A Word of Clarity
This is not a blog post about the president of the United States.
It does, however, begin with one of my favorite pieces of news coverage about him. It was early in our time with Donald at the helm and journalists everywhere were still trying to figure out the best way to provide coverage of him and the administration. In the midst of that coverage, CNN anchors George Howell and Christine Romans began a conversation with Zachary Wolf, the managing editor for CNN Politics Digital. In the midst of their reporting, Howell remarked that much of what Donald had spoken about during his campaign seems to now be changing or at the very least is now being reinterpreted. Which prompted Wolf to lament:
Indeed.
This question from Wolf has been rattling around in my head since the first time I heard it. I find it to be an apt description of how so many of us have felt for at least the last three years. We are not sure what the words we hear mean… so we find ourselves at a loss for words. This is not just something we find in our political language or in the mouth of our president. We discover that in our families, our churches, our places of work, everywhere we are experiencing a great sundering of language where our words have no meaning to each other. As a pastor, someone who speaks and uses words publicly for a living, I have discovered that it is increasingly more difficult to connect to my greater community and even to my congregation with the words and language of faith.
Babel is the biblical name for this great confusion of words and meaning that we experience. The language of babel is always there to deceive, to corrupt, to sow discord and enmity wherever it goes. Babel has been talked about in a number of ways by Disrupting Theology’s own Corey Simon so I don’t want to focus too much on that, but I want to talk about how that confusion and enmity can be wiped away and babel be disrupted.
“In His immeasurable love, He became what we are in order to make us what He is.”[1]
One of Jesus’ proper names is The Word of God. This is found right in the pages of scripture in the first chapter of the Gospel of John.[2] For the early church and the first several centuries of Christian thought in particular this was one of the more important theological confessions that Christians made. God’s Word is that very manifestation in which the invisible God becomes visible. For Gregory of Nyssa (one of the most important theologians of the first centuries of the church) When God “speaks” God’s Word into being we see the perfect “mirroring” of God’s radiance reflected in The Word. To say it in another way, it is The Word that reveals God, there is a perfect convertibility to God’s Word (or Son) and God in God’s self. Finally, to put it in Trinitarian terms “if the Father wills something, the Son, being in the Father, knows the Father’s will — or rather the Son himself is the will of the Father.”[3] We can say that God’s Word, The Son, Jesus Christ is God’s “divine rhetoric” it is God’s speaking about Godself. One can even say (with David Bentley Hart, one of my favorite theologians) that God is “infinite discourse” a conversation of love amongst the three Persons of the Trinity and one that reveals who God is because God is both the speaker (The Father) the speech (The Son/Word) and the reply (The Holy Spirit).[4]
That Jesus in all his historical peculiarity is God’s Word has deeply public and political consequences. One of my favorite theologians of the early church, the incomparable Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, saw very rightly that The Word’s concrete physical and historical life as a human being was the way in which all of humanity was saved. Irenaeus argues that it is the life of Jesus, the concrete life of God’s Word as a human being that saves and redeems all things. Irenaeus calls this work recapitulation; The Word’s life is one that redeems precisely because it is a life that touches upon lived human life. Irenaeus finds in The Word’s life a microcosm of the entire lived history and life of the human being and because of this life that history is saved and remade:
“When He became incarnate and was made man, He recapitulated in Himself the long history of mankind and in that summing up, procured for us the salvation we lost in Adam.”[5]
Irenaeus extends the logic of recapitulation throughout the life of Christ. Every stage of life, every action, and every detail of his human life is done to retrace the steps of humanity, to meet the sufferings and struggles of life, and bring it into close union with the life of God. This intimate union is the very thing heals and saves the human being. The human being isn’t saved because of a divine command or because of a blood sacrifice. Rather the human being is saved because of the lived human life of God’s divine Word in all of its historical, concreteness.
Disruption
This little foray into philosophical theology is really all to say that Jesus Christ as God’s Word is the very thing that reveals God to the world. When we affirm that Christ is the “Word made flesh” we affirm that God’s speech, what God says about Godself in his life as the Trinity is truly the person of Jesus of Nazareth in all his strange and wonderful peculiarity. We know that Jesus’ particular human life is a salvific life, it reconciles us to God. Because Christ experiences temptation; suffers at the hands of political authorities, friends, and family; and dies, we know then that all of those things have been brought into contact with God in the most intimate way possible. Being brought into that contact we can now find liberation from them: Christ was tempted in order to save those who were tempted, Christ suffered for sufferers, and dies to destroy death.
If we apply the question that Zachary Wolf asks of Donald Trump to God, “What does God mean when God says words?”, the answer is not something elusive or confusing, it is not babel. The answer is Jesus. Jesus is what God means when God says words. And God’s “utterance” of Jesus is the very thing that offers clarity in the midst of babel. This is no small thing because this is the way the Christian can come to disrupt the power of babel and its terrible hold over our words. The Christian can point to God’s Word in the world and “speak” God’s Word by living it out, by mimicking the life of Jesus. God’s Word is no book or political speech. God’s Word is not an instruction manual or a blog post. God’s Word is a person. God’s language about Godself is a life. As William Stringfellow was fond of saying “The Word of God is militant in the world”[6] it is always moving and saving and clarifying. The Christian can turn to the person and life of Jesus, God’s Word, in order to see through the confusion of babel and find the truth, and we can come to declare that truth to others by having our words be God’s Word…which, by the way, is the very definition of salvation anyway.
God your people come to you confused and tired. We are not always sure what the truth is, we are not sure even how to speak with our friends and families anymore. But we know that you are still God. We know that you have spoken with the life of Jesus and it is by that life that we are liberated from babel and its confusion. Empower us to allow The Word made flesh to enter into our hearts so that we can proclaim The Word from our lips and our actions. Amen
[1] Irenaeus, Against Heresies Book five, preface
[2] Gospel of John 1:1–18.
[3] This passage can be found in Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Ablabium
[4] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite 2003, page 291. The entire book is a thrill.
[5] Irenaeus, AH, 3:13:1
[6] My favorite book by William Stringfellow is The Politics of Spirituality. You should read it.
