Snow is the humblest weather.

I have the quiet joy of watching it right now, during my favorite time of the day: dawn. The latest nor’easter has shouldered its way onto the east coast, throwing its heavy belly over New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and—where I am now—the suburbs of Pennsylvania. In the soft, blue-grey light of the morning, the snow is falling.

Snow is humble, to me, because of how it comes to us and what it does to the world around us. It does not come with the drum beat or splattering voice of rain; it does not come with a whistle as the wind. It just … falls, pirouetting and turning in the atmosphere before laying itself down on the earth, covering what is already here, conforming to the shapes it settles on.

As I stare at it outside the window, my mouth sits open in wonder. I can hear the thud of my heartbeat at the back of my throat, marking the constancy of my own life and mirroring the stability of the world outside. That stability, of course, has an origin and anchor: the speech of God.

I have written numerous times about the governance of God’s speech, following the well-trodden path of my friend and teacher, Vern Poythress. I do not think I will every stop writing about it. It is too rich, too mysterious, too marvelous to go unnoticed. I find myself returning to the truth of God’s governing speech almost every day, as a child returns to the top of a snow-covered hill with his sled, never tiring of the ride.

You see, the most gripping thing to me about living in a world of God’s speech—a world that was created, sustained, and finds its telos in that speech—is very simple: what we see around us is what is said. The world is what God spoke, speaks, and will speak. It is not the cold and impersonal gathering of elements, not the mere existence of matter in motion. The world, at base, is not elements; it is syllables—a rhythm of God’s uttered work, with a mysterious meter in which we are all caught up, forgetting that everything we do, think, and say happens in the context of someone else’s dialogue: God’s dialogue—or perhaps better, God’s trialogue. We live and move and have our being in divine speech.

Looking at the snow this morning is a wonderful reminder of that. In a few hours, I will pick up my shovel, zip up my jacket, and head out into a quiet, whitening world. Standing in the midst of the cascading snow will help me see that I am surrounded by what God is saying, by what he has spoken. I am not just an observer of God’s world; I am part of the discourse.

Perhaps this sounds hopelessly abstract to you—the prattle of a poet’s heart. But remember this: the world is God’s and the fullness thereof (Ps. 24:1; 1 Cor. 10:26). The snow comes from his storehouses (Job 38:22) and falls at his bidding (Job 37:6). The world in which we live is not an abstract thing; it is the spoken and verbally sustained environment for the display of God’s character. Our world is ever a word about God himself.

Maybe that’s why I am mesmerized by the snow. The sense of metaphorical humility that I find here is a reflection of the greatest humility: the humility of God in creating, sustaining, and redeeming the world; the humility of the Son of God, who took on flesh all while remaining immutably divine and absolute, bending down to peer into the hearts of men and perform his silent spiritual surgery, giving us new hearts, so that we could look at the snow, and see not just the weather, but the measure of God’s greatness and love.

Snow may be the humblest weather. But it is so only because of the great humility of God. If nothing else, that should give us pause as we stare out the window. Here we are in a world of God’s speech, and we hardly hear it, just as we can hardly hear the falling snow.

I always remember Leviticus 17:11, probably for personal reasons. “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.”

When I was a boy, as my father was building our house, I tried to hand him a hard-wire brush while he was climbing down a ladder. He didn’t see me coming. When he turned his face towards me, the brush bumped into his nose, and one of the fine silver quills stuck into his skin. When he pulled it out, there was a drop of blood the size of a pinhead, a tiny dark purple dome that entered the open air and almost whispered, “No . . . no.” Blood is not meant to go on the outside. It maintains its vitality by being concealed. Blood is meant to be covered.

It is also meant to move. Years later, I stood with my brothers and mother in our living room, watching my father die. The tumor had grown, had taken too much, as cancer always does, and now his respiratory system, the last remaining function of his body, was shutting down. I will never forget the moment when the hospice nurse told us the number of breaths he had left at the end: three. I have never counted down from three that way before, silently, surrounded by those who shared my own blood. After the last air left his lungs, his flesh grew paler. It was the blood stilled, the heart no longer thudding that took the color from his skin. That, I believe, is when his soul made an exit. When blood settles and ceases to flow, the soul must go, for our souls, like tired dogs, seek out the ancient scent of life that resides in the Spirit of God.

Blood, in a sense, carries a burden. It carries life—a divine gift as mysterious as it is requisite. In God’s great providence, it is the only thing that can atone for sin, that can cover a transgression, that can restore the divine-human relationship. For years, this has puzzled me to the core. How can red liquid have the potency to prevail over darkness and death by the burden it bears? Why does blood atone for sin?

I cannot help ruminating. I think the atoning power of blood has something to do with giving up the burden of life, effected by ending the two qualities of blood: its internality and movement. When blood is shed, the inside comes outside, and the movement ceases. Sanctity is uncovered and stilled. The blood can thus no longer bear its burden, the burden of sacred life, which has its ultimate origin in God (cf. John 14:6). So, that life is set free to do the impossible, to do spiritually what God has done physically from the beginning: separate light from darkness (Gen 1:4), separate image-bearing sinners from the evil they have done.

In the mysterious, God-governed process of atonement, we can easily forget that it is not blood in itself that atones, for blood only “makes atonement by the life” (Lev 17:11). It is life that rights a wrong and restores the morally destitute. It is life that breaks the power of sin and death (Rom 6:9–10). That is why we look with hope toward the day when all that is scarred by sin is “swallowed up by life” (2 Cor 5:4). Even more mysterious and glorious is the truth that this life is tri-personal: the Father of the living (Mark 12:27), who gave the Son of life (John 1:4; 14:6), by the life-giving Spirit (John 6:63; Rom 8:10; 1 Cor 15:45)!

In this light, the beauty of Christ’s blood takes on a new aura. Every drop of blood from Christ’s body, every red-lined laceration, every tear in his skin was an instance of holy blood giving up its burden, the burden of life. It is only by that burden that we are re-born. It is only by life that we inherit life. That is why we can say, “Soul works covering for soul.”[1] The life of one soul can vicariously atone for the life of another precisely because blood gives up its burden.

Blood is no little thing. It carries, in the end, the weight of the world, and salvation of every sinner.

[1] Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (1948; repr., Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2014), 165.

Mary was not so green when she mistook Jesus for a gardener (John 20:15). God is a gardener: he sows; he waters; he grows (Gen. 1:11; 2:6; Ps. 104:14; 1 Cor. 3:6). To him belongs horticulture and humanity.

Yet, in another sense, God is a garden in himself. He is our environment, the one in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). The Word of the Father, who stood before Mary at the empty tomb, is the life-giving person in whom, to whom, and through whom are all things (1 Cor. 8:6), and that Word is ever spoken in the potent breath of the Holy Spirit. It is in the Trinity—more specifically, God’s verbally manifested and linguistically mediated reality—that we dwell and thrive.

All of this, no doubt, is quotidian for today’s theologian. Especially in Protestant circles in the last twenty years or so, the Trinity has taken a place of prominence. Everywhere one looks, new books and journal articles are finding their way onto the shelves—person and relation; ontology ad intra and ad extra; immanent and economic; vestigia trinitatis; the list goes on. The surge of interest in Trinitarian paradigms and doctrinal minutiae, for some, is little more than a fleeting fancy, the latest love affair for Protestants, and old news to Catholics and Greek Orthodox. Perhaps the latter parties are wondering where Protestants have been for the last few hundred years. The questions we must ask ourselves, on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, are the following. First, why has the Trinity come roaring back into our dogmatic discussions and, second, how can we ensure that this indispensable truth of Christendom remains the main hall in which we gather for global theological discourse rather than serving as a vestibule to other dogmatic concerns?

Perhaps the answer to both questions lies in a metaphor. Trinitarian theology, like ivy, has always wound its way up a trellis. By “trellis,” I mean a historical and theological dilemma of the day that serves as latticework upon which the deep and eternal things of God can stretch out and climb in human history. Knowing what one such trellis is in our own day provides an important clue as to why Trinitarian studies have been so popular of late for Protestants, and how we can ensure that this turns into a tradition rather than a trend.

