Towards a theological reflection on language and linguistics

An attempt to reflect on the fact of language in the light of Genesis 1 & 2


Introduction:
My first degree is in Linguistics (otherwise known as linguistic science) and I have read a number of books in the intervening years that attempt to bring together linguistics and theology. Either they have been mostly about how linguistics can help textual studies or understanding some elements of background to biblical or even doctrinal investigations or they have been very much focussed on the philosophy of language in order to inform hermeneutics and enquiries related to metaphorical and analogical matters in relation to God-talk. All of those things are important, and interesting, but not what I was really looking for.
What I was looking for was a theology of language rather than theology with language or theology via language. What I have been seeking to do is to address the perceived lack and reflect theologically on the phenomenon of human language from the perspective of one formed by the discipline of linguistic science. The framework for this reflection is the pastoral cycle, a major tool of reflection in practical theology which sketches out the main aspects of reflective thinking and practice and so gives structure to the reflective process.
This reflection I see as a kind of dialogue between the characteristics of language in my analysis so far, and some apparently key and certainly intriguing passages in Genesis 1-12. This approach would correspond to Green's 'intuition'1 on the reflection epicycle.

1 experience
Quite simply the experience is of conducting much life in and through the medium of English but also of using other languages from time to time and finding interesting questions about the structure of speech sounds, syntactical relationships, linguistic variation in respect of social and psychological matters and how the human condition is reflected in and refracted through language. There are, then, two main facets of the experience for me.
1.1 human language
Is fairly unique as far as we can tell. The claims about teaching other primates to use sign language are contested in regard to whether they are actually using grammar or merely isolated vocabules in sequence. Being part of linguistic communities is basic: no community, no language.
1.2 linguistic science
is simply the attempt to study the phenomenon of language systematically, descriptively (as opposed to proscriptively: beware grammar marms!) and with a view to formulating testable hypotheses.

2 analysis
In this section I will mention the main characteristics of human language as they appear to me from my experience. These are the communal nature of language, it finiteness, its assimilation to and disclosure of human power, solidarity and identity, and that it is rule-based and generative.

2.1 communal
The only examples of languages which have only one speaker are those shortly to be dead languages or artificial languages. In the former case a linguistic community once did exist. In the latter it exists in the imagination of the author (Sindarin or Quenya might be cited here and Esperanto when first devised). Language is a communal possession: it belongs to a speech community who negotiate it tacitly in usage and sometimes explicitly in arguments or observations about habits or differences of speech.

2.2 Finite and focal
However big a word count a language can muster, it is still a finite number, and a smaller number of words that will be in active regular usage. Finiteness means it is partial, connotative and unstable. Focal means that as a finite tool it brings things into focus, excluding others thereby from topicality.

2.2.1 partial
Language is partial in that it is constrained to draw attention to some things. It cannot refer to everything. And even what it does focus on can only be partially described by picking out salient features of perceived reality while leaving others assumed and unstated. This is an important feature to note because some theological positions assume that the partialness of language implies an imperfection that would not be part of Eschatological reality. I doubt this -as will be seen below.

2.2.2 connotative
Because it is partial, language -indeed any sign system, also tends to invest its components with a penumbra of connoted meanings: things that may be implied or implicated, associations. These meanings are often very influential but unnoticed consciously.
2.2.3 unstable
By virtue of a vocal tract operated by fatigue-prone musculature in a frequently sub-optimal environment relying on 'receiving equipment' of variable quality, language changes. By virtue of facing novel dimensions of human experience (at least existentially), language changes. By virtue of artistry, fashion and the felt need to stake out identities, language changes. It is unstable.

2.3 interacts with power, solidarity, identity etc
Language use can identify one as belonging to certain groups, it can use the connotative meanings of, for example, accent to intimidate or to welcome. Vocabulary can be used to include or exclude. Syntax can slow others' apprehension down.

