Every Tribe and Tongue

A Biblical Vision for Language in Society

Pasquale, Bierma

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781498274388
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Every Tribe and Tongue offers a way, first, to rediscover biblical stories and principles that relate to questions about immigration and societal multilingualism, and, second, to outline possible ways to guide thoughtful engagement in the discourse of the public square based on the biblical witness. We will try to show that, far from being an afterthought in the Bible, the call to love our neighbors and to gather people of every nation together in the worship of God is at the very core of the gospel message.Two powerful passions animate this book from beginning to end. First, this work is saturated in a deeply rooted love of the diversity of human languages that are one of God's gracious gifts to human beings. Second, this book is dedicated to calling the North American church to take seriously its charge not simply to love the stranger and alien but to live as strangers and aliens within the American nation to which it has been called to witness to Jesus Christ.

1

Speaking Beauty into the Chaos

God’s creation began with language. “Then God said . . .” we read in Genesis 1. God said. And it happened; God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. Of all the ways God could have caused creation to happen, Scripture tells us that God, in some mysterious way, used speech.

Language, it seems from Scripture, is integral to the act of creation, and integral to who God is. God speaks, God acts, and creation bursts forth. God’s word, and words, goes out into all creation, and creation becomes a beautiful echo of his good words.

God’s word went out, Genesis says, over the “formless void and [the] darkness [that] covered the face of the deep.” God’s creative speech results in the opposite of chaos; creation turns chaos into order, formlessness into beauty, darkness into light. God’s word thunders over the chaotic void, and creation blossoms. God creates by speaking beauty into the chaos.

From the beginning, then, God’s word has brought the universe to order and goodness. Instead of a “formless void,” there is a beautifully formed world. Instead of chaos, there is beauty—and all because “God said.”

“By God’s speech that which did not exist comes into being,” writes Walter Brueggemann in his commentary on Genesis. “The way of God with his world is the way of language. God speaks something new that never was before.”1

God created the world by his dabar, his word. The Hebrew word dabar can mean both “word” and “thing.” The ambiguity suggests a connection, and there is one: God’s dabar creates a dabar; his word creates a thing. We heard a rabbi recently say that he tries to remember this double meaning as he looks around at God’s world. “I see things in creation and try to think of them not as things, but as God’s spoken words. I see a bird and I think, ‘there’s God’s spoken word.’”

Then, as God’s finishing touch on creation, God says, “let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” in order to help watch over the world. Not because God can’t handle the job without humans, but because God delights in creating creatures who are stamped with his likeness. He walked with them, and he talked with them.

“It is not surprising that God, who is ‘far beyond what we can ask or think’ should deal with us by means of language,” Eugene Peterson writes. “God speaks. For Christians, basic spirituality is not only a noun, God, but also a verb, Said (or Says).”2

And the first thing these image-bearers are asked to do is to speak. Speak words, speak truth, assign linguistic units and meaning to the reality of God’s creation. “The Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” The first body part human beings are on record as using is the tongue.

To this day, humans are called to speak beauty into the chaos. Where herds of unclassified animals roam or fly, humans speak order into the anonymity. Where our tongues would be tied for lack of a linguistic symbol to use, humans make a system of symbolic communication. Every name, every term, every vocabulary word and function word in every language ever used by humans, has been merely a continuation of this naming act that we were created for. “Just as Adam named the creatures in the Garden of Eden, we define ideas and objects by using vast vocabularies of verbal and nonverbal symbols that subtly represent (or misrepresent) the reality of God’s world,” says Quentin Schultze.3

God spoke beauty into the chaos, spoke humans into existence, and immediately seemed to say, “now keep it going.” Keep speaking beauty into the chaos. “God created us to be stewards of symbolic reality,” writes Schultze.4 As Stephen Webb states:

We can add our voices to the divine harmony because we were created in God’s image. Theologically construed, speaking is not a trait projected upon God by analogy to human experience. We do not speak first and then think about God as speaking too. On the contrary, we can speak only because God created us to be hearers of God’s Word. We are created in God’s image, but that image is more like an echo than a mirror. God spoke us into being so that we too might have the joy of sharing in the spoken Word.5