Before introducing what I believe is a trellis for Trinitarian theology in the twenty-first century, it would help to review some of the church’s history in light of this metaphor. And to find a trellis or two from a bygone era, all one needs to do is pick up a decent volume on Christian history and start turning the pages. Jonathan Hill’s The History of Christian Thought (2003) is a fine place to start.

In the early church, the trellis for Trinitarian theology was the burning question of what it meant to proclaim Jesus as Lord in the context of a rigid monotheism, and, of course, what it meant to say that the Spirit was God as well. Justin Martyr, attempting to wrest the early church from Platonic errors while still drawing on terms familiar to Platonists, brought attention to Christ as the Logos of God, the Father’s thought communicated to men. Irenaeus followed suit with a striking, albeit problematic analogy, of the Son and Spirit as the “hands” of the Father, bringing the third person of the Godhead more into purview. But it was Tertullian who broke new ground by coining the term Trinity and developing the “substance” and “persons” language we still find in today’s creeds and confessions. Athanasius continued this tradition by stomping out the weeds of Arianism, drawing on Origen’s exposition of the eternal generation of the Son.

Then, from the heart of Turkey, came the Cappadocians, led by Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil the Great. The Cappadocians laid the groundwork for the persons of the Trinity to be differentiated by their mutual relations—a concept carried through the middle ages and well into the twenty-first century.

But we could not in good conscience proceed any further without mentioning Augustine, who rightly rebuffed the residual semi-Arianism of his predecessors, opposing any claim that the Father was the source of divinity. He thus brought out the consubstantiality and distinctness of the persons simultaneously, especially when he emphasized the famous (or, for some, infamous) filioque clause: the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. In doing so, as Hill puts it, he “purged the doctrine of every trace of subordinationism” (87). This was a fitting contribution to the continuing development of what came to be called perichoresis, the teaching that the persons of the Godhead mutually interpenetrate, indwell, or are “in,” to use Augustine’s language, each of the others (De Trinitate 6.10). This is one of the Trintiarian teachings that is so prominent today, and we owe this, in many ways, to the Cappadocians and to Augustine, among others (Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, who came later).

Cyril of Alexandria followed Augustine by addressing the issue that had led to the building of the trellis centuries earlier: Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity: the Son come into flesh. In all of this, then, Christology was in large part the trellis that gave Trinitarian dogma room to stretch and climb. But that trellis would be exchanged for another in Byzantium and the medieval era.

A fixation on Christology eventually lead to mystical speculation on how one comes close to a three-personed God (a second trellis for Trinitarian theology). How can man have communion with the transcendent, triune Lord? That was a question that burned in the hearts of Psuedo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, and Symeon, to varying degrees. The resulting mysticism and negative theology came to an end with Gregory Palamas, whose discourse on the “energies” of God sought to explain how, exactly, we could experience the Trinity: we do so only by God’s acts upon us—the Father through the Son in the power of the Spirit. This was to have echoes in the twentieth century with Karl Barth and Emil Brunner.

In the medieval and scholastic era, we still find remnants of mysticism, especially with Erigena, which is to be expected—history is a stream, not a string of puddles. But the trellis of experiential communion with God, by and large, traded for the trellis of rational exposition. It can be difficult to see how the latter might be a trellis for Trinitarian theology, which is inherently mysterious. But while it is easy to categorize Anselm’s arguments for the existence of God as “Unitarian” (pointing to Aquinas’ de Deo uno), there were clear Trinitarian threads in his thought, such as his work on the necessity of God’s becoming man in the person of Christ. Peter Abelard’s work, Theologia, is perhaps a better example. Abelard follows the path of rational exposition, but seems to have gone too far in trying to erase all mystery from the Trinity. Thomas Aquinas, though he sought to preserve mystery in Trinitarian dogma, fell into a similar trap with his unbound reliance on Aristotelian philosophy. In attempting to articulate the relation of the persons to the essence, he let mystery become more nominal than normative for Trinitarian theology. Much of Aquinas’ work, along with that of Anselm and Abelard, built Trinitarian theology on the trellis of rational exposition. And though this was countered by later medieval mystics (Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart), it seems to have nevertheless held sway until the early Reformers set their hands to building a third trellis: the trellis of soteriology.

For many of the mainstay Reformers, discussions of Trinitarian dogma were set on the trellis of salvation and sin. Luther, for example, focused much of his theology on personal, faith-wrought union with Christ, who was given by the Father, and whose work of redemption and sanctification, applied internally by the Spirit, always led grace to triumph over law. Calvin, as well, though markedly different from Luther in his thought and mannerism, focused much of his attention on depravity and salvation in Christ. And this was set within its Trinitarian context. Calvin even went so far as to say that if we do not grasp that we serve and are saved by one God in three persons, then “only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God” (Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.13.2). Salvation, as many in our day have reminded us, is Trinitarian.

The trellis of salvation and sin that was so prominent in the Reformation would wane with the waxing of a new trellis in the modern era: a return to rational exposition, but of a different sort, fueled, in large part, by the Enlightenment. This trellis, admittedly, would keep the ivy of Trinitarian theology all but out of sight. With attacks on the logical coherence of Trinitarian dogma by figures such as Voltaire, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau, and with the unparalleled rise of deism, Christian philosophers and theologians felt compelled to rearticulate Christian dogma in a manner that at least acknowledged the so-called “Age of Reason.” Sadly, oftentimes they sold their heritage of belief for day’s wage in the empirical market. As Lessing and Reimarus excised the miraculous from Scripture, one could see it was only a matter of time before something as complex and mysterious as Trinitarian dogma would become suspect. It was Immanuel Kant who questioned the practicality of belief in the Trinity, and his phenomenal/noumenal distinction may not have helped matters here. By relegating God to the realm of noumena, he could effectively turn Christianity into a kind of pragmatic moralism. Such a context was not conducive to the growth or maturation of Trinitarian thought, which is perhaps why we see so little Trinitarian work emerging from that era. The work of the Puritans—masterpieces from the pen of Francis Cheynell, Thomas Goodwin, John Owen, and the like—would carry the church until the Protestant Trinitarian revival in the twentieth century.

And by that time, the Protestant church was in need of a return to its Trinitarian roots, crippled as it was by rampant moralism, still evident in the thought of Schleiermacher and Ritschl. It needed a new trellis on which Trinitarian truth could bud and blossom, and Karl Barth’s “theology of revelation” seemed to fit the bill (Hill, 269). Thus, the doctrine of revelation became the new trellis: enveloping general revelation, Scripture, and proclamation, according to Barth (Church Dogmatics, 1.4.4). The wholly other God of Barth’s theology was proclaimed to be wholly “for us” in his triune self-revelation, namely in the “event” of Christ, which transcended time. But Barth’s understanding of revelation in the context of the Trinity, while refreshing, was riddled with fissures that would only widen with time. Part of this was due to the debris of existentialism: the shift in thinking of truth as experiential and subjective rather than external and objective. Certainly, Barth opposed all of this, but his focus on an encounter with the “event” of Christ left the door open for those who sympathized with the existentialist movement.

Following the footpath of twentieth century theology at the time, Rudolph Bultmann attempted to “demythologize” the revelation of the New Testament, extracting moralistic kernels from mythological husks. From there, it is not too difficult to see how and why Reinhold Niebuhr would ignite the twentieth century with a call to ethics and morality, nor how Paul Tillich would call on Christians to engage their culture with an apologetic existentialism. In fact, we can even see how Karl Rahner would end up arguing for the concept of “anonymous Christians.” Those who have experientially witnessed the truth of God need not cling to the Christian Bible, or even the name of Christ, for, in Justin Martyr’s terminology, all people have within them the “seed of the Logos” anyway. Such a conclusion cannot be divorced from Rahner’s view of the Trinity. In claiming that the economic Trinity (what God does) is identical with the immanent Trinity (who God is), Rahner was working out one of the implications of an existentialist view of revelation. If the truth of the triune God’s revelation can only be subjectively experienced, then what sense would it make to ponder God as he exists “in himself,” apart from his creation? That logic is directly linked to Barth’s prior claim that God is only ever “for us” in Christ. In other words, there is no Trinity “behind” or “prior to” Christ’s work for us.

This set the stage for Jürgen Moltmann to emphasize the centrality of the cross, claiming that God is a “suffering God.” While this had the benefit of drawing people’s attention to the unfathomable empathy God has for us in our own suffering, it posed a plethora of problems for orthodox Christianity by binding God to his creation and practically effacing the Trinity of independence.

