“The Language of Religion”

“The Language of Religion”

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, January 28, 2007

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

In over 20 years of delivering sermons to Unitarian Universalist congregations, I have noticed that those who wish to critique what I say focus as much on specific words that are used as they do on the ideas which are expressed. Whereas in many churches, the cardinal sin is to be imprecise about a particular creed, in Unitarian Universalist circles, sloppy or ambiguous use of language to express an idea can get you in a heap of a lot of trouble. I know.

And sloppy use of religious language is the most risky.

I want to reflect this morning on religious language and the role words play in our lives. In these rooms, if you throw around words like Asoul@ or Agrace@ or Aspirit,@ you=d better be prepared to say precisely what you mean. If you stray into words like Asalvation@ or Aprayer@ or AGod,@ be alert that you are skating on thin rhetorical ice. Unitarians are particular lovers of words, and if there is any one topic that is the favorite in religious discussions, it is discussions about how words are used and misused. Many discussions around here, and in other UU churches, are words about words.

We want to define and redefine what we're talking about, for we know that how we use words is important for shaping meaning. Words can manipulate and they can obscure just as easily as they can illuminate and clarify. Unitarians want to make sure that the language we use is doing the latter rather than the former.

This has been true at least since John Adams, the first Unitarian president, who wrote to a friend this comment: "Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party faction, and division of society." So at least since then, Unitarians have wanted to know the difference between the use and the abuse of words.

If there were a scripture verse for ideas I wish to explore this morning, I might take it from Psalm 50, verse 9, which according to the centuries old King James version reads this way: "I will take no bull from your house." When a committee of scholars prepared the Revised Standard version of the Bible in 1962, this verse was only slightly altered: "I will accept no bull from your house." In context, the reader knows that the object being described is the kind of bull that has horns, for the complete verse says, "I will accept no bull from your house, nor he-goat from your folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills."

When taken out of context, the verse sounds rather startling to contemporary ears. But just to make sure, when the committee of biblical scholars in the 1990s prepared a New Revised Standard Version, the verse in question was rendered this way: "I will not take a bull from your house." Apparently, the new translators did not want their words to be ambiguous.

Before focusing on religious language, I’d like to say something about words and language in general. As much as we'd like it to be otherwise, what is spoken or written in words is always, but in varying degrees, inadequate to express our feelings, our ideas, and our experiences. We mean one thing by our words, our hearers hear something else. "Inadequate" is the key thought here. Words are so often inadequate that there are times when they are not appropriate. Think of when we are most at a loss for words:

* When we feel deep sympathy for trouble or pain that a friend is going through -- we don't know what words to use to express our sympathy.

* When we gain some profound insight into a mystery that has long puzzled us -- we don't know what words to use to convey our sudden enlightenment.

* When we encounter something new in the world or experience a different part of the world and long to tell others about it -- we don't know what words might capture our discovery.

When I have faced the grief of losing loved ones, there have been many kind words spoken. But words, while appreciated, are unnecessary. Equally sustaining is the sensitive and understanding look, the sympathetic hug, or the silent presence of someone who cared. Words are in these cases often superfluous.

In fact, there exists a word to describe a situation in which words are inadequate. It is indeed, one of my favorite words. The word is "ineffable." It means "Incapable of being expressed in words." If you have attended the birth of a child, if you have spent a night on an alpine meadow, if you have at some point been near death but suvived, if you have loved another person, or been loved by another person, then you know what ineffable means. No words adequately describe the experience. We say: "Words fail us." Yet words are often all we have to wrap the experience in, so that we may pass it on to others.

It is a sad fact that words are so often inadequate to communicate our most profound experiences or feelings; words can only dimly represent what we really want people to know. Tennyson observed this in his epic poem In Memoriam, when he wrote:

I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel;

For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.

Believe me, no one knows this more than a preacher. Words have the power to half conceal and half reveal what is known by the soul.

It happens to me at least several times a year as I'm preparing a sermon or some other presentation. I remember a particular written passage that once moved me profoundly and almost magically opened up new insights of discovery. I search for that passage frantically, and when I find it, I find just words. It was not all that profound this time, there was no great “Aha!,” no magic.

Then I realize that the magic that I felt the first time I read it wasn’t so much because of what was in the words, but more because of what was in me at the time I read them. They spoke to me in my circumstances at that time. The meaning of words are connected to personal life experience, personal perspective, and they always speak to us in that context.

There is an illusion about language that words can objectively convey descriptions of reality. But words, I believe, carry with them a personal dimension of meaning. I have listened to many conversations that I didn’t understand, not because I didn’t know the words that were used, but because the words were not connected to my experience of the world. More than once in my life, I have asked someone who knows about electricity to explain to me how televisions work – how an image can disappear into thin air and reappear in my living room instantaneously thousands of miles away. Those who have been patient enough to explain it to me have done so using English as their language. I understood almost every word they used. Their sentences made sense, with subject verb and predicate. But the context of the words they were using was something I’ve not experienced or studied. The words they use do not have a context in my personal world. The result is that I still believe that television is a product of magic.

An economist can talk about “supply-side economics,” and each word they use has meaning to most of us who hear them, but they have different meaning to those with a background in economics than they do to those of us who don’t.

Words do not have a life independent of human experience; they take on meaning only when they reveal something real in us, when they touch real human lives. Without that touch, without a context, words lose meaning and even purpose.

Words, after all, are merely symbols, artificial names we give to something that is real. There is no such thing as, say, the "moon." Yes, there is a natural satellite of dirt and rock that orbits our planet and shines brightly on cloudless nights and controls the tides of our oceans. But a "moon"? The object itself is not the same thing as the word itself. The word "moon" is simply a name we English-speaking people have given to this object so we can talk about it. Owls and coyotes don't have a name for the moon, yet they are as intimately familiar with it as we are. As John Locke once observed,

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

The problem with the Psalmists' words that I read at earlier – about taking "no bull" from your house – is not with the words; the problem is with the context, and with the viewpoint of the listener in history. History changes context for us, and over time the words need also to be changed to express proper meaning.

So, to prepare for a discussion specifically about religious language, there are several observations that can be made about language and words in general:

1. Words are often inadequate for full communication.

2. Words only have meaning in context of personal experience.

3. Words are symbols of something else; they are not the things they describe.

A few years ago Bill Sinkford, the President of our Unitarian Universalist Association, issued a challenge. It’s time, he said, for us to consider more deliberately the role of religious language in our congregations. Are the traditional religious words the property of conservative religions, or do they also communicate something meaningful about our experience in liberal religion? He wrote,

“I believe that we need some language that would allow us to capture the possibility of reverence, to name the holy, to talk about human agency in theological terms – the ability of humans to shape and frame our world guided by what we find of ultimate importance.”

The discussion continues in many UU circles now about what religious language and words are meaningful to us and what are irrelevant.

I approach that discussion with the acknowledgement that, as I’ve said, all language is symbolic; words are not the same thing as the object to which they refer. But some word references are more concrete in their symbolism, and some word references are more metaphorical in their reference. For example, the word “tree” is symbolic for an object in the world we can all picture, and largely agree about what it means. But what about the words “Family Tree?” A ‘family tree,” of course, is not something that actually exists, like a tree exists. These words symbolize a concept, a metaphor about how we can chart the system of genealogy within a specific family. But even as a metaphor, most of us can agree on the meaning of the concept behind that word.

But what if I mention the great “Tree of Life?” Here are words that also don’t have an exact reference to concrete objects we experience in the world, and yet the words seem to carry meaning for us. The meaning is in metaphor, of course, not in the physical world, but these words may not symbolize exactly the same thing to all of us. Still, the words “Tree of Life” are not empty of meaning to most of us, and we can grasp some concept behind the words.

The point is that the more metaphorical the language the less concrete and precise the meaning. In the land of metaphor, no words are more imprecise than religious words. Let me begin with the big one: the word “God.” The word is used in countless ways, and yet some feel that their understanding of the word is the only way that makes sense. That is true of the religious fundamentalist, and is often true of the anti-religious atheist as well. Their definition of God is the same, it’s just that one affirms it and the other denies it.

But the concept of God is not, nor should it be, restricted to one and only one meaning. There is no metaphor bigger than God. The word is a word, but the meaning behind it can be used in so many ways.

I am impressed by this point made by UU minister Forrest Church, who talks about his belief in God. He offers a simple observation about the word that, to me, is shockingly obvious, though it never occurred to me before. He points out that “God is not God’s name.” He continues,

“The power which I cannot explain or know or name, I call ‘God.’ God is my name for the mystery that looms within and arches beyond the limits of my being. Life force, spirit of life, ground of being; these too are names for the unnamable which I am now content to call my God.”

But “God” is not God’s name.

Another Unitarian Universalist minister, Laurel Hallman of the Dallas church, tells the story of the time she spoke to an adult religious class at the church, and advertised her topic as, “Why I am Not a Theist.” She said,

“They packed the room to hear what I had to say, because of course (many people in the church) thought I was. Why did they think I was a theist? Because I use the word God. Because I pray in the midst of a worship service. I was a bit embarrassed to find that I had failed to make the distinction that the use of metaphors and poetry and scripture has to do with religious imagination, and not with one theological category or another. We had a lively and productive discussion that day, as I spoke about how religious language communicates the depths of experience, and isn’t always what it seems.”

