Untamable Words

Words arise without any history. One does not need to be an anthropologist-linguist to chart this particular mystery. One simply needs to be a parent, or an older sibling, or an aunt or uncle. Watch a child fumble with sounds that have no meaning, and he will begin to communicate whole lines of thought that are wholly and utterly incoherent yet not pointless. Every tumble of the lip, every tremble of the tongue, every throated yell, every “bah” on the mouth is the fundamental elements from whence speech comes. And, at some juncture, to the parents’ delight, that “bah” becomes “Dah dah dah,” “Mah mah mah,” sometimes “Bah bah bah” or “Kah kah kah,” which soon transforms into “Dadda,” Mamma,” “Babba” (bottle), and “Kaakaa” (kitty-cat).

            These are anhistorical fragments of words, formed without meaning until they are assigned meaning, spoken into the void of the universe and then, soothingly, lovingly, directed by the parents toward their proper home. Signifiers floating about as simple tones, given signifieds by the authorities. As the completed linguistic (Saussurean) sign they enter into time rightly, connected with the past, their lingual family; but as signifiers they are eternal mysteries. From whence do these sounds come? From whence do these notes of a hidden song arrive?

            My son turned one year old recently. We gave him Duplos as a birthday gift. Immediately, when we opened the box, he grabbed the pieces and tried to fit them together. Surely Duplos are not so different from normal wooden blocks, but then how does a child recognize that they go together when he cannot even stack wooden blocks atop one another yet?

            Following the same path Giambattista Vico did once, one comes to the historical boundaries of humanity, the darkness in which a mysterious light once shown and suddenly we began talking. The primordial, pre-linguistic, pre-signifying human existence is the definition of the unknown for us. We believe we are so intelligent, we pierce and probe the ancient world in ways that Vico could never have imagined; but this moment is impossible to contemplate.

            Where does the Word come from? How do a people communicating in grunts or howls suddenly begin to formulate language? And how do a people who communicate in a language begin to formulate its articulations, with words, with phrases, with sentences, with paragraphs, with essays, with treatises, with entire genealogical accounts and completed biographies?

            The question is an earnest one from an earnest questioner, first because I identify as a part of “people of the Book,” as some say; second because I identify as a “lover of words,” as others say. Both as a Christian and as a humanist, I take the logos very seriously. How does one honor the logos as one writes it? How does one honor the Logos as one writes on His behalf? Words are heavy. Words are dignified. Words need due respect.

            Maybe the reason they are to be treated in such a formal manner is that they approach us from beyond. They exist in a world and a time far from us. They connect us into history, but they themselves exist outside of our understanding of time altogether. We are not the authorities over words; words come to us from authorities beyond ourselves. Words are the ultimate agents of humility, because they remind us that none of the worlds we have built are worlds built without the aid of some other, older, coiner of phrases and turner of language. Worlds are built of words, and all the words we have we have borrowed. We cannot be self-made men in the land of words, nor can we pull-ourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps when the very bootstraps we wear have been a gift given to us.

            This makes me think that the phrase from Seneca regarding rhetoric and the bees is even more true than I had originally thought: every man goes about from book to book and takes the best nectar of each to form into his honeycomb. The man who doesn’t say such is not being honest. Even the man who has never read anything is still referring to books that are written, to sayings that are said, and, most importantly, to words that are not his in the first place. The words are from beyond himself.

            The Writer, then, is a person whose art is in taming the Mystery of Words for the common man. But the Writer knows full well that those Words are untamable. He does the best he can with them nevertheless.

Critiquing Babylon

If I haven’t already been asked this question before, I am sure I will be asked it again: “Why are you reading… that?” Or, as I prepare to leave Chicago and head off to Seminary, I am already expecting the moment: we have our new friends over at our place, we’re enjoying a game of Carcassonne, and someone – one of the bookish ones – looks over my bookshelf as asks, with true curiosity and true concern, “Why is this on your shelf?”

