The power of language in the everyday world

I live every day in the world of language. I speak with many people every day. I read books, magazines and newspapers every day. I write a lot of words, mostly on the keyboard of my computer. Every day I probably listen to more words than I write, read and speak. Even when I think, I am a slave to the reality of language.

My slave language happens to be English. English is the child of a West Germanic language. The language came to England many centuries ago when German people migrated across the channel. The language had a unique ability to absorb features of other languages with which it came into contact. It was influenced by Scandinavians and shepherded by the Scots and the Angles. The British gave English a huge push onto the world scene by writers such as Shakespeare. The King James translation of the Bible gave the language another big push, as did expansion of British colonialism. The United States solidified English as the lingua franca of the world when it became the world’s super power through its incredible victories of World War II. Today, people around the world are scrambling to learn English. The English vocabulary continues to expand, adopting new words everywhere it goes. The story of the English language is fascinating to say the least.

However, English is not unusual in its evolution. All languages are constantly evolving within the context of its use. Language is a functional phenomenon. Words ultimately do not have meaning. Rather, they are sounds and symbols that have uses. I first learned the use of English words because I lived with them in a highly verbal family. When I entered school, I learned to read and write words. I learned to put them together in sentences and paragraphs according to rules of grammar. My life was a laboratory for the development of language.

In my devout Baptist family, I was told that there was one book of words that were different from all other words. They were different because they were straight from God. They were timeless and without error. These words were “verbally inspired.” After all, the Bible was the Word of God. I was taught that in the languages of the original writings the words of the Bible were fixed, perfect and exact in their meanings. I was taught that learning Greek and Hebrew was the key to my understanding of life and, most importantly, God’s will for my life. I learned Greek and studied Hebrew. I found that Greek and Hebrew were just like English and all other languages. They evolved in the cultures that used the languages. I concluded that words, even the Greek and Hebrew words found in ancient manuscripts of the Bible, have no intrinsic value or meaning. However, they do have uses that are very important to the understanding of Judaism and Christianity.

Words are the vehicles that we use to tell stories and communicate messages, whether those messages are of great or lesser importance. The most important use of the words of the Bible is to tell the stories of people and nations in their pursuit of meanings and values for life. As a pastor of congregations, it was never my desire for my congregants to study the words of the Bible, but to study and master the stories of the Bible.

The most important story found in the Old Testament is the story of Moses, who under the direction of God led a slave people out of Egypt into a new life in a homeland of their own. The most important story of the New Testament is the story of the crucifixion of Jesus on a Roman cross and his resurrection from the dead. To be transferred from person to person and from generation to generation, these crucial stories are dependent on words. However, the words that are used are common and ordinary words. They are tools in the hands of storytellers.

The pursuit of holy words has been a curse to Christian Faith. It has focused people’s attention on a baby carriage rather than on the child, who is being transported. The pursuit of holy words is further compromised because of translation of words from one language to another. The everyday language of Jesus was Aramaic. Aramaic was the common language of all the rural people of Galilee where Jesus lived and taught. The passing of the stories of Jesus from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English with significant stops between militates against every theory of verbal inerrancies.

Our religious culture of holy words has not well served Christ and his followers. It suggests a kind of incarnation of God into words and a book. The essence of Christianity claims that God was incarnate in Jesus, the rabbi from Nazareth. Belief in a Holy Bible is a denial of the very nature of language and reduces the Almighty to sounds, paper and ink.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister who lives in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.

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