God created us for language, but not for any one language. Rabbis used to muse that Hebrew was the perfect language, assuming that Adam and Eve spoke Hebrew in the Garden of Eden, and that Hebrew was the “one language” talked about in Genesis 11 before the Tower of Babel (for a different reading of this passage, see chapter 2). Hebrew was indeed used by God to speak with Israel, and its descendant, Aramaic, was used by Jesus during his life on earth. But beyond that, Hebrew is simply another language among languages. Any language can and does allow humans to employ their image-bearing linguistic ability. No language is better than any other at doing it. We should see language as a sacred gift from God, but should not see our native language, or your native language, or anyone’s native language, as any more holy or blessed than any other. We will look at this more next chapter, but for now we can say: Language is a gift; a language is a tool.

Nor does this mean that a person must be able to speak in order to bear God’s image, any more than it means someone must be able to see or walk in order to bear God’s image, simply because that is how God created humans. All human beings bear the image of God. People with linguistic disabilities still communicate, still speak and proclaim (with hands, with faces, with machine devices), because humans are communicating beings, whatever their abilities. As James Vanden Bosch says, “Although language is a significant part of what it means to be human, it is not the essence of a person’s value in God’s eye, and therefore a Christian . . . must not undervalue humans who are without language or who experience language impairments or deficits.”6

Whatever their language, abilities, or personalities, humans are communicating beings. But humans are not talking robots, emitting whatever signals the programmer commands them to make. Instead, these image-bearing creatures are given a choice—keep on speaking beauty into the chaos, or instead, speak chaos into the beauty. God let the fate of the world, the future of his creation project, hinge on the words that humans would say next.

Speaking Chaos into the Beauty

Randall Dale Adams was on trial for the 1976 murder of a Dallas police officer. Two witnesses said they saw Adams pull the trigger. A third, a psychologist, testified that Adams would remain a threat to society unless he was given the death penalty. Adams was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Adams’ sentence was later commuted to life in prison on a technicality. But thirteen years later, the truth about the 1976 murder finally emerged: the two witnesses had lied in court. One of the witnesses, who had been released after he testified against Adams, probably committed the murder himself. That witness was later tried and executed for another murder.7

With our ability to use language, we have great capacity to speak beauty into the chaos. But because of the effects of sin, we often do just the opposite; we speak chaos into the beauty. We have the opportunity to use our language to echo the truth, clarity, and goodness to God’s creation. But sin leads us to speak words that build lies, suspicion, pride, nationalism, and destruction in God’s world.

God created the good world by speaking words; the serpent brought ruin to creation by speaking words of his own. “Eat the fruit from that tree and you will be like God,” the serpent says to seduce Eve into sin. The words, and the actions they prompt, turn the beautiful garden into a house of lies.

Once the deceit and the defiant act it prompted has pumped chaos into the garden, the words and the lies keep flowing. “Did you eat that fruit?” God asks Adam, and he whimpers and says, “Eve—she made me do it.” “Is that true?” God asks Eve, and she says, “The serpent made me do it.” God asks direct questions, but the words pile up like sandbags, filled with denial, evasion, and blame.

Ever since, we humans have kept on piling up words that speak chaos into the beauty, and falsehood into the truth. “Our communication becomes a pervasive, destructive idolatry,” writes Quentin Schultze. “We spread distorted, selfish, and manipulative information. We lie, defame, verbally abuse, and gossip.”8 Our false and self-serving words go out into creation, and wherever they go, they spread the misery of sin.

The book of James does not underestimate the huge messes that we can make with our tongues:

The tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by hum...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Speaking Beauty into the Chaos
• Chapter 2: Pentecost in Practice
• Chapter 3: Love Your Neighbor
• Chapter 4: From Every Nation
• Chapter 5: Teach Your Children Well
• Chapter 6: The Word of the Lord
• Chapter 7: Language Purity and Language Play
• Chapter 8: Go Into All the World
• Bibliography