2.3.1 moral dimensions
Therefore, language has implication for ethics and politics as well as for the simple tasks of daily getting on with others, remember James' “taming the tongue”.

2.4 structured, rule-based and generative
Despite being finite, the range of possible meaningful sentences is infinite. Many rules of grammar are potentially recursive. Language then, is creative in offering the potential to use limited means to produce many distinct ends.

3 reflection
The things mentioned in the foregoing analysis section are fairly basic observations about language within linguistic science. What follows is to bring those observations into reflection on Genesis 1 and 2 and in particular the acts of creation and naming. For the sake of brevity I am not going to include further reflections on the temptation story and the Tower of Babel story.

3.1 Things I notice in the texts as a linguist
First of all let's look at Gen1.1-5. How should we understand the relationship between 'God created' and 'Let there be light'. In short, I'm taking it that "Let there be light" is to be understood as an act beginning to bring the formlessness and void to order. So we have an act of performative language bringing about what is spoken. Then we have acts of naming of what has been brought about.

3.1.1 God speaking
I don't read Genesis 1 as literal history, but it is interesting and important to start within the framework of the story. So I find myself wondering as a linguistic scientist: what 'said' can mean without mouth to speak; what medium the signal is supposed to be carried through; what linguistic community is implied? Now, there is an important sense in which these questions are simply 'wrong'. They are asking things that are beyond the purview of the story, particularly if it is not a literal story. (Of course, if it were taken to be a literal story, then the difficulty in coming up with sensible answers to these questions would tell against treating the story as being of a literal kind of genre). But let's stay with it for just a while longer.

"Said" seems to entail 'imagining' God -for the purposes of the narrative- as having a vocal tract and to be functioning within a medium capable of carrying sound. In other words the picture is literally contradictory to the rest of the narrative by envisaging it taking place in the world that is still to be created. So what are we to make of this? It does play into the later stories which see God walking around and in anthropomorphic terms. If we leave aside the anthropomorphisms or rather, if we seek to find in them pointers to non-literal meanings or ideas about God (as all religious language must do, it's just that this is 'cruder' than we usually play with), then what could we say; how could it help us to understand God and the world better?

The question may be better taken as why it is presented as a speech-act and not, say, as a feat of engineering, or manual labour. Maybe because light is 'ethereal', though that would not hold for the subsequent acts of speeched shaping. I'm going to suggest that the important thing about it may be that speech and words, hint at mind in a way that other kinds of actions do not. Speech is used among humans mostly for 'mind reading', so speaking is more closely associated with 'what's on your mind'. There's a closer relationship between intention and expression; less room for recalcitrance on the part of what is being 'performed upon'. For many people there is a close relationship between language and thought because much thought is mediated and processed in language.

Therefore, this "Let there be..." is both relatively effortless and hints at a very close connection to the mind of God. Here we do not have the effortful and violent myths of other cultures' creation stories with a gods having to make do with something that is being recycled from the body of an opponent, for example. Rather we have a clear expression of God's mind which can truly be called "good"2.

3.1.2 God naming
Let's now move on to the next part.

And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. Gen1.4-5

Here we have God portrayed as naming "day" and "night". Again, I don't think that it is very useful to ask what language3; the point is the act of naming not the phonemes.

It does seem to me that portraying God as naming tells us that God affirms language. There are those who, aware of the limitations of language which hermeneutics rubs our noses in, view language as necessarily imperfect and therefore as a condition of fallen human existence to be overcome and removed in the Age to come. I see in this part of the passage a hint that language is part of God's purposes and is not necessarily allied with the fall. Of course it must partake of the fall, but hermeneutics is not a science that must disappear in the new heavens and the new earth4.

The fact of God naming gives a legitimacy to the endeavour of language. The tasks of recognising similarities and differences and creating or refining semantic fields, of creating symbols to carry ideas, concepts and emotions between minds is a god-imaging task. In this passage we see God recognising reality and representing it in some way symbolically. To be sure it is tied to finiteness, createdness. But it is not thereby ungodly.