Wolfhart Pannenberg’s contention that all of history is, in fact, revelation in which we choose to believe enabled him, like Barth and Bultmann, to embrace critical scholarship and symbolic interpretations of revelation because what really mattered was the subjective commitment of the individual to the truth of a particular event. The influence of existentialism here is still evident.

In sum, the trellis of revelation, leading from Barth to Pannenberg, did indeed give the dogma of the Trinity room to climb, but it also did no small amount of damage to the orthodox understanding of God’s ontology, not to mention the existential blight it spread to other doctrines.

All of this brings us to the Trinitarian trellis of our day: language. This is not too far afield from the trellis of revelation, since all revelation, in many ways, can be considered profoundly linguistic. As Jonathan Edwards pointed out centuries ago, not only is the truth of Scripture linguistically delivered to humanity, but also the entire cosmos, which was uttered into being and is upheld by the God who speaks. Scripture is God’s word, but the rest of creation is a “word” from God in another sense.

A scad of material has been emerging in the last decade or so on God as a communicative being, and on human language as a derivative and analogical behavior. This, it seems to me, is quite fitting, since the Trinity is the hearth of communion and has eternally communicated with himself in the “speech” of love and glory (Frame 2013, 480–81). Of course, we still have our issues to work out—issues that have long been part and parcel of every theologian’s curiosity: in what sense is the Son the “Word” of the Father? Should we adopt a consciousness model of the Trinity—in which the Father speaks the Son in the power of the Spirit—or an interpersonal model—in which the persons of the Godhead are understood as mutually engaging communicative agents? Or are both models valid? In answer to the former question, there is room for Trinitarian dogma to grow as we work out how the Son is both the thought of the Father, which stretches all the way back to Justin Martyr, and how he is the communication of the Father, which can be traced back to Augustine. And more work needs to be done to explore precisely in what sense the Spirit is involved in this communication. As for the latter question, we seem hard pressed to resolve the age old quandary between the east and west. The stale rumor that the Latin west defaults to a consciousness model while the Greek east upholds an interpersonal model has been dispelled. And thank God it has, for the church is now in an age of unprecedented global awareness and intercontinental communication. That is why linguistics (semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, hermeneutics) is such a fitting trellis for Trinitarian theology: global communication is no longer burgeoning; it has blossomed. In such a setting, the nature and function of language is replete with implications not only for our understanding and development of Trinitarian dogma, but for our practical engagement with one another in the gloriously diverse, communicative body of Christ.

We have, no doubt, just rushed through a cornucopia of theological discourse spanning two thousand years, and scarcely done it justice. But the point in considering what the trellis was for Trinitarian dogma in each era is to notice that we are at an opportune place for global discussion in the church, and we would be remiss if we wrote off the current surge of interest in linguistics and the Trinity as a passing trend. In my opinion, we are in the midst of one of the most appropriate Trinitarian discussions in the history of the church: a discussion of the nature and work of a communicative God for, in, and through his communicative creatures.

At the outset, I proposed two questions on which Protestants, in particular, need to meditate, both of which are related to the twenty-first century’s trellis for Trinitarian dogma. Why has the Trinity come roaring back into our theological discussions? In brief, I would say that this can be attributed, in part, to the rise of interest in linguistics, for language and the Trinity are inextricably intertwined: the triune God is a communicative being, and humans are image-bearing communicators. It would be strange indeed to witness a rising interest in linguistics without seeing any corresponding interest in the God of language. The late twentieth and early twenty-first century interest in linguistics has thus built a worthy trellis on which Trinitarian dogma can grow, but we need to continue exploring the relationship between divine and human communication, and use the results of such study to enhance and support the communion of the global church.

The second question, however, is perhaps more critical: how can Protestants ensure that Trinitarian dogma retains a prominent place in theological discourse? The answer here seems tied to what we have already said: language must, as it has, stay in the limelight of our theological discussions. We must vigilantly guard the trellis of language from those who would, with Derrida, derogate language as a labyrinth of différence. We must dwell on the divine roots of human discourse, ever remembering the ancient truth that language is not simply something we do but is a vital part of who we are. We are creatures of communion. And the communion we long for is structured on the Trinity itself, both the consciousness and interpersonal models. We are speakers with thoughts and breath, persons who thrive in a web of relationships.

In light of what has been said, there seems to be no better place for our discussions of the Trinity than in the context of language, for our speech reflects the Speaker, our words the Word, and our breath the Spirit of the speaking God. At this moment in history, we have become deeply aware of ourselves as communing persons bound to the self-communing, tripersonal God. What better time for the global church to unite against a world hell-bent on disrupting and destroying the communion of the body of Christ? Language, I say, is at the roots of the Trinity, the roots of humanity, the roots of the church. Let us tend to this trellis together.

Currently, amidst the Reformed discussion concerning God’s simplicity and immutability, there has been repeated references to the anthropomorphic language of Scripture. It is commonly understood that language attributing human emotions or physical features to God is not meant to be understood “literally.” A typical example is Deuteronomy 26:8, “And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders.” God does not have physical body parts, so such language is immediately classified as anthropomorphic and seldom given a second thought. The same goes for a passage that attributes emotion to God, such as Genesis 6:6, “And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” Certain theologians claim that God cannot experience emotion in any way, because that would suggest that he undergoes change or is affected by creation. This, it is claimed, would compromise the Creator-creature distinction by making God somehow dependent on the world he has made. In such cases, the anthropomorphic language of Scripture has become a sort of throwaway, a means of dismissing semantic possibilities that do not accord with particular historical or confessional understandings of God. My aim here is not to address the concerns of the current debate directly, but to raise a question that may reorient us to God’s divine purposes in using human language.

Is the way in which many theologians treat anthropomorphic language, as a tool that God uses to convey something that cannot be taken “literally” (whatever that means), a helpful way of processing this language? To me, the approach seems to assume a fairly shallow view of the nature of language and God’s purposes for it. More specifically, it misses the worship we should give to God in response to reading it. Let me explain this after examining the concept of anthropomorphic language itself.

Anthropomorphic language is often treated as a unique instance in which God speaks to us in covenantal condescension. He comes down to our level and communicates something in terms that we can readily understand. This seems relatively simple, but there is a lot of mystery and complexity here that goes overlooked.

First, consider the fact that all language is anthropomorphic. All human language with reference to God is an occasion wherein the infinite is related to the finite. In revealing himself to us, God always speaks anthropomorphically. Human language is just as much a part of being human as is having body parts or emotions. There is a profound sense in which, from the very outset of Scripture, God speaks anthropomorphically. He uses human language to express something of his infinite love, wisdom, and divine intentionality.

Second, labeling language as anthropomorphic does nothing to explain such language. It appears to explain it, but the question that I do not see being asked is this, “Why did God choose to use this language?” Surely, if God wanted to speak to us in a more literal manner, he could have done so. God is the author of Scripture, and it is he who chose to reveal himself in this way. Why? Why use poetic and metaphorical language—of arms and hands and emotions—rather than language that is plainer? In other words, what is God’s intention for using this language?

Some, no doubt, would say that his intention is to communicate on our level. But that answer needs to be more developed. If by “communicate on our level,” we mean, “say something that is not really true about God,” then that should give us pause. Is that God’s intention—to dish up dialogue that, in the end, is semantically vapid? Does God present his children with linguistic ornaments just so they can dismember them and see what lies behind? I think that is a shallow way to read Scripture. It leaves out the richness of divine-human communication.

Third, is “anthropomorphic” even a valid category for language? This is related to the first point, but introduces a distinct problem: we assume that human language is merely human. And so we must move, as it were, from the merely human language to what it might say about God. But God himself is the giver of language and is everywhere reflected in it. What’s more, Jesus used language in conversing with the Father (John 17). If Jesus is one person with both a human and divine nature, must we not also say that his divine nature was engaged in speaking with the heavenly Father? And if so, does that not mean that language cannot be merely human? God is profoundly involved with human language. And because everything that God has created reflects him, we simply cannot say that language is merely human. Language has divine origins. In that sense, all language is really theomorphic. Our use of language reflects the God who communicates with himself in three persons and who has blessed his creatures with an ability that analogously reflects what he, as the original communicative being, does. So, using the phrase “anthropomorphic” actually gets the whole thing backwards: it assumes that our language is the original and that God has fit himself to it, when in reality God’s communication is the original, and he has endowed us with the ability to communicate as a gift that is derived from and reflective of his loving communion.

