That's my brother, Lt David Jensen, 2RAR, setting the East Timorese straight. He's not a gorilla by the way.
With speech, humanity is a bit like a gorilla with a loaded pistol: the explosive weapon is in the hands of someone who has an uncertain control of it. While on the one hand we know that our words have immense power to harm or to do good, we are not always masters of what we say. The connection between words and things has become slippery: not because of some philosophical problem but because those who wield them are deceitful and prone, not just to experience human limitations, but to mistakes.
However, God chooses to use human words in his salvation of the world: not overcoming their creaturely limits, but sanctifying them for his purposes. The paradigm is the calling of the prophet Isaiah (in Isaiah 6): terrified by his vision of God’s glory and holiness, he is rightly a reluctant prophet. As he says: ‘I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips’. But an angel brings a burning coal to touch his mouth. God in calling him purifies his speech so that he can use it to address his people.
It ought not to be surprising then, that with the pouring out of the Holy Spirit after the ascension of Jesus, God enables people to talk about him with their limited human words. In fact, more than just talk about him: it ought not be a surprise that God uses the words of human beings to bring about his mighty purposes – to advance the redemption of the world and to give life to the dead. Pentecost is a miracle of redeemed human speech, a reversal of the divisions of Babel. The gospel of Jesus is a word of new creation with its own new grammar: it is a whole new language to learn.
7 comments:
My goodness - peas in a pod!
Is Pentecost the reversal of Babel or the firstfruits of the reversal of Babel? Mightn't redeemed human speech be as real as the resurrection of the dead? I.e. it's started, but we've only got a taste - a genuine and decisive taste, but there's still a long way to go!
Isn't it possible to have an overrealised linguistics?
Well, fair enough: but it does signal the fulfillment of the Joel prophecy, doesn't it? The outpouring of the Holy Spirit en masse results in an outpouring of prophetic speech to the nations.
Yes, it is poss to have an over-realised linguistics. Many preachers do, I am afraid.
One little whinge:
Is it really such a bad thing that "the connection between words and things" is "slippery"? Doesn't that contribute to the extraordinary power of language to describe objects (even unseen or impossible ones)? We're not just prone to mistakes, we're prone to creativity.
I reckon you'd make your larger point without that clause.
Alan Wood.
Granted, Alan - good point. Somehow, that looseness of language is a great delight: but at the point of the looseness creeps in the possibility of error and deception. How to describe these two truths theologically?
Is the possibility of error and misinterpretation a pre-fall phenomenon? I know I've gone about this before, but I'm still waiting for someone to effectively critique J.K.A. Smith's argument in The Fall of Interpretation.
Well I have mentioned Webster's growl at him elsewhere on this blog... there seemed to be an effective critique there.
I suppose error and misinterpretation can actually be funny and delightful, and part of the game of trying to communicate. In France, it was really quite enjoyable to try and fumble my way through knowing 20 words of French or less. But that gap in a fallen world is an aperture into which evil often creeps, we observe.
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