D E M O   M O D E

Adjust gradesSend E-Mail to Instructor--------------------------IntroductionSection One: The Comma I--------------------------Register for New CourseReturn to Home

Introduction

God has revealed Himself to us in writing. Although we may take that for granted, He has not communicated with everyone using words. In our fathers’ time he disclosed himself in words only to his people, while his handiwork alone declared His glory to the world. Objects and pictures communicate, but full and open disclosure is made with words.

That clear verbal disclosure is an expression of love. God loved His people and disclosed Himself to them. We follow this pattern by opening up with our friends in a way we don’t with others. The greater the love between friends, of course, the greater the disclosure. In Numbers 12, Jehovah told Aaron and Miriam that with His ordinary prophets He spoke in visions and dreams.

Not so with My servant Moses;
He is faithful in all My house.
I speak with him face to face,
Clearly and not in riddles;
And he sees the form of the Lord.

God loved Moses, and the proof of it was that He disclosed Himself to Moses with directness and clarity.

When the fullness of time had come, God became incarnate in our midst as the Word. That God revealed the Word out of love is obvious from the entire biblical revelation, and is articulated in the famous passage in which Jesus tells us that His Father so loved the world that he sent into it His Word, His one and only Son.

Like his Father, Jesus also disclosed himself more clearly to those he loved. To the faithless of Israel he spoke in difficult parables, but to his disciples he spoke plainly. Words are capable of transmitting the entire spectrum of meaning; they are capable of complexity, of detail and subtlety and fullness. This skillful and clear use of words must be learned. The greater your skill with words, the greater your ability to express love.

God’s people are the people of the Word. The risen Christ has called us to do his will on the earth as it is done in heaven, and that requires us to interpret all the earth in terms of the Word. Our progress in this task over the last century has not been exemplary. Even non-christians have noted our culture’s reinterpretation of the world in terms of image. In 1965 George Steiner wrote:

Increasingly, meanings and attitudes are transmitted and made memorable by aural association--the jingles, the oohs and ahs of modern advertisement--and by the pictorial means of billboard and television. The read sentence is in retreat before the photograph, the television shot, the picture-alphabets of comic books and training manuals. More and more, the average man reads captions to various genres of graphic material. The word is mere servant to the sensory shock.¹

Although we still in large part enjoy the structure and stability of a language predicated on the Word, it is being rendered irrelevant by an image-oriented culture in which Christians are only too happy to turn in skillful verbal fellowship for the television. While they are spending a significant part of their lives stupefied in front of it, our language is being deconstructed by God-haters and re-ordered to exclude the Word:

What might now be the tasks, or the opportunities, for the latent political intelligence of literature? The first, I suggest, is to find a language that can match the new world, or the new cosmos, created for us by the Hubble telescope and the translation of DNA. We live at the opening of an age where the nature of humanity, and the nature of the universe, can at last be scrutinized and understood without racism or tribalism, and without superstition. (A page of Stephen Hawking on the “event horizon” is more awe-inspiring than anything in Genesis or Ezekiel.)

But we still employ the stilted and faltering metaphors of our prehistory; translating vivid new discourses back into the safe, solipsistic patois that we already know. Welcoming the completion of the Human Genome Project in the spring of 2000, President Clinton sounded like a gaping Walter Gantry when he said it gave us the dictionary our Maker had used to “create” us. At present, then, language lags behind reality and behind humanity .... ²

Teaching our children God’s ways involves teaching them to appreciate God’s creation and use of words. It requires teaching our children to think God’s thoughts after Him by learning to write according to the pattern He has established. As the Preacher said, “The words of a wise man’s mouth are gracious, but the lips of a fool will swallow him up.” And, “The words of wise men are like goads, and masters of these collections are like well-driven nails; they are given by one Shepherd.”

The required text is Strunk & White, The Elements of Style (3d ed. 1979).

¹“Literature and Post-History,” in Language and Silence: Essays on Literature and the Inhuman, 384 (1967).

²Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere.