Our God is an awesome God...

New argument for my good friend, Rhology (and of course, I would not argue so vehemently with the man if he was not an old friend):

Do you believe that God is awesome?

If yes, do you believe that God is more than awesome?

If yes, do you believe that God is so much more than awesome that we lack the language available to describe just how awesome God is?

I'm going to assume for a moment that all of the preceding questions you would answer in the affirmative. It's a fairly standard practice for evangelicals and fundamentalists to proclaim God in this way, that He is so amazing that language is not well suited to describe Him.

Assuming all of this, would it be safe to say that language is a tool that, while it can convey meaning, is ill-suited to conveying the specific meanings that are intended? For instance: If I say that God is awesome, and I also say that the new Honda that came out this year is awesome, surely I don't mean that God is like a car (although his angels may be in one Accord!) You may hear the word "awesome," you already conceive of the contexts of the word "awesome" - that is, you envision different things you consider awesome, and if you're trained to understand the etymology of the word, you may even stop to think that this thing is engineered to create a sense of "awe" in people.

Words are full of connotations - meanings they carry with them that don't necessarily have anything to do with the original word or the meaning in its current utterance. The word "mutilation," as I once argued, literally means a modification to a person's body, such as piercing or cutting, that in some way detrimentally effects the form or function of that part. Taken literally, you could say that ear piercings are mutilations. However, when we think of mutilation, we don't think of just that simple definition - we envision people being brutally murdered, their bodies cut apart, and so on. We envision horrible acts of violence by one person on another. If we do use the word mutilation to describe ear piercings, calling them "ear mutilations," suddenly we have a concept that sounds like people in shopping malls all across the country are victimizing little girls by irrevocably maiming their earlobes, doing emotional and physical trauma from which these kids might never recover. Or, they could simply be feeling like they got stung for a little while, but really happy that they get to wear earrings now.

Language is unfortunately not innocent, in the sense that there are no virgin words, they've all been around the block a few times, and picked up diseases (in the form of connotations).

What connotations you believe apply to a particular word depends greatly on your objective filter - the lens of your belief and experience by which you observe a bit of data. As I said on your blog (and you agreed):

"For a person not yet a Christian, they have to use whatever objective lens they have to view it, because we each approach issues initially from our own personal experiences" (Gamelot, 07/16/08).

When I write a blog, I have my own personal connotations I intend for the words to carry. Sometimes, we may come to a disagreement merely because of a misunderstanding caused by the fact that you read the words differently than I intended them. But, once I've thrown those words out there, they carry all those meanings and then some.

This is a possible benefit for language, if you see language as an art form. Just like in a painting, the painter may have intended his audience to see certain things and have certain emotional responses to the painting - but the true art of the painting lies not in what he intended, but what the audience actually gets out of it. It has a power beyond its paint. Language does too.

Where am I going with all this?

If language is ill-suited to convey extremely specific meanings, then any meanings we derive from it can and should be understood to be just that - the meanings we derive from it. We need to be aware that others can derive different meanings and have perfectly valid reasons for doing so, based on the lens of their experiences. The language doesn't contain just one meaning or the other - rather, it contains all of them.

Of course, the Bible was written in language.

You say that
"God obviously has a vested interest in communicating clearly to His people, so yes, God had a hand in preserving His Word intact" (Rhology, 07/10/08). If that's the case, then by virtue of the fact that He chose to provide His Word through media of multiple translations of an archaic language, He must have known that the language would pick up connotations along the way, and He must further have INTENDED the language to pick up those connotations, because otherwise His message wouldn't be communicated clearly to His people.

Thus, each person who reads the Bible and applies his own lens of experience reads the Bible in exactly the way God intended him to read the Bible. Sphere: Related Content