As Christians, we have a set of authors that we tend to think as authoritative and representative of our beliefs and values. No one questions if you have Augustine, Luther, or Calvin on your shelf, even if they themselves are not really Augustinians or Lutherans or Calvinists. (I have all three, on that note.) But what do you do with that Christian friend (me) who on their shelf has names of an atheistic or even brutally anti-Christian bent, like Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, or Jean-Paul Sartre? Worse yet, what do you with that Christian friend who is not opposed to using those writers and thinkers to make a point? (For instance, my most recent blog posts have been, in no particular order, about Cicero, Sartre, and Foucault.)

If you look at my bookshelf, the level of blasphemy and heresy is pretty astounding. Nietzsche believes that man must make his own moral universe, Sartre believes that man is morally free to do anything (and he lived a life of that too), and Foucault says that every claim and revelation of truth is a manifestation of power and control (he’s not actually wrong; but there’s another essay to be written about how God’s truth doesn’t fit his paradigms). Marx looks at the face of capitalism and laughs, and conservative Christians think for that alone he is to never be read. Althusser (who I quote profusely) maintains that we are subjects by interpellation and, thus, maybe we shouldn’t be subjects at all (re: antihumanism). And the list goes deeper if I include the novels and literature on my shelf: Hesiod’s Theogony, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Beckett’s Molloy. Each of these reject, in their own way, the biblical claims and truths that I base and build my life upon. Why read them?

I’ve been enjoying this week a sermon series from a year ago at Door of Hope (the church that Josh White pastors) on the Book of Daniel. It’s a timely set of messages about how Daniel and his friends live faithfully even under the reign of Babylon, and the messages echo beautifully the Bible Study in Daniel that I led our small group through during the MAPH year. Daniel is a challenging and provocative book for academics: here we see that our call is not to remove ourselves from the learning process, but to invest even deeper and, yet, with faithfulness to the Lord. The tension isn’t between learning Babylonian languages and literatures (the Hebrew youths all receive [effectively] Ph.D.’s in Babylonian, according to Daniel 1) and serving the Lord; the tension is how one serves Babylon and serves the Lord simultaneously.

The great tension and arc of the Book of Daniel is the story of how Babylon thinks of itself in a hegemonic manner: it is all-powerful, it is an eternal kingdom, it is the world empire. The Lord, of course, rejects this notion altogether: He sends a dream to Nebuchadnezzar to remind the king that he is a part of a larger order of kingdoms, that his kingdom will not last, and, even moreso, that the Lord will bring a Kingdom that will never perish to destroy all the other kingdoms.

The reminder for the people of God is that Babylon will eventually crumble. And this is a great theme throughout Scriptures, where the eternal battle between two cities - Zion and Babylon - is continually and regularly waged. Babylon, "the world," Egypt, Rome, Tyre, Sodom and Gomorrah... these are all shorthands for the Tower of Babel, that power that men exerted in order to make themselves into gods. We know, according to Revelation, that Babylon will eventually fall destructively, and that all of Creation will rejoice when that happens; but for now Babylon still exists.

This brings me back to my atheists. The reason I love to read the atheists is because they are all particularly accomplished as critics of Babylon. Foucault critiques the power of Babylon, Marx the commodities of Babylon, Althusser the ideology of Babylon. For these writers their concern is first and foremost "there is something at work here that sets man's power over other men, and something about that manifesting power is dangerous and destructive." They are atheists, so they aren't interested in describing the eternal machinations of that power; instead they simply take their observations and describe the temporal machinations of Babylon.

This is incredibly useful for the Christian person. Provided that the arguments are coherent and follow a logical line of thought - and many of them do - then the Christian person is given a tool to observe the machinations and powers-that-be unveiled and defamiliarized, reified in some corporeal manner before themselves, so that the Christian person might be allowed to make a good judgment. Oftentimes the atheists refuse to make judgments - or when they do the judgments feel flat (Foucault in particular avoided doing this) - but Christians have access to Truth in some measure which allows us access, again in some measure, to good judgment.