It seems that I am raising a lot of questions without offering many answers. So, let me get to the real point. This “anthropomorphic” language in Scripture seems to be expressing something very different about God’s intention for human language. To me, it seems to express the awe-inspiring truth that the creator of heaven and earth has condescended, has come down, and has spoken to us. In so doing, God brings us to marvel. He is not afraid to condescend in human language, to take on syllables and syntax, to enter the world of words, for that world is ultimately a reflection of his own communicative nature. Nor is God, in an even more profound sense, afraid to take on flesh. The Incarnation is the climax of God’s revelation, of God’s speech to us, for there he not only utters words to us; he utters the Word, his eternal Son, in the power of the eternal Spirit. How could God do such a thing?

It is here that God draws our attention to the response we should have to his revelation, be it literal, metaphorical, anthropomorphic, or incarnational: worship. We worship God for the greatness of his mysterious grace in speaking to us—not because he condescended in human language and life, but because language and life themselves have divine roots. They are gifts. Why would God give such gifts to us? I do not know. I cannot know. But I can worship him for such gifts because they reveal the inexhaustible truth of salvation, of what God has come down to do for sinners.

I believe that the whole debate over anthropomorphic language is missing something quite basic to the nature of God, something that goes well beyond our ability to articulate his nature and essence: God speaks. Creation, redemption, salvation—he speaks all of it. I hear it, and I want to worship because God has come so far, to a creature who is so low, to do something so incomprehensible.

The more I read orthodox theology, the more apparent it becomes that a fundamental tenet of Christian belief is either embraced or ignored (to various degrees) by any given author. For me, this choice or tendency on the part of the author has dramatic implications for the truth of what he or she says. That tenet is this: Scripture is the very speech of God.

Most conservative Christians are quick to grant the validity of this tenet and would even affirm its centrality to our thinking about God. But I find in some orthodox theology an inconsistent working out of this tenet in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and language. This is not the place to pose and proliferate on theoretical questions concerning how Scripture as the speech of God influences our understanding of the nature of reality, or human thought, or language—those are oceans that even the best theologians that I have read have trouble navigating. I myself have only just begun exploring these issues and hope, by God’s grace, to write about them in the future. But I would at least suggest that confessional, orthodox theologians ask themselves a simple question when they begin thinking about a particular doctrine or body of thought in the above areas: What does God himself say about X in Scripture? Put differently, what does God’s speech tell us about his own nature and the nature of reality (metaphysics), how we acquire knowledge of him and the world that he has made (epistemology), and how our communicative behavior (language) functions to reveal both our epistemology and metaphysic? I believe that meditating on Scripture as the speech of God is absolutely critical in answering these questions. In the paragraphs that follow, I hope to explain why.

To begin with, if the Bible is the speech of God, it is the highest, most trustworthy, and most illuminating authority we have—on everything. In my understanding, that is why the Reformers were so adamant about the maxim sola Scriptura. Scripture alone is sufficient for us because Scripture alone is the speech of God—the verbal revelation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the medium of human language. Given this fundamental belief of Reformed theology, I cannot help but be puzzled as to why some theologians would first turn to a “respectable” figure in the history of human thought when they begin thinking about metaphysics, epistemology, or language—especially a figure outside the Christian tradition. Plato is not God, and neither is Aristotle, or Locke, or Wittgenstein. And yet the inanity of the previous sentence does not keep some theologians from turning to such figures first (sometimes through an intermediary such as Aquinas) when questions of metaphysics arise, for instance.

Now, let me be careful. I do not want to downplay the value of these thinkers and others when it comes to “big questions” of philosophy and theology. I did my undergraduate work at a liberal arts institution. I have benefited greatly from reading as widely as I can. To reaffirm the words Carl Trueman once uttered, echoing many before him, we learn a great deal not from reading only those who agree with us, but from reading those who disagree with us, those who differ from us. So, this is not a question of whether great figures in the history of human thought should be mined for their insight. It is a question of where Christian theologians are to begin. What will be their foundation for inquiry? When the question is put that way, I cannot help wondering, why do we not always begin by asking what God himself has to say about metaphysics, about the nature of human knowledge, and about language? Why not always begin with the speech of God in Scripture?

The inspiring thing about these questions is that when we do begin with the speech of God, I find that the whole world—our perception of God and reality, as well as human knowledge—takes on a linguistic dimension. In other words, the very fact that the triune God speaks, as revealed in Scripture means that he has created, sustains, and governs everything by word. Should this not profoundly shape the areas of human thought mentioned above? Should we not have a metaphysic, epistemology, and view of language grounded in and shaped by God’s speech?

A Linguistic Metaphysic

Take metaphysics, for instance. Some might argue that Scripture does not have a metaphysic (at least, not a developed one as can be found in Aristotle’s Metaphysics). But I would contest this. I believe that Scripture has a metaphysic yet to be fully developed in the church, though some have certainly begun to explore this. Perhaps what people mean when they say that Scripture does not have a metaphysic is, “Scripture does not have a metaphysic that looks like other metaphysical theories in human history.” But should it? Would we not expect the speech of God to be clearly distinct—even relatively radical—as compared to merely human speech? Or perhaps people mean, “The purpose of Scripture is not to give us a view of metaphysics, but a clear exposition of what God has done in history to redeem his people.” I understand the sentiment behind that statement, but what about the words of 2 Timothy 3:16–17? “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” We would be hard pressed to teach anything—much less be “complete”—if God did not reveal the nature of reality to us. In other words, if the purpose of Scripture is to reveal what God has done in history for our salvation so that we may use this to teach others, how can we do so without having a basic view of reality that is itself dictated by God?

This has led me to believe that Scripture does (in fact, must) have a metaphysic. In fact, Scripture begins to lay this out for us in the first chapter of Genesis. The very first page of Scripture tells us that all of reality came into existence by God’s speech (Gen 1), and Scripture elsewhere reminds us that all things are held together by the eternal Word of the Father (John 1:1; Col 1:17; Heb 1:3), who stood behind God’s speech at creation. Scripture’s metaphysic is thus linguistic. All things exist and draw their nature from the language, the speech, of the triune God, which governs the world and guides it to the ends that he has set for it. It is the divine voice—the Father uttering the person of his Son in the power of his Spirit—that has created, sustains, and governs all things. God’s voice has the power to bring the world into being, to sustain it, and to melt it away. As the psalmist wrote, “The nations rage, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts” (Ps 46:6).

This linguistic metaphysic, I believe, should be where theologians begin when they ask what something is, when they ask about the nature of reality. To ask what something is, biblically speaking, is to ask what purpose that thing serves in the spoken plan of God, as revealed in Scripture (God’s written speech). It is to ask what God’s speech has done to create it, sustain it, and direct it to his revealed ends. An apple, for instance, is not merely a piece of produce from the malus pumila tree. That might be true in the context of botanical science, but in the context of redemptive history, an apple is a life-sustaining gift from a garden-speaking God (Gen 1:12). It exists as a revelation of God’s gracious providence, as a means of sustaining God’s image-bearers as they work to steward the world (Gen 1:29). That understanding might not appear in the Latin, and it certainly will not appear in Aristotle, but that does not make it any less true—at least, not for the biblically minded theologian. To discern what something truly is, to understand the nature of the world in which we live, we must turn first to God’s speech in Scripture, not to the thought of a philosopher or even to that of another godly theologian. When we turn to God’s speech, we find a metaphysics of word. That metaphysic certainly does not resemble the neat categories of form and matter, substance and accidents, or potentiality and actuality. But, again, I ask, should it?

An Epistemology of Word

Epistemology has a similar foundation when we examine the speech of God in Scripture. Scripture reveals two things very plainly: (1) God has spoken into existence a world that everywhere “speaks” about him, i.e., offers revelation of God (Ps 19:1–3); and (2) God speaks directly with his people to guide them in paths of wisdom. The bedrock question of epistemology—what is truth and how do we know that something is true—is again based on the speech of God. God tells us what is true in his revelation. This is what Reformed theologians have come to call a revelational epistemology. It is an epistemology that stands firmly on the grounds that God speaks to reveal himself and to reveal what we can faithfully know about his world. So, when we turn to God’s speech, we find an epistemology of word.

