images. We must listen carefully and thoughtfully to discover for ourselves the sense in which a myth speaks truly. Like poetry, myth conveys more than can be expressed easily and exhaustively in prose and its great value is that it continues to speak to us whenever we go back to it.
Religious language, including language about god, shares the characteristics of the languages of myth and poetry. Much of our difficulty in communicating with each other on the subject of religion comes from the lack of clarity about the meaning of the words we use, yet clarity is essential for meaning and communication.
When she was about 10 years old my granddaughter Ashley asked me if I believed in God. We were traveling by car from our home in Vero Beach to our vacation home in Western North Carolina. We had a long drive ahead of us and sometimes that long drive provided an opportunity to talk about things that mattered to her or to me. I thought this might be such a time.
I thought quickly about what might have led her to ask such a question. Did one of her friends say something that was disturbing to her? Was she looking for information? For assurance?
It seemed like a “teachable moment” that could lead to a useful discussion, so I asked her what she thought about God. She replied that she was just curious, she hadn’t thought about it much, she just wondered if there really was a god. I don’t recall what I told her but it seemed to satisfy her and after some more conversation she became absorbed in her hand-held electronic game.
It is a question that many of us ask ourselves and for me there is no clear easy answer. Do I believe in God? Yes. And No. Both answers are true and yet neither is true, which leads me to conclude that I don’t think the question gets us very far if it is asked that way.
At least part of the difficulty I have with the question of whether or not I ‘believe in’ god is that it is not clear what the questioner means. Specifically, I do not know what he means by god. Does he mean, do I have the same view of god that he has? If I do not know what he means by god, how do I decide that No is a better answer than Yes?
If I say Yes to his question, what does that Yes mean? Is the god of his question the same as the god in my reply? I may say No because I do not think that the word god in the question has any clear meaning or any meaning that I can agree to, or because I am reasonably sure that the questioner and I do not share a common meaning and I do not wish to add to our already considerable confusion in talking about god. However, the questioner may assume (wrongly, in fact) that my No means that I reject god as a useful religious concept or that I reject the notion that the word god refers to any meaningful ultimate reality.
Here’s the point: answering either Yes or No assumes that we share a common meaning for the word god and that is almost certainly not the case. So whether I answer positively or negatively, either answer misleads the questioner and I have not communicated anything that gives him any information about me or my religious views or even a rough answer to his question. If I do not know what he means when he uses the word god and if neither answer communicates any useful information, common sense tells us that the question has no meaning when it is asked in that way.
If I ask the questioner what he means by god he may take offense because he does not know that there are as many possible meanings as there are persons who use the word and he may think I am toying with him, or he may answer with phrases such as ‘the creator of the universe’ or a ‘very powerful being who is Lord of all that is,’ or ‘the father of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ or some other description that suggests an anthropomorphic being, a divine Person who acts, loves, forgives, punishes, performs miracles, answers prayer or otherwise acts very much like a person writ large who interferes with natural law or manages the events and course of history.
In response to each of these attempts to say what the word god means to him I could say, "No, I don’t believe that." Alternatively I could say "Yes, I believe in god but as I understand him, which apparently that is not the same thing that you mean by god," or I could say "No, I don’t believe in your god or share your conception of god, and when I use the god I mean something different than you mean." I would have communicated substantially the same meaning with any possible response. The difficulty arises because the term god has no acceptable agreed common meaning. Each of us uses the word to mean whatever we want it to mean and we mistakenly believe that others have the same view of god as we do.
This leads us directly to the peculiar dilemma posed by our use of “religious language” that we do not often think about, which is that we use various words and expressions to discuss religion and religious concepts without considering whether we and our conversational partner have the same thing in mind when we use a particular word and consequently we proceed with our conversation (or our argument) unaware that we may be miscommunicating or misleading rather than informing.
We use words to communicate meaning. In order for us to communicate clearly so that we understand each other when we speak and write, the words we use must have a commonly agreed meaning. Without agreeing on the meaning of words it would be impossible for us to communicate.
If we are unclear or disagree about the meaning of a word we can look that word up in a good dictionary and the dictionary then becomes the arbiter of what that word means. If there are several possible meanings of a word we will agree that we are intending to use a particular word in a particular way, or we will understand why we have disagreed and then we will seek words more appropriate to our respective meanings. It is a social convention fundamental to communication that we agree to use words this way. If we did not do so we could not communicate with each other.
Those engaged in discussions about god or religion (as well as politics, ethics, values and other abstract subjects) often are not aware that they are using words differently and therefore that they are not communicating. That makes discussions about religion frustrating to the participants and considerably more difficult emotionally than conversations about ‘things’ where we share a precise understanding of the meaning of the terms, such as cars, or tables or atoms, for example.
If I say to you ‘look at that horse’, you must have the same general picture in your mind of ‘horse’ as I do in order for you to understand that I intend for you to look around and locate an animal that resembles what we both have agreed to call a ‘horse.’