Or listen to this concept about God offered fifty years ago by one of the greatest Unitarian minister of the 20^th century, John Haynes Holmes of New York City:

"When I say 'God,' it is poetry, not theology. Nothing that any theologian ever wrote about God has helped me much, but everything that the poets have written about flowers, and birds, and skies, and seas, and the saviors of the race, and God -- whoever that may be -- has at one time or another reached my soul! The theologians gather dust upon the shelves of my library, but the poets are stained with my fingers and blotted with my tears.

Religious language is by nature metaphorical language. It does not offer an objective description of the world, but it describes our subjective experience of the world. Take Darwin’s theory of evolution. As science, it is not a metaphor, but an empirical, testable scientific theory. Evolution, though, can also be a metaphor, taking on religious meaning, though the metaphor shouldn’t be confused with science. Evolution as metaphor does not refer specifically to the way a species evolves, but it is rather a way of looking at meaning and progress in life. A generation after Darwin published his theory, in 1913, a Unitarian minister by the name of John C. Kimball wrote a book that presented evolution in the most extreme form of religious metaphor. The book he called, “The Romance of Evolution.” As I read an excerpt notice that he attaches religious meaning to the “Tree of Life” metaphor I mentioned earlier. In the book, Kimball wrote,

“What is (evolution) but a new and grander form of the mystic tree of life, bearing the natives on its branches and having memory and hope, having all history and philosophy and literature in the whisper of its leaves. Under the magic touch (of evolution), what is the whole universe but a mighty romance whose characters are stars and planets and the elements, not less than human beings. . . . a romance whose far beginning we have read, and some new page is published from day to day, but whose plot, so intricate and wonderful, no human skill can unravel.”

I tend to be fairly open toward varieties of religious language. When I hear people talk about God, I am interested in what they mean by the symbol, but little interested in the fact they choose to use that word. If the word symbolizes for them some kind of cosmic judge and authoritarian ruler, I'm always at the ready to engage in debate about that meaning. I care little about the word itself. And if the word serves to symbolize their experience that the world is basically trustworthy and caring, and that life is essentially purposeful, and they label the Source of the world's trustworthiness and purpose as "God," I understand that meaning, and will not quibble over their choice of words to symbolize what they feel.

The same is true for most religious words: faith, prayer, grace. I'm ready either to debate or accept what these word-symbols point to, though the words themselves are not troublesome for me. By and large I think most people should be allowed to adopt the words that have meaning for them.

This attitude may put me at odds with some Unitarians, who are content to argue over the words themselves. In most cases, I'd rather leave the words alone, and find out what ideas reside behind the words. About that, I'm usually ready to debate.

From all that I've said so far, it might seem that I'm making the point this morning that words aren't that important. I've suggested, for example, that words aren't real -- that they are merely symbols for what is real. But there can be no Unitarian apostasy greater than to minimize the importance of language. It is hard to separate the importance of our words from the values we hold dear.

And yet, I also can’t escape the fact that language is something personal, that it expresses the person’s personal experience, and that the meaning of metaphorical language, which includes religious language, is rarely literal and precise.

Historians of religion refer to Protestants as "people of the word." This phrase is used because the Protestants replaced the holiness of Catholic sacraments with the holiness of words -- words encountered directly through scripture as well as through sermons, commentary, and discussions.

If Protestants are "people of the word," you can't get more Protestant than Unitarians. We know that words not only express how we see the world, they also shape how we see the world.

Unitarians and others like us are inclined look for precision in use of words; slippery words like "worship" or "God" or "soul" can raise in us a demand for greater exactness and definition.

I have sympathy for that kind of care about language. Most Unitarians don't need to be told how important words we choose are to our lives. Most of us already know that. We have a greater need for acknowledging the "ineffable," the insights that come from experience that cannot be conveyed through words. We have a greater need to recognize that just because religious language is inadequate to describe that which is at heart indescribable, it doesn’t void the usefulness of that language.

And we would do well sometimes to open ourselves more to wisdom that doesn't come through words, but from poignant encounters with nature, from discoveries gleaned from experiment, from making things with our hands, from art, music, and dance, from being with loved ones in quietness, and from joining in community for common growth.

The language we choose is important, but it is also true that the precise words we use, especially in the context of religion, are ultimately imperfect and inadequate to relay the full experience of the human soul. The language we choose is personal, and a person’s choice of expression deserves respect. Of more significance is the meaning behind the word-symbols, and there are times when we must not let the language get in the way of the meaning behind it. And there are times when meaning can be found not in words at all, but in silence, or in action, or even in a smile.