Again, let me re-emphasize my point here. I am not saying that examining the thought of philosophers is a fruitless endeavor. Despite our fundamental disagreements with them, we can learn much from reading Plato’s Gorgias, or considering satirists such as Voltaire, or rationalists such as Leibniz, or empiricists such as Locke and Hume. But biblical theologians should never begin there. That is not their foundation. Their foundation is God’s speech in Scripture.

A Christian Philosophy of Language

Lastly, language likewise must be understood according to God’s speech. This is perhaps the most profound truth I have ever encountered and something I plan on studying for the rest of my life, and well into eternity. Language—what I have in another article (“Words for Communion”) defined as communion behavior—is not a human faculty; it is a divine disposition that has been gifted, with creaturely restraints, to God’s image bearers. Language is a behavior that allows for interpersonal communion. It is a behavior that God sees fit to use in infallibly revealing himself to us throughout history. It is a behavior that God calls us to take up in prayer. It is a behavior that God calls us to take up in worship. It is, in essence, a behavior that is at the heart of God’s very being and at the heart of our being as image bearers. A Christian philosophy of language begins with the Trinity—the speaking God we encounter on every page of Scripture—and moves from there to humanity.

Once more, it is not that we cannot learn something from Aristotle’s view of language (though his etymological discussions are humorous at times), or Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games,” or Austin’s speech-act theory, or Saussure’s structuralism, or Chomsky’s generative grammar, or Derrida’s deconstructionism. We can learn something from all of them even when we have deep disagreements. (I would argue here that Kenneth L. Pike’s language theory is a far more biblical and Trinitarian approach to language than most others, and is often left unconsidered in many discussions of language.) But the point is that we should not begin there. We begin with the speech of God. When we do, we find a view of language that is deeply personal and purposive according to the ends that God has declared for his creation in Scripture.

Conclusion

Now, I’m sure that to some academics what I’ve just said is a blend of naivety and fideism. Some might read this article and conclude that I am merely a biblicist who attempts to elevate himself over all other “thoughtful” human beings. I cannot control what others might think of my motives. But I know my own history. I know what is on my bookshelf and how I have been blessed by great thinkers of the past and present.

I also know that my God is a God who speaks. And that truth—the tenet that Scripture is the very speech of God—takes precedence over any thought that mankind could develop. We can interact with the thoughts of men, but we should not begin there. Once we do, we are in danger of pandering to something less than divine revelation. What we end up saying will be attractive to the world, and even to much of Christian academia these days, but will it be pure? Will it be something that aligns with the speech of God? Titus 1:15 says, “Everything is pure to those whose hearts are pure.” Theological “purity,” if we might call it that, is found only in adherence to the speech of God, a speech that has made our hearts pure, and a speech that should purify our thinking as well.

All heresies with respect to the Trinity may be reduced to the one great heresy of mixing the eternal and the temporal.

— Cornelius Van Til

Cornelius Van Til cut through the densest theological controversies like a hot knife through butter. What some readers dismiss as daft conclusions or graceless criticism, others learn to appreciate as incisive critical synthesis. You might say, some wince at Van Til’s work while others whistle at it. I put myself in the latter group. After years of reading his work, I’m still struck by his theological acumen.

Van Til’s discussion of Trinitarian heresies is a case in point. Throughout his chapter on the Trinity in An Introduction to Systematic Theology, he keeps coming back to the same point: at base all Trinitarian heresies are the result of mixing the eternal and the temporal. This is tied to his emphasis on the Creator-creature distinction. He reminds us that

all non-Christian thought would have us think of God as one aspect of the universe as a whole. In one way or another, all heresies bring in space-time existence as the other aspect of the universe as a whole. … Here, in fact, lies the bond of connection between ancient and modern heresies. For this reason, the church has emphasized the fact that the ontological Trinity, that is, the Trinity as it exists in itself, apart from its relation to the created universe, is self-complete, involving as it does the equal ultimacy of unity and plurality. But it was a long and arduous road by which the church reached its high doctrine of the Trinity.[i]

Indeed, the church is still walking that road, ever vigilant of its feet, for a precipice lies on each side of the doctrine. Every century the church has stamped the dust of dogma and left footprints for the faithful to follow. It was in looking at such footprints, I believe, that Van Til drew out his incisive critique of Trinitarian heresies.

Gnosticism

He first takes aim at the Gnostic notion of the Logos (not to be confused with the biblical understanding of the Logos in John’s Gospel). The Gnostics could not see how the eternal God could be self-contained and yet still engage with creation. To solve this problem, they understood the Logos to be “the self-expression for God in the universe.”[ii] In other words, the Logos for them was a middleman between eternity and time, the divine and the human. But their conclusion merely muddied the water by making God dependent on creation. The Gnostics had mixed time and eternity by making the latter inextricable from the former. It was Irenaeus who would step onto the road of orthodoxy to claim that “God did not in any wise need the universe as a medium of self-expression; he was self-expressed in the Trinity.”[iii]

Sabellianism and Arianism 

Van Til next set his sights on Sabellianism and Arianism, showing that they were two sides of the same coin. The Arians refused to let go of the Son as a creature. Put differently, they refused to let the self-contained eternal Trinity engage with the dependent temporal world on God’s own terms. God was, in some sense, made correlative to the world. We might even say that Arianism attempted to force time into eternity by demanding that the Son be understood as a creature.

Sabellianism, too, tried to force Trinitarian doctrine to fit the confines of temporality. In attempting to harmonize God’s threeness with his oneness, Sabellius and his cohort opted to make the three persons temporal manifestations of an eternal unity. For Van Til, this meant that they wanted to have “the temporal world furnish the plurality as a supplement to the eternal world, which furnished the unity of reality as a whole.”[iv] The plurality of persons in the Godhead was thus made correlative to the plurality we find in creation. This is drastically different, mind you, from the eternal unity and plurality of the Trinity being the basis for the temporal unity and plurality of creation.[v]

In both Arianism and Sabellianism, adherents were guilty of “uniting the temporal in a correlative union with the eternal.”[vi] To say that the Son is a creature is to say that God must follow the norms of creaturely reason (Arianism); to say that the divine persons are merely modes of the one God is to say the same thing, really. In both cases, God is denied as the self-contained three-in-one; he cannot house in himself unity and plurality in perfect harmony, apart from creation. But, as Van Til affirmed frequently, he does. That is what the true church came to confess.

Nestorianism and Eutychianism 

Van Til then turns to Nestorianism and Eutychianism, which seem strange victims for a critique of Trinitarian heresy. Yet, Van Til saw these blunders as “no more than modified forms of opposition to the church’s doctrine of the Trinity.”[vii] Nestorius conceived of two persons in Christ (which is linked in a sense to equating time and eternity), while Eutyches argued that Christ only had one, divine nature (not a divine and a human nature), thus segregating eternity (Christ’s divine nature) from time (Christ’s human nature). In both cases, the deity of Christ was not properly related to his humanity and there is a false conception of the relationship between the eternal and the temporal, which in Christ are neither confused nor divided. Mixing up the relationship of the temporal and eternity in Christ is, in essence, an offshoot of mixing up the temporal and eternal in the Trinity.

Deism and Pantheism

But Van Til does not stop here. He moves on to link Nestorianism and Eutychianism to deism and pantheism. “Any doctrine that denies God’s providence (as deism does) or his providence and creation (as Greek thought did) must in the end become a confusion of the eternal and the temporal. Deism and pantheism are no more than two forms of the one basic error of confusion of the eternal and the temporal.”[viii] Van Til’s critique here is a classic example of how what was often obvious to him was not so self-evident to the rest of us. What does he mean here?