If we are at the zoo and I say to you, ‘look at that velocipede,’ you may not know what a velocipede is but you would certainly be forgiven if you assumed it was an animal, since you were surrounded by various animals that you had not seen before the names of which you did not know, but the context of our conversation suggested to you that most likely I meant a particular animal previously unknown to you. [The miscommunication is resolved by an explanation that velocipede is an antique term for a bicycle, but we use it to illustrate the point that much of our conversation about religion is carried on with a presumption that we know and agree about the meaning or referent of the words we use to discuss religious concepts.]
Regrettably for clarity, the vocabulary we use in our ordinary conversation about religion does not communicate very clearly what we intend to say. In fact the opposite is true, our ordinary religious language tends to conceal more than it reveals. If you doubt this is so, try asking several different people to define or describe god. You are likely to find that not only do different people describe god in different ways, but you may also find that you do not have the same thing in mind as others do.
We could try a different approach and ask whether god exists. This approach doesn’t get us any farther down the road of clarity and provides us with additional troublesome difficulties in meaning. We still must wrestle with what god means in this sentence, but more important, we must also consider what exists means and whether the implications of existence can reasonably be applied to traditional concepts of god. To exist means to be a part of our world of experience, to be a thing among other things, to be tangible, to occupy space and time, to be measurable. Whatever else we may or may not believe about god, surely we must agree that god is not a thing.
That is why it does not make sense to say that god is a “being” even if we intend to say that god is not just a being like other beings but is the Supreme Being or is the highest form of being because a “being” by definition is something that is, something that exists, something real and tangible that necessarily occupies a particular place in space and time. That is what we mean when we say that something “exists.”
I do not see how a concept of god can have any meaning that is more than trivial if that god exists in the world of space and time, of things, of beings, of the universe, of existence. So I reject the notion that god exists, that god is a part of the universe, a thing among other things, a being in any sense of what that word means. It makes no sense to say that god is or exists, because if god exists he is not and cannot be god.
It is precisely this difficulty with saying what we mean in a way that is clear, honest and helpful that made it impossible for me to remain in a parish ministry. Parishioners and I spoke a different language, which is to say that the meanings of the words that are most crucial to Christianity are not generally agreed.. Every conversation became an occasion of miscommunication. It became impossible to use words like god, creation, resurrection, and salvation in my conversations with church people without miscommunicating, knowing that what I said was misunderstood or was heard in a way different than I intended.
Religious professionals sometimes avoid the problem of miscommunication by ignoring differences in meaning or not calling attention to them, but I was not comfortable with keeping private meanings for these important but troublesome words and could not continue to use them with the knowledge that by using them without reinterpreting them I was giving the impression that I used them in the same sense they were understood (or misunderstood) by lay persons. This raised an issue of integrity for me that I could not get around.
Some of my theological school classmates and ministerial colleagues had less trouble with this issue than I did, thinking it better to adopt the admonition given to physicians as a guiding principle—‘do no harm.’ In this case, the presumed harm was to undermine the religious faith of some parishioners, and therefore (as I concluded anyway) to ignore the implications of their theological education and to carry on with the life of the parish as if their theological education was an interesting but irrelevant side trip on their educational journey.
Unfortunately, perhaps due to a conscience much too sensitive, I was not able to ignore those implications. I believed then and still believe that serious harm has been done to our understanding of Christian faith by ignoring the intellectual challenges to Christianity posed by modern secular culture. By failing to deal with the challenge of modernity in a constructive manner and by failing to translate the meaning of Christian faith into the language and culture of our secular world, we have diminished its value and relevancy to many thoughtful people in our generation and that has been a considerable disservice to the integrity and viability of Christianity.
Our failure to reinterpret Christianity as it was received from an earlier generation into language that was understandable and relevant to our modern world left us with an archaic and irrelevant Christianity that could easily be ignored. The practical effects of failing to deal with the related questions of meaning and relevancy worked to diminish the appeal and the intellectual vigor of Christianity. The brightest minds of our generation increasingly began to feel that Christianity is not so much wrong as irrelevant because it reflects a world view that is incomprehensible to the 21st Century.
One obvious effect of the failure to reinterpret Christianity for the modern world can be seen in the precipitous decline of mainline protestant denominations since the 1960s and in the related but counter-intuitive rapid growth and influence of the evangelical and fundamentalist churches throughout the 1980s and 1990s not just in the United States but also in the developing nations of the world.
Fundamentalism thrives as an escapist reaction to the intellectual challenge of modernity by providing simplistic but emotionally satisfying answers to difficult theological, existential and human questions. It gained its foothold through the decline of the traditional classical and humanistic liberal arts education, which in turn resulted from the failure of public education. It continues to flourish through an incomprehensible intellectual schizophrenia in which the 19th Century theological world view of fundamentalism is still held by contemporaries of our modern scientific world who are apparently oblivious of the logical inconsistency of these conflicting outlooks.
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