So often we judge quickly or rashly and we do not consider the machinations of Babylon. Through reading these atheists, I have learned, little by little, how to avoid those quick judgments and how to uncover the powers that operate and then hold those powers to account in light of a Christian critique. This is how I operate as a Christian intellectual: I observe the critiques (from atheists and from Christians) of this-or-that manifestation of Babylon, and then I hold that manifestation up to the light of the Christian revelation. The combination of this tactic allows for a precise level of critique that I do not think most Christian writers today have demonstrated themselves able to do. This is a needed work: if we do not know how Babylon operates, how will we know whether or not we are bowing down to idols of gold made for its worship?

This, to put it quickly, is the value of Christian humanism, and, for my blog, the value of being a Christian mythologist.

Rethinking Community

There’s a scene that occurs in a few TV shows and movies that strikes me as particularly foreign to us, although we do not often recognize it. It occurs whenever characters from one relatively isolated group (say, a family, or a school) interact with characters with whom they would not otherwise interact with if it were not the occasion or situation.

One great example for this is the various town interactions that occur in Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls. One expects Lorelai to interact with the people at work – Michel and Sookie – and one expects Rory to interact with her peers at school – Paris, for example – and one expects them both as regulars at Luke’s to befriend Luke himself. But who is the figure of Kirk? Or Taylor Doose? Where do they fit in?

Obviously they are figures that aid in our understanding of Stars Hollow itself, a place that exists somewhat independent of Lorelai’s inn and Rory’s school, and, surprisingly enough, a place that exists with its own economy and its own spirit. It is a place that represents a community that truly does exist in all of its quirkiness. The increasing presence of Kirk as the series goes on is an expression of the increasing importance of Stars Hollow as a character for the season (Stars Hollow, of course, personified in the character of Kirk).

But at a realistic glance, one might ask a following question: When do all these people find time to be a community? And why? The TV has cast a spell on us: we recognize that a town existing as a community is a beautiful thing, a quirky thing, and a valuable thing. There’s this quote from G.K. Chesterton in which he observes that the family is a romance because we have no control who our family is; but for Gilmore Girls, Stars Hollow is a romance because these characters have literally no reason to relate or connect with one another at all, not even family relations. Kirk has no relational or identity reason for connecting and engaging with the Gilmores time and again, he doesn’t even have an occupational reason for doing so, since he works a different job nearly every episode. He is neither coworker, nor peer, nor friend (at first at least), nor diner-owner, nor romantic interest, nor circumstantial encounter, even. He just is and he is for no “purpose.”

I’ve been thinking about the problem of community a lot lately. The word is a difficult word to bring up in discourses, probably because it holds with it, in recent parlance, some measure of “left-ness.” In the politicization of the world, “community” is categorized to the left while “individual” is categorized to the right, a false dichotomy that ought to be deconstructed if I’ve ever seen one.

The problem is particularly tricky for the Church. The Church also ought to be a romance, following Chesterton’s terminology. Here we have people who come from every walk of life and in every stage of life who come together to worship the God who has met them all in some, miraculous, incredible manner. These people are called “the Body.” They are not called, if we use the similar language that Paul provides us in Romans and in I Corinthians, “the diverse Body Parts” or “the Members,” although we might refer to an individual at times a “member” of “this or that church.” But the word that the Scriptures use is that this Church is a Body, thus it is a Community.