Deism supposes that God is outside of and distant from created reality, which runs like a clock thanks to the laws of nature that God himself has instilled within it. God exists, for deists, but only as a hazy figure just within earshot of creation’s ticking clockwork. This belief system allowed deists to clutch a form of theism (which was not by any means Christian) without having to accept the rationally suspect claims of Scripture: that God became incarnate in the person of Christ and continues to work in his people through the power of the Spirit. These claims of the Bible assaulted the rules of human reason, so deists left them behind and supported a clear distinction between the clockmaker God and his gear-grinding world. Deists, in other words, enforced an extreme form of separation between the divine and the human, the eternal and the temporal. Thus, the “confusion of the eternal and the temporal” here is simply the practical removal of the former from the latter. God is stripped of his Trinitarian economy because that economy does not seem to cohere with the standards of temporal (human) reason. For Van Til, this is linked to Nestorianism. Just as the temporal is not divorced from the eternal in God’s economy, neither is the eternal divorced from the temporal in the person of Christ. This may be why Van Til suggested that Nestorianism was “the deistic form of opposition to the true doctrine.”[ix]

The distant heretical step-sister of deism is pantheism. Deism segregates the eternal from the temporal; pantheism blends them together so that we cannot distinguish them anymore. For pantheists, God is in everything. The divine is mixed into the fabric of creation. This mixture thus frustrates all efforts to distinguish between God and the world. In the end, pantheists simply resolve the issue by concluding that creation is divine. This parallels the attempt of Eutyches to show that Christ only had one, divine nature. The human is dissolved into the divine. With Nestorius, the human and divine were set apart; with Eutyches the human is collapsed into the divine. In both cases there is confusion of the relationship between the eternal and the temporal.

Solution: God Exists as Triune

What is the solution to this confusion? It is our recognition of the biblical truth that “God exists as triune. He is therefore self-complete. Yet he created the world. This world has meaning not in spite of, but because of, the self-completeness of the ontological Trinity. This God is the foundation of the created universe and therefore is far above it.”[x] The Trinity is properly understood and worshiped only with a biblical understanding of God’s transcendence and immanence. The ontological Trinity is independent of creation, and yet all of creation has meaning because of God’s independence and sovereignty over it, even as he is present with us in it. The triune God created the world and stands above it, and yet all of reality has meaning because he is involved with it. The Trinity might be likened to a gloveless gardener. He is responsible for planting the rose bushes and the rhododendron, but he is not thereby dependent on them. Yet he also chooses to fill his fingernails with the dirt that hugs the roots of what he has made.

Calvin and Arminius

Modern Trinitarian heresies followed in the same path as the ancient ones. They once again fumbled with a “false conception of the Trinity, the self-contained God of Scripture.”[xi] The issues may have changed over time, but the problem was perennial. In Calvin’s day, the biblical doctrine of the Trinity was distorted by Arminius, who—again, following principles of strict rationalism—tried to resurrect the specter of subordinationism. Like Origen, Arminius wanted to push the taxonomy of the Trinity too far, ultimately reducing the divine to a unity rather than a Trinity. Calvin, in contrast, “was strongly interested in asserting the consubstantiality of the three persons of the Godhead.”[xii] While this was in some senses novel in Calvin’s day, it was really nothing more than a re-articulation of the ancient catholic doctrine that God is both one and three.

Idealism and Unitarianism

Continuing his critique, Van Til chastises Arminius for opening the door to “more radical departures” from the biblical doctrine, which came in with the idealists. “The idealist philosophers have identified the Trinity with the principle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in reality as a whole.”[xiii] This Hegelian principle, once more, leads to an ultimate unity, not an ultimate Trinity. It leads to Unitarian faith rather than Trinitarian. What’s worse, it binds God to his creation so as to render him dependent. So, Van Til restates his synthetic summary of Trinitarian heresy.

Unitarianism is nothing but a new form of the old error of mixing the eternal and the temporal. Modernism is the happy heir of all heresies, and basic to all its heresies is the denial of the consubstantiality of the Son and the Spirit with the Father; or rather, its error is even deeper than that, since the Father himself is for modernism no more than an aspect of reality. If ever there was need for reaffirming and teaching the true doctrine of the Trinity, it is now.[xiv]

Indeed, the same is true for us today, especially in light of the longstanding liberal push to forsake the immanent Trinity for the economic—to seek God for us rather than God in himself. Such a push could easily be translated into Van Til’s vernacular: we should seek the God in time rather than the God of eternity. But it is exactly at this point that orthodox Christianity must check its feet and follow the straight and narrow. It is only because God is in himself that he is for us. God is for us in time by a loving and gracious decision, and such a decision emerged from the eternal Trinity who is love.

Conclusion

T. S. Eliot once wrote, “Only through time time is conquered.”[xv] I always interpreted this to mean that the God above time entered time in order to redeem time. But time did not always need to be conquered. Indeed, time did not always exist. Seconds were spoken into motion by the voice of the Trinity. Before there was time, before there was such a thing as history, there was simply the Trinity. I end with Fred Sanders’s words.

God’s way of being God is to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simultaneously from all eternity, perfectly complete in a triune fellowship of love. If we don’t take this as our starting point, everything we say about the practical relevance of the Trinity could lead us to one colossal misunderstanding: thinking of God the Trinity as a means to some other end, as if God were the Trinity in order to make himself useful. But God the Trinity is the end, the goal, the telos, the omega. In himself and without any reference to a created world of the plan of salvation, God is that being who exists as the triune love of the Father for the Son in the unity of the Spirit. The boundless life that God lives in himself, at home, within the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is perfect. It is complete, inexhaustibly full, and infinitely blessed.[xvi]

In remembering these words, let us continue in the footsteps of orthodoxy, never mixing the eternal and the temporal, the God who is love in himself with the God who is love for us. As Van Til wrote, it has been “a long and arduous road by which the church reached its high doctrine of the Trinity.” Let us continue to walk it, in praise of the self-contained tri-personal God.

[i] Cornelius Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, ed. William Edgar, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007), 353.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid., 354.

[iv] Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 356.

[v] Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, ed. K. Scott Oliphint, 4th ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008), 47–51.

[vi] Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 356.

[vii] Ibid., 358.

[viii] Ibid., 359–60.

[ix] Ibid., 360.

[x] Ibid., 359.

[xi] Ibid., 360.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Ibid., 361. This is a reference specifically to Hegel’s dialectic, the notion that history is in the process of moving towards an ultimate unity as a result of the continuous cycle of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

[xiv] Ibid., 362.

[xv] T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943), 16.

[xvi] Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 62.

“Priest, teacher, artist—the classic degeneration.” John Updike’s apothegm has been used by several theologians to describe the era of post-modernity. Kevin Vanhoozer, for example, echoes him by claiming that our culture has moved from priest to teacher to artist. We have traded submission to dogmatism for submission to reason, and then exchanged the latter for the demagogue of self-expression.

But we are, after all, now living in the era of post-post-modernity, so the artist is not the end of the line. Someone has come after him: the informationist, and that troubles me far more than Updike’s classic degeneration. At least with artists, there was the potential to extract kernels of truth from the husk of obscure subjectivity: something of the artist could challenge and change us. But informationists are, as the name suggests, concerned only with the peddling of ideas (cf. Acts 17:21). What is delivered to them as a living truth is crystallized into a concept and stacked with everything else that is “fascinating.”

In principle, of course, there is nothing wrong with something being fascinating. But we tend to forget that many things that assume the label are seldom worth added attention. If you tell me that your grandfather used to sleep with his eyes open, I will tell you that’s fascinating, but I’m probably never going to think about it again. Fascination pricks the mind’s appetite but does not satisfy it.

It is for this reason that informationists care little about whether or not something is true; they care only to acknowledge novelty or obscurity before moving on to the next thing. And because there is no shortage of information in today’s marketplace of ideas, truth—as a challenging and catalyzing reality—can be made practically irrelevant to an informationist, especially the Christian faith. Christianity is often lumped into the same category as other ideas in the history of Western civilization—a bedfellow to Plato’s pure forms and Kant’s phenomenalism.

But the informationist treatment of the Christian faith is, I believe, a prelude to something else. For years I have heard of people mourning the marginalization of Christianity in the secular universities, but if media trends maintain their current course, if information continues to be the greatest commodity of trade, then I suggest something else entirely: the universities are not going to reject and marginalize Christianity; they are going to embrace it as an idea. Christian teachers will soon find not that they are refused a seat at the intellectual table, but that a place has been cleared specifically for them. If they take it, however, it will risk the very heart of the gospel.