But it should be noted that the finitude is part of the point of language. It selects or highlights certain things about what we are aware of and leaves so many other things unlabelled, unsaid because they are not the focus. We can either assume others know them already or that they are not sufficiently important to name at that point for the purposes of communication then and there. God creates something finite, bounded, and immediately it is capable of being symbolised. Yes, God knows with total immediacy every quark, molecule, energetic trajectory, cell, planet and galaxy, but to recognise boundaries, differences and similarities, is to do something more than 'merely' be aware of all and each. Recognition opens up into seeing finite things in themselves and in relationship, and that in turn opens into the possibility of representation in symbol.

I'm not convinced by the idea that language in this passage shows in some way power over things. To me it seems that it is more akin to God seeing that what is, is good. It is about recognising the way things are, understanding them to some degree, seeing them in relationship, affirming them. It is first an act of contemplation, even of thanksgiving-in-embryo and then it is a calling to focus for others. Far from being a sign of fallenness, language is other-oriented of necessity in two dimensions: the signified is other and the receiver is other. Language represents an attempt to transcend the self; it is grounded in an agapeic movement.

3.1.3 God's self-talk
Verses 26-28 is the first time reader-wise that God is portrayed as talking to godself. A first-person "Let us..." instead of "Let there be ..." and similar third-person phrases. I can't help feeling that this is significant. Significant too that these are phrases not aiming to inform or describe but to accomplish things, underlining the apprehension that speaking is not just, or even primarily, about the modernist norm of reasoning.

Language really implies community. We don't learn to speak unless there is a language community to learn from and with. Language is a collective possession belonging to all who use it [notwithstanding the attempts to police it by the grammar-marms and 'disgusted of Tunbridge Wells']. So, though I know it's exegetically perilous, I can't help seeing a plurality implied in God being portrayed as speaking; it's not a royal 'we', its a simple recognition of a linguistic community. And it seems to imply that the communicative community that is God is being widened to include humans. Especially as God goes on to instruct the newly-formed divine-image bearers directly: second-personwise.

So it also seems to me interesting that the divine image seems to be associated with communication and therefore personal relationality. So to me, it doesn't seem at all far-fetched to find here a hint at personal relationality and community 'in' God. And it seems to me that we have the embryo of human beings being invited to share in the divine community-life.

'Ruling over' the earth and 'subduing' it, seems to imply that being included in God's [speech-]community brings with it a share in God's privilege of ruling, and naming things may be a key aspect of how to understand ruling and subduing.

3.1.4 Adam's act of naming
We turn next to Genesis 2:19-20a. It is this naming by Adam that seems to be the most fascinating. And again, it doesn't seem to me to be about taking power over. It seems, rather to be more of a contemplative act. Perhaps more than contemplative: an act of understanding, of taxonomy; and act of seeing in connection with other things and in differentiation. In actual fact, in doing this we seem to have a parallel to God's acts of naming in Genesis one.

Of course, the difficulty we have with that is that it is almost certain that chapter one has a different origin to that of chapter two. However, we may want to ask further questions of potential intertextual histories, but I don't want to hang around that issue here; merely note that I think that perhaps this theological similarity may indicate that there is one.

It is interesting how this naming is presented. It is not something that Adam snatches at while God isn't looking, it is not an act of fallen humanity [though it is intriguingly bracketed by things that later contribute to the fall]. Rather it is an act which God engineers by bringing before Adam what is to be named. And although it is in the passive, there is more than a hint of Divine endorsement in "that was its name". It is as if God is giving Adam -that is humankind- the freedom to make connections and discoveries, taxonomies and poetries. In short, it seems to me, it is implied in this little scene that God opens up a space for human culture to evolve with some degree of freedom from God. God is not creating a Divinely-sanctioned Borg collective where individuality is effectively erased and cultural development is only permitted along certain very tightly constrained lines. No, Adam can make names, give names and those names stand. Humans can contemplate the world, explore its nature, its components and its 'inter-ousiality' and assign signs and codes to think further and together about it and that sign-empowered marshalling of thinking understanding and celebrating is allowed to stand; it is accepted by God. God seems to want to see what we will make of the Creation, how we will understand it and wonder at it and how we will speak of it. And when I write 'speak', I mean to include the languages of the arts as well as the more 'scientific' or formal linguistic registers.

