Lesson 27: How Does God Operate Through Words?
Enough about God operating through natural events and people! Let’s get to the bottom line. God operates in this world primarily through words.
The religions claim words provide our contact with God. The ancient Vedas of the East say, “On the spoken word all the gods depend, all beasts and men, in the word live all creation…The word is the navel of the divine world” Judaism and Christianity proclaim God creates with words, thereby beginning an ongoing conversation that brings salvation to humanity. Our scriptures are entirely about the Word of God that orders the chaos of life from the very beginning to the present. It is as necessary for life as the bread we eat.
The God who is hidden in nature and people is revealed in words. God meets us in words. If nothing else, God is a word-event. Pat Robertson’s sin was the way he used words about God. He blamed God for the earthquake, claiming he did it, because the Hatian people made a pact with Satan.
The religons should understand what Jacques Ellul meant when he claimed in 1985, “Anyone wishing to save humanity today must first of all save the word”. He was lamenting that by replacing words with images, modern technology was destroying the “blessed uncertainty of language” and with it meaning, truth, and freedom. Twenty-five years after his warning, we can appreciate his prescience. We have seen how the Internet, the cell phone, and Facebook have changed the way we use words, often obscuring rather than clarifying meaning and truth.
Harry Frankfurt claims the problem is the prevalence of bullshit. He distinguishes bullshitting from lying. While liars deliberately make false claims, bullshitters are simply uninterested in the truth. They want only to impress and persuade their audience. While liars need to know the truth, the better to conceal it; bullshitters, interested solely in advancing their own agendas, have no use for the truth at all. Frankfurt believes “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” Robertson offers a perfect example of this.
I think this means Lupe is quite right when she makes using words truthfully and demanding the same from other people a primary modern Christian responsibility. It also makes the English teachers reading this as important as pastors in our modern society.
So how do we know which words are God and which bullshit in a time of so many false prophets? I’d like to talk about that in the coming weeks. What do you think?
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