I have written elsewhere that the greatest threat to the gospel is treating it as an idea, for once the gospel becomes an idea, it dies. Sapped of the vigor of Christ—the truth who calls us into a dynamic personal relationship—the gospel as idea is nothing more than a relic. To see such a relic, we make the occasional pilgrimage from the faraway parts of imagination and speculation, but we always return home. We think of what it would be like if Jesus were really raised from the dead and beckoned us into communion with the Trinity. But then a stoplight turns green, we push the gas pedal, and churn the wheels of the ordinary again. The gospel, we think, is a happy fiction that will be sitting there waiting for us to return from our pragmatic errands.

Consider this phenomenon from the perspective of spiritual warfare. Imagine if you were the devil. What would be your weapon of choice to assault the faithful? Would it be fanaticism? Doubt? Relativity? Distraction? C. S. Lewis and other apologists throughout the centuries have made such suggestions, but I think there is a different threat now. The weapon of choice is vigilant sterilization. To assault an army of those who have faith seeking understanding (following Anselm’s biblical maxim), the devil promises understanding at the cost of faith—a sterile idea in exchange for a relationship. In accordance with his serpentine strategy, he has offered us the possibility of knowledge apart from a covenantal relationship with God.

You will remember that Adam and Eve, too, were presented with an idea apart from such a relationship. The idea, of course, was false. Adam and Eve could not have true knowledge in isolation from the God of the universe. Perhaps the devil is tidying up his tricks in the 21^st century. Rather than offer what he knows all Christians have been warned against, he now offers what seems to have been promised. Sin and salvation, the Messiah and the message, grace and glory—it’s all there, but it has been sterilized into a concept. It is, in the most negative possible sense, a “still-life” of the gospel: a portrait of the promise, not the promise itself. He has, in his serpentine strategy, offered us fruit that is, more than ever, “a delight to the eyes” (Gen 3:6). And we are taking it.

The effect is devastating. The devil is assaulting the doors of the church not with a battering ram but with an abstraction: that the gospel can be had simply if it is embraced as an idea. He has effectively convinced the masses that understanding apart from faith is just as good as faith seeking understanding.

The next move, it would seem to me, would be to take Christianity to the academy, to hand it over to informationists who care only about fascination, and there is nothing worse you can say about the gospel than that it is fascinating. The gospel razes your life to the ground and then builds it back up, brick by brick. It decimates before it generates. That is why Christ is not a principle; he is a person, a person who changes and challenges us. He pushes us, however discomforting it may seem, not to settle on our understanding with ease and efficiency, but to work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12). To exchange this person for a stagnant principle is to exchange life for death all over again—to give ascent to the serpent a second time by agreeing that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is enough in itself. To accept the gospel as idea is to accept ideology at the cost of isolation from the dynamic, engaging God of Scripture.

Updike’s classic degeneration, it seems, is not the worst that could happen to Christianity. Indeed, we have already lived through it. “Priest, teacher, artist” has come and gone. We are now in the era of the informationist. Just as the devil used dogmatism, reason, and self-expression to attack the church, so now he will use the gospel in abstraction. And the secular university is the perfect place to do it. Now Christians can, at last, have faith and intellectual prestige. They can claim the gospel as idea without claiming Christ as Lord. That is the devil’s cunning.

This is a sobering prophecy for a generation pushed, more than ever, to the realms of higher education. And I hope that I am wrong. For the moment, I suggest that every time you hear yourself saying that this or that in the Bible is “fascinating,” beware. It may be the devil on your shoulder, asking once again if you will take the fruit of the tree, rather than the bread of Christ’s body. The latter will pull you onto the path of suffering and glory; the former will leave you as you are. That, far worse that Updike’s classic degeneration, is the devil’s degeneration, for he knows that if he keeps you the same, then he has kept you from Christ.

A secular view of metaphor and analogy may have us believe all too easily that metaphorical language is not as “important” or “true” as literal language.[2] And, as some have pointed out, sometimes the Bible suggests the contrary: that metaphors and analogies are potent and have been woven into the fabric of reality for divine purposes.[3] But the problem, at second glance, is more complicated than distinguishing between “metaphorical” and “literal” language. These categories themselves assume that there is a clear line between “literal” and “metaphorical” language, which is oftentimes not the case. Yet, what is even more important is that the literal/metaphorical distinction many times betrays an unbiblical affirmation, namely, that literal language can be understood exhaustively (univocally) and thus has no element of mystery or depth.[4] Metaphorical language, on the other hand, is more overtly “loose” and mysterious, and thus is potentially less helpful and more difficult to comprehend (equivocally). This view of literal and metaphorical language, however, is deeply flawed and theologically problematic.

As a test case, let us look at the Bible’s description of God as our Father. Trying to make this a literal statement or a metaphorical one is not so helpful. If, on the one hand, we say that it is metaphorical, what do we mean? Do we mean that God is not really our Father, or perhaps that God is our Father, but only in a secondary sense; in the primary sense, our earthly father is our true father? This brings up many problems, as I have recently realized. After reading the following words of Herman Bavinck, and considering a passage such as Galatians 4, I wonder whether this “metaphorical” approach is really the way in which we should approach such language, especially if “metaphorical” is understood in the sense described above.[5] Bavinck writes,

The scriptural name “Father” is a much better description [than “unbegotten”] of the personal property of the first person. Implied in the word “fatherhood” is a positive relation to the second person. The name “Father” is even more appropriate than the word “God,” for the latter is a general name signifying transcendent dignity, but the name “Father,” like that of yhwh in the Old Testament, is a proper name, an attribute describing a personal property of God. Those who deny to God the name “Father” dishonor him even more than those who deny his creation. This name of “Father,” accordingly, is not a metaphor derived from the earth and attributed to God. Exactly the opposite is true: fatherhood on earth is but a distant and vague reflection of the fatherhood of God (Eph 3:14–15). God is Father in the true and complete sense of the term.[6]

We can easily breeze over such a statement. “Yes, yes, God is the true Father of all. Now what else?” What else?! Bavinck is turning our earthly experience on its head. We tend to think that our earthly experience with fatherhood is the basis on which we understand Paul’s claim that God is our Father. But the reverse is the case, according to Bavinck. God’s intrinsic Fatherhood is the grounds for any earthly manifestation of fatherhood. So, if we read a passage such as Gal 4:4–7, we should understand God to be our Father literally, right? Not quite.

That approach has its problems as well. The word “literally” could be misunderstood to mean that we are sons in the same way that Christ is the Son. But that would not be theologically accurate either. The divine Son is eternally generated by the Father, and the Spirit proceeds both from him and the Father. Eternal generation and Spirit-procession are not qualities that we have as creatures. This does not mean that we are not sons of God, however. Directly after v. 4, when Paul makes the statement that the Son of God was born of a woman, he tells us we have been adopted as sons and are now sons (v. 5, 6). And, what’s more, we receive the Spirit of God’s eternal Son and cry out to God as Father (v. 6). So which is it? Are we literal sons or metaphorical sons?

Maybe the literal/metaphorical distinction is not so helpful here. In fact, it can even be harmful. Think about how this distinction is often used. If we can delineate which statements in Scripture are “literal” and which are “metaphorical,” that could be fodder for univocal thought, suggesting that some statements in Scripture can be understood as “brute” facts, known by God in the same way that they are known by us. In saying that God is literally our Father, we can be tempted to think that there is little mystery in such language. But we easily find mystery if we press the semantics a bit. If God is our Father, what does that mean? He is not our Father by blood, of course, since that is an earthly trait (this would be a “literal” view). But he is ultimately responsible for our coming into existence, and the moving of blood through our veins, which keeps us in this earthly existence, would not have come about apart from his speech and breath (Gen 2:7; Job 33:4). In that sense, he is our Father by blood, since our earthly father merely fell in line with God’s structuring of the human race (this could be a “metaphorical” view). So even the phrase “Father by blood” is deep and mysterious and eschews the literal/metaphorical distinction. We can understand it to a degree, but our finitude keeps us from understanding it exhaustively or from categorizing it with divine surety.

