Friday, May 07, 2010

Our Shared Life and Other Thoughts

This idea has been rolling around in my head for a few weeks – some pieces much longer – and I’m going to try to put it into words. I’m not sure if I can make as much sense of it as I want to. For me, this is a starting point. Once these ideas are out, I will refine, explain and define them more as I see fit and necessary.

At the core of everything is the truth. By this I mean God and the story of God; his being and his essence and just his stuff for lack of a better word. I will refer to it as the truth to keep it simple. This truth exists beyond our ability to describe it with language. This leads to our inability to understand it in any real way, or at least in any way that comes close to the actual truth.

It’s the idea that we can only know a shadow of the truth. I don’t think shadow is the right word, though. It’s not that we’re not looking at the truth. We are, but we can’t understand fully what we see.

This relates to the post-modern idea that words have no inherent meaning. Now, I don’t claim to be an expert in post-modernism or certainly the ideas associated with deconstruction, but I find it fascinating. Any word I choose to use has no meaning outside of what I (or more rightly my society/culture) choose to give it. It’s most easily seen in the difference between languages. I call a dog a dog and you know what that means, but I could say that in Iraq, and people wouldn’t recognize it.

Moreover, once we decided on a way to communicate and understand the word we both use to describe the animal, the cultural association with the meaning of the word is very different. One of my favorite examples of this is that Kurdish people use the word Communist. It turns out, though, that the connotations of the word are very different. In Kurdistan a communist is someone who doesn’t believe in God, any non-religious person. The term is not necessarily used to describe one who believes in the communal ownership of the means of production and/or the inevitable rise of the proletariat.

Our languages are inadequate for communication in general and are woefully inadequate as a means to describe the divine.

God existed before the creation of the world. God existed before the creation of human language. God created language, but is, in fact, pre-language. Knowing this, we must also admit that God and his creation must be more than language.

God never said “Let there be light.” Of course we can’t know with absolute certainty that God didn’t utter his words of creation in English, but it seems highly unlikely. We, in fact, have no real idea what god said. We only know that he said something - insofar as we understand the idea of speech, that is.

We know that the Bible says God spoke. John tells us the word of God was with him from the beginning. The word was with god and the word was god. John tells us that the word of God is Jesus and that by that word, God created the earth.

We don’t know God’s words, but we know the outcome: creation. Action. The speech of god equals the action of god. There seems to be no difference. This means that Jesus, too, is the action of god. The word and the action.

Knowing this, then what do we say of the Bible? The Bible isn’t the word of god, right? That’s Jesus. It’s god’s own action. The Bible is a language-based representation of the story of God. God exists outside of the book. Certainly we know that God is known to people who can’t read and to people who have never heard the words of the Bible only the story of Jesus and the action of God. (Like everyone who believed before the Bible). I don’t mean to sound critical of the Bible. I’m not trying to be. I am trying to be critical of our limited understanding of the Bible and our limited understanding and use of the words therein. The power of the book is God.

We, as a culture of Christians, often argue over translations and meanings, but the book itself really has no inherent meaning. The words mean nothing outside of our context of understanding. It only means what someone told us that it means.

And most of us are okay with that. Someone else’s understanding of the story of God is good enough for us. Or the reverse is true. We’re okay with someone else’s criticism of the story of God.

We accept conventions as the truth and we settle for shallow understanding of the truth. We use words that don’t mean anything to describe our sacred faith and assume that everybody knows what we mean. We say, “ I met with my small-group for fellowship and we decided to do some servant evangelism to he non-churched.” Those words don’t mean anything. “Oh, I feel so blessed. Hallelujah.” That doesn’t mean anything either. “The worship service was followed by an alter call.” Nothing.

This all really a jumble of two ideas: the message/story/truth of God is more than the words Bible and our current use of language in reference to God is shamefully cheap and meaningless.

We use important words to describe things we don’t understand anymore. The church uses jargon as a crutch to stop thinking. What if we stopped? Or better, we talked about it. Let’s discuss our language. Tell me what salvation means. Tell me what it means to be blessed. Tell me what fellowship is. What does it mean to worship? What’s a worship service? What’s church?

After we discuss it let’s evaluate if our meanings hold any fidelity with the way we actually live. That’s the part that’s missing most, I think.

A couple of months ago, I discovered the Kurdish word for fellowship. I don’t remember the actual word, but it translates to “our shared life.” Not shared life, not a shared life, not the shared life, but our shared life. Our. I love it.

You may say so what? Who cares? That’s not the Greek word. I like it because it means something in a way that fellowship doesn’t. Fellowship is an idea, but our shared life is a description.

I guess this is really beside the point, but, like I said, there’s a lot swirling around my brain tonight and I wanted to get it out.