Learning the language of God
In our co-ed Bible study, we’re currently listening to the audio set by James Jordan, “How to Read the Bible.” Tonight we heard the second session, entitled “Beware of Rules;” Jordan also covered his third point, “Read the Bible in the Church.”
Jordan often says very striking things and leaves you to chew on things. One of the things that he noted from Romans 1 is that “people are crazy” – professing to be wise, they became fools, because they suppressed the truth in unrighteousness and failed to respond to God’s revelation with pistis (faith, faithfulness). He also noted that Jesus is the alpha and omega - i.e. the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. And he stressed that we must let the Bible teach us how to read itself. We learn to read the Bible, not by approaching it with a set of autonomous rules, but by reading it over and over again. (Rules are spectacles, paradigm-providers. If Scripture does not provide these spectacles, our reading is in fact tending to stand over it, rather than in submission to it.)
Putting all of this together, it strikes me that what we’re really talking about is learning a new language. Jesus is the Word of God by whom all things were made and are sustained; He is the divine language, and in the Scriptures the Holy Spirit speaks Him.
When you have a baby and start to talk to him or her, the sounds you make are not very significant to that child. The slate is too blank; the child has not yet been enculturated into the language you’re speaking.
In our case, as we’ve noted, we are crazy. We’re not merely dealing with a blank slate; we’re unlearning all sorts of things that we “know” which in fact are not true.
But in both cases, it is constant exposure to the language by which the child or disciple is taught the language.The child picks up on the particular syllables you’re using over the course of time, as he or she hears them repeatedly, day after day, month after month. This is how the child learns to speak the same language you do.
By the grace of God and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, the same thing happens to us when we are brought into repeated and constant exposure to the hearing of the Word of God. Christ is communicated to us; and He is communicating with us, so that we learn to speak the language of God.
I think this is a good reason for ongoing exposure to Scripture. No matter how well you think you know what the Bible means, the truth is that in this life, you’re not a native speaker of the language of God. You need more than the nice doctrinal data that you’ve systematically assembled; you need the communicational training that you’re not going to be done with for a good long while.
One other thing that struck me about the lecture was that the Bible as a whole is like the parables which Jesus spoke. Contrary to common assumptions, Jesus said He told the parables precisely so that those who did not have ears to hear would be confused and hardened. Jordan says that all of Scripture functions this way; if one is not reading the Bible in the community of the Church, and if one’s heart is not right, the Bible becomes more and more tangled, confusing, a stumbling block. And almost as a throwaway line, Jordan added that this is also true of natural revelation. The more men who are separated from God study it, they do not clear up matters but confuse them more and more, because they are not looking at things by way of the divine language by which the world was created and is upheld.
I think there are all sorts of ramifications of this for apologetics, particularly when the primary attacks of unbelievers against the existence of God tend to revolve around things like epistemology (how things are known). The unbeliever says that if God really exists, that would be demonstrable, but in fact Christians cannot prove that God exists. But the truth is that no revelation, still less a rational argument or even appeal to material evidence, will prove to such a person that God is. Because he has, by the nature of the case, set himself fundamentally at odds with the possibility of a true epistemology. When someone is suppressing the truth, what they need is not proof.
Ultimately, what things boil down to is authority. God created man, and He did so in a certain way. He created man within community, and subject to Himself. This is the light of all seeing. When one rejects God’s community and God’s authority, there is simply no way to arrange the pieces of evidence to his satisfaction. Because the problem is not one of evidence to begin with. It is one of idolatry: worship of my own authority and reason and will rather than thankful glorification of God as God. This is the way to profess wisdom and become a fool.
That’s a bit of a macro view of the unbeliever on a basic level, but it seems to me that our lives are made up of micro versions of this. Most basically, if I stand with God and His community, I am going to have a completely different relationship to the faith once delivered to the saints than I otherwise would. But it also goes further; the matters that I tend to find objectionable in Scripture – that cause a “gut” reaction, or an “intellectual objection” – are not matters to which I should take exception and try to study in some naturalistic way. The way to genuine resolution can come in one way, and one way only, and that is to learn to speak the language of God better. I must, as Jordan says, continue to “learn to read the Bible by reading the Bible over and over again.” Not because the Bible is magical, like a mantra that does something because the syllables have some sort of talisman-like power, but because the Bible is God’s language written, and wherever I am tempted to question God, that shows I am still insufficiently equipped as a speaker of His language.