But we have a hard time being a Community. Individualism dictates that we each must come and each must play our own part, and that if we do so then that is a community: sovereign individuals playing their part on the assembly-line Church. But an assembly-line cannot make a Community any more than it can make a Church, and often in churches that are more individual-focused (think: megachurches that are so big that worship is a wholly private affair because one can get lost in the mass of people) we find that parishioners often have no personal connection with the Church’s mission, or its purpose, or its goals, or even with other people. I have known churches where members come in, they dance for the service, they worship in the privacy of their own seats, and then they leave shortly before any can catch them. It is as those worship is a private matter only. I wonder what coming to church means for these folks; couldn’t they have the same experience from the privacy of their own couch? (And don’t televangelists serve this same demographic?)

Yet stories like Gilmore Girls draw our attention and our hearts, and if we pay attention we might see that they are drawing our hearts for a reason. There is something incredible about being a part of a living Community.

While we have lived in Hyde Park, we have languished – on one hand – because Hyde Park itself is a very dysfunctional “community.” It is not geographically segregated, but it is culturally self-segregated: there are community members and there are university members, there are Christians and there are seculars, and we interact with one another, at most, when we are in the act of purchasing. Our social relationships have become material ones.

But – on the other hand – my wife and I have joyed in our church community. Church of the Shepherd is a small church, a small community, and it has all of the joys and struggles that a small church formed mostly of graduate students has: a revolving door of comings and goings, little sets of resources to accomplish our mission, and the constant dynamism of ever-changing worship. Yet still, somehow, we have found a way to be a community. We are inter-connected with one another’s lives. We celebrated a friend’s birthday party last weekend, we mourned in Ash Wednesday this morning, we will eat after service sometime again soon, I am sure.

I do not know how to explain the feeling that I am attempting to explain, nor the spiritual wealth of being in the midst of a community that “gets” community. How can I? I do not have the appropriate language – individualism has robbed me of the ability to communicate it. But here are a few sketches:

+ Our worship is a worship of the Church, not a worship of private individuals. We do worship together; not pretending to be together but worshiping alone. It is a delight. One of the ways we accomplish this is by serving each other in the service – one reads the Scriptures, others lead the songs, others lead the prayers, others take the offering. Liturgos literally means “work of the people”; our liturgy is a work of our community.

+ Our Bible Study is a study of the Church, not a study of private individuals. The pastors prepare together and prepare in the context of commentaries and various evangelical theologians (I get to join them sometimes); and we wrestle with questions rather than lay down solid facts. This gets us into the Word more deeply, and we leave with both the refreshment of the Scriptures in our studies, but also with the refreshment of having wrestled through the Scriptures as a community.

+ Our sermons are of the Church, not of private individuals. The pastors work as a team in preparing sermon series, and members of our church serve one another by preaching from time to time too. We make it a practice to represent various theologians and voices in the messages so that we are embedded not just within our own theological tradition, but also within the “great cloud of witnesses” that has gone before us.

+ We also eat together. A lot.

These sketches serve as introductory thoughts in what it looks like for a Church to become a Community. It is hard to nail down, however, precisely what will and will not work for a given Church; they’re all very different. The crucial thing, however, is that we recognize Sunday worship not as a space for us to have our individual experience with the Lord, but for us to participate in worship as a Body together in His presence. Individual prayer and worship is a thing for daily devotionals or morning Bible studies; Sunday is a time for us to come together as a Community. That distinction seems like a crucial one that is worth making.

Beyond this, too, I am also thinking about what general community – the Community of the town, etc. – ought to look like in a culture as individualized as ours. That will need to be another blog post, once I have thought it through more. For now, however, I will observe that being a Community as a Church is also evangelistic: the world outside is dying for relationship and dying for community, and we have the ability to be that Community for them. Let us be the Body: that in itself is a prophetic declaration.

Strategies of Discourse

I have made an effort to take a step back from my micro-critiques of power (i.e. writing things about the ideology that sprouts from the head of orange hair – albeit not from its mind) in order to wrestle with more fundamental problems of discourse. So far this year the problems of discourse have arrived in the form of “fake news,” in the form of “the media,” in the form of a leader who really does not know heads from tails, and in the form of social media in general.