It seems to me that this basically favours a constructivist approach to learning. Not a strong variety where there is no objective reality and we entirely construct our own world, but a moderate version which accepts the [God-] givenness of the world but sees God as leaving room for us to see what we make of it and be creative with what we discover and how we 'taxonymise' it. This contrasts with a strong sovereignty view of God, such as that which seems to be implied in the Qur'an,5 which seems to minimise human creativity and responsiveness. The Qur'an seems to imply that language is God's and the implication for us would be to relearn those original names with all that implies for conforming to particular ways of taxonymising and cultural understanding.
This has important consequences for theology of mission, culture, science and education.

3.2 language and the image of God
Linguist Mark C Baker writes6:
In the Judeo-Christian scriptures language is, then, a property of humankind by virtue of the fact that God creates humans "in his own image" (Gen. 1:27). All other animals are called forth out of the ground, implying that they have a physical nature and are subject to the same physical principles as inanimate matter 9Gen. 1:24). The creation of humanity, however, has a second step: 'The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being" (Gen. 2:7). In other words, humanity is given a spiritual nature that is specifically said to be parallel in many respects to God's. Among other things, this means that since God is a linguistic being, so are humans.
Is God really a linguistic being? I have trouble with saying that God is a linguistic being. The text of Gen 1-3 does present God speechfully including the “let us” passage mentioned above. But it would be going too far to claim that this was more than anthropomorphism. When we reflect on the nature of language, we understand why: language necessarily involves partialness as we select topics and ignore -or leave assumed- other things. Language is, of necessity, tied up with the work of dividing up and demarcating creation. So to say that God is a linguistic being is problematic: are we really saying God talks to Godself in Gods own inner being? Let's further reflect that God has no vocal tract (except in incarnation) and presumably no barriers between the persons of the Trinity to full disclosure and therefore no need for the partialness of speech.
Yet clearly God condescends to communicate in some way corresponding to verbally with Adam. So perhaps it is not that God is linguistic so much as God is communicative and language is a chief means to communicate in a context involving finitude both of environment and of agents? Being communicative is an aspect of loving: it is going out to the other, touching the other, overcoming the separation. Perhaps we can see language at its best as a reflection of the Divine perichoresis. Language images God in terms of finitude and biologically-emergent matter, not only in terms of communicativeness, but also and relatedly in terms of socialness, for language is a community affair.
So the implications of language for thinking about the image of God seem to devolve to being particular cases of the general issues which come to a head in incarnation and ascension.

4 planning
At this point I have not explored the planning phase of the cycle. So Let me outline the work still to be done. Further reflection on passages from Genesis 1-12, particularly the temptation narrative and the Tower of Babel and its precursor. There is more to be said about constructivism particularly in relation to education and via semiotics about culture and the arts. In turn it may be that this should be related to the New Jerusalem and an eschatological account. There is also some exploration due of the way that language's implication in incarnation may be thought about further.

notes
1 Buckley & Green, Let's do Theology
2 There is an ideological dimension here that need not detain us now as it is covered in other reflections on the history and meaning of this passage.
3 . It happens here to be in English translated from Hebrew -which is the original language of the text as we now have it. However, it would seem that the Hebrews picked up what we know as 'Hebrew' from the Canaanites, having presumably spoken Aramaic in patriarchal times.
4 There is a helpful treatment of this issue in Smith, 2000.
5 “Allah taught Adam all the names of everything”, Q.2.31
6 Baker, p.512

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