Keeping the words of Michel Foucault in the back of our minds, one must navigate discourse always with the notion that knowledge and power are correlative matters. That is, that discourses of knowledge disclose themselves as spaces of power, and, vice-versa, that spaces of power always have related discourses of knowledge tied to them. This is why in Discipline and Punish Foucault observes the presence of ultimate truth only within the domain of the public execution; and this is why in The History of Sexuality the notion of a biopower, and its knowledge of objectified life, is so disconcerting.

So the deployment of discourse is always strategic. This should not be surprising to us. I’ve been enjoying reading, as I’ve mentioned before on this blog, Cicero’s speeches against the corrupt Sicilian governor Verres. His strategy is incredibly concise, and every direction that Hortensius might turn to defend his client is removed, step-by-step, by Cicero’s rhetorical brilliance. The speeches of the In Verrem are rightly called those that made Cicero known throughout Rome as the empire’s master of rhetoric. Rhetoric, in the Ciceronian tradition, is always demonstrating some type of strategy to accomplish its ends. A piece of written work is always revealing not only its rhetorical style but also its power and purpose.

I bring Foucault and Cicero together here because I think it is worthwhile to observe the ways in which modern discourse functions, and I do this because I think that discourse functions in accordance with its internal rhetorical-strategy even in spite of its writer’s intentions. We like to think that our words function as we like them to; but the severe truth that any writer who is worth their weight knows is that words have more life than we can bridle, and that the skilled writer must recognize the living qualities of words, respect it, and “tame” it, if possible, in order to accomplish their ends. Cicero was the master of this (so was Petrarch; and the Apostle Paul, I must add). Yet most modern discussants are not Cicero.

Instead, we literary-hacks, we half-bred writers are throwing words out into space that have no relation with one another. In moments of brilliance or genius – but not of talent or skill – we finally communicate what it is we mean to communicate; but most of the time we miss entirely how to operate within our own discourses. Social media aggravates this, of course. Whereas in a blog post – like this one – or a journal article, the audience is some neutral, unengaged spectator whose responses, if they happen, occur in another medium – a journal article response, or a comment on Facebook – in social media, instead, the audience is a thoroughly engaged and absolutely non-neutral figure. Even moreso, the audience is no “faceless” mass; they are definitionally “faced.” They have some real presence on the discourse being presented, not as neutral discussants or interlocutors, but as people who disagree.

And as such, the strategies of discourse are dislocated and unbalanced. Rhetorical methods that have historically been tried and true do not fit this new space, and when they are attempted to be brought into it, they transform that space and provide it with some moral or intellectual character that is not intrinsic to it. This, too, further perpetuates the alienation that exists within the social media.

So words, maybe targeted and planned, come under different powers when planted in the worlds of social media. Somehow their rhetorical structures divide and are dismantled. Discourse that would have been effective as standard oratory (in Ciceronian ways) or as an essay becomes different, with different implications and underlying meanings, in the social media. To follow Foucault again, Power is at play here, in some manner.

Power, in the traditional discourses, is located in the speaker, or in the powers-that-be that allow the speaker space (e.g. editors, reviewers, publishers). But in these new discourses, power is located in the community at large. Power is distributed across many discourses, many specialties, and many voices. It is a little confusing and a little off-putting to be surrounded all at once by so many voices speaking all at the same time. They are all clamoring for Truth because there’s a way in which their Power could be held onto if they can manage to grasp Truth.

But Truth in the social media discourse, in the new discourses, is harder to hold on to. Maybe this is the more disconcerting undercurrent beneath all “fake news” / “post-truth” phenomena: not that we have become such relativists that Truth is up for debate, nor that we have created such untrustworthy powers that claim non-truths as Truth, nor that we have political engines that declaim what is and is not Truth, but instead that our very discourse has become a continual reaching-for and grasping-at Truth without ever actually holding it. It’s a game of hot potato.

It’s a game of Power, of course, too.