The same could be said for other fatherly behaviors attributed to God: offering guidance (Ps 23:2; 139:10), showing love (1 John 3:1), teaching us from his wisdom (Ps 51:6), chastising us for wrongdoing (Heb 12:6), etc. It does not seem to be helpful to apply the literal/metaphorical distinction in such cases, for embedded in this distinction is often (though not always) an intention to understand language exhaustively, to demarcate with precision the beginning and end of so-called “literal” and “metaphorical” expressions.

Instead, we might simply say that these fatherly behaviors are things that God truly does, but we can (and should) understand them analogically, with a profound sense of awe and an appreciation that this triune God is in a loving, guiding relationship with us. He knows what that means far more than we do, but he has not hidden that meaning from us. He has revealed it to us, but revealed to us as creatures.[7]

We can still express truth in language analogically. God really is our Father in Christ by the power of the Spirit. We know this because he has told this to us in passages such as Gal 4:4–7. But we know this only as creatures. We are free to follow Bavinck and affirm that we have been adopted by the ultimate Father, who acts in ways incomparably higher than, but not irrelevant to, our earthly father. We must embrace both the divine and earthly contexts of human language, just as we embrace the divine and human natures of the person of Christ.[8]

And such an analogical approach also gives us more freedom to make linguistic connections and applications today. Consider the divine “adoption” discussed in Gal 4. We can connect this to human adoption analogically, with many benefits.

Thinking from an earthly perspective, we tend to view adoption as the forging of a foreign relationship, the taking on of one person by another family. But the truth is that sin has orphaned all of us. We were all in desperate need of adoption. And God waited until the proper time to adopt us—waiting far longer than the painful interlude many couples struggle with today in trying to adopt children from another country. And it was costly—oh, was it costly. It cost the blood of his own Son, the highest price to be paid.

It is the Trinity—Father, Son, and Spirit—who stands behind the redemptive possibility of adoption.[9] In God’s eternal counsel, a pact was made (the pactum salutis) to adopt not just one child, or a few, but every tribe and tongue and nation. We are—all those in Christ—sons and daughters in a divinely proper sense, a sense which goes beyond any notion of literal or metaphorical language. Thus, “adoption” can be stretched to encompass both earthly and heavenly senses in a way that illuminates both for us as creatures. We can be adopted on earth, but our greatest adoption is by our heavenly Father.

If all of this is true—if we should choose to invoke neither the literal nor the metaphorical category with ultimate control and precision—then we need to begin practicing how to use language analogically, and that may require significantly modifying or, in some cases, even abandoning prior terminology. If we go on using categories like these thoughtlessly, we risk leaving behind the riches of redemption and relegating the truth of the gospel to a seat at the univocal table, where we continue to imagine that we can fathom all that God has done for us in calling us back to him as our Father.

Notes

[1] Poythress suggests, helpfully, I believe, that metaphors serve as perspectives on the world. See Vern S. Poythress, Symphonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1987), 15–18. Some of these metaphors I have taken from him.

[2] “There is no reason to have any general theological preference for literal language over figurative or to assume that every metaphor must be literally explain in precise academic terms. Scripture does not do that. Often, in fact, figurative language says more, and says it more clearly, than corresponding literal language would do.” John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1987), 227–28. “Language in its literal and metaphorical capabilities derives from God, who is the infinite source of both the literal and the metaphorical and their relation to one another. In mysterious ways the relation is grounded in the very being of God, in the relation of the Father to the Sonthrough the Spirit. We cannot neatly and perfectly separate out the literal and the metaphorical within language, any more than human thinking can perfectly comprehend the relation of the Son to the Father. The presence of the Word before the Father is not only the source of human metaphorical language; it is the source of the world. God created the world through his Word. We therefore expect that the world itself is shot through with metaphor.” Vern S. Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 284. See also Vern S. Poythress, “Rethinking Accommodation in Revelation,” Westminster Theological Journal 76 (2014): 150–51.

[3] I discuss one option for a biblical approach to metaphor in “In the Beginning Was the Word: John 1:1–5 and a Revelational Theory of Metaphor,” Westminster Theological Journal (forthcoming).

[4] This does not have to be the case. I have no problem with people using the descriptor literal when trying to express that a piece of language is not emphasizing a relationship between two concepts. “Jesus is the savior of the world” is more literal than, say, “Jesus is our rock.” In the latter expression, we have to relate the concept of Jesus to the concept of a rock, mapping the qualities of one onto the other so as to arrive at a deeper understanding of the “target” (Jesus). See George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 63–65. The danger is when we think that the statement “Jesus is the savior of the world” is void of mystery and can be exhaustively understood by us. This violates the Creator-creature distinction and assumes we have God-like mastery over language, when, in fact, “mystery is not something that comes at the end of our study, as if we can master some things but have to default to mystery in the end. Mystery, as Bavinck says, is the lifeblood of all theology. We begin with it, we study and think and learn in its context, and we conclude with the joyous affirmation of its exhaustive presence in all that we know.” K. Scott Oliphint, “Simplicity, Triunity, and the Incomprehensibility of God,” in One God in Three Persons: Unity of Essence, Distinction of Persons, Implications for Life, ed. Bruce A. Ware and John Starke (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), 229n23.

[5] All credit where credit is due: I was finally convinced of what I outline in this article after hearing a sermon on Galatians 4 by David Cummings at Calvary Chapel in Quakertown, PA, on September 6, 2015.

[6] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 307.

[7] Note here Oliphint’s words on the “creaturely” nature of all that we do: “Because God has spoken, we can know who he is, something of what he does, even why he does what he does; and we can know that who he is, what he does, and why he does what he does is revealed to us to know as creatures, not as creators. In other words, it is not the case that since we have the truth of Scripture, what we know is identical with what he knows. . . . All that we are, think, do, and become is derivative, coming from or out of something else; we depend on, as well as mirror, the real, the Original, the Eimi. In classical terminology, we are ‘ectypal.’ The kind or type of people we are, knowledge we have, thoughts we think, things we do, is always and everywhere a copy, pattern, impression, image, taking its metaphysical and epistemological cue from the only One who truly is, that is, from God himself.” K. Scott Oliphint, Reasons for Faith: Philosophy in the Service of Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2006), 176, 178–79.

[8] Edward Morgan helpfully explains how Augustine understands language as “incarnational.” Human speech is analogous to the incarnation—God’s internal Word manifested in the flesh and applied in the love of the Spirit—and thus “the incarnation in fact reads as a commencement of an explicitly Trinitarian conversation between God and humanity, whereby through the incarnation humanity recognizes as Trinity the God who addresses it. Reflection on this conversation leads the human person closer to God, who is truth. Finally, the Spirit inspires this conversation.” Edward Morgan, “The Concept of Person in Augustine’s De Trinitate,” in Augustine and Other Latin Writers: Papers Presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held at Oxford, ed. F. Young, M. Edwards, and P. Parvis, Studia Patristica 43 (Paris: Peeters, 2006), 206.

[9] “Paul’s specification of the Spirit’s identity—his delineating who this Spirit is whom the Galatians have received—involves his referring the Galatians back to God and Jesus. However, he does not picture God and Jesus as enjoying a priority to which the Spirit is then added as a supplementary afterthought. If that were the case, then we would not be able to speak of mutuality in the constitution of the identities of God, Jesus, and the Spirit. Rather, Paul has in mind a fully reciprocal relationship whereby the Spirit’s identity is intertwined with God’s and Jesus’ identities from the outset. Both in eternal priority and in the temporal outworking or “sending” from that eternal priority, the Spirit is identified here along with God and his Son in a web of inter-determinative relations. This matrix or web that exists between God, the Son, and the Spirit preexists their effecting of the Galatians’ adoption described in 4:5.” Wesley Hill, Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 142.

Genesis 1–3 is riddled with mysteries, the pursuit of which, some argue, does more harm than good. For instance, it is puzzling how and why a malicious and crafty serpent ended up in God’s good creation. But there is one thing that is abundantly clear in the creation account: God’s word is on the line. His word, as Frame puts it, is “the issue before the first couple.”^[1] And based on their response to it, the world would either be full of God’s glories or laced with the fissures of sin.

He Made Us Listeners

Now, if the word was and is the critical medium in God’s creation and governance of the world, then it follows that the senses involved in that medium are especially important. I’m thinking particularly of the sense of hearing—which allows us to perform the act of listening. Listening, we often forget, is not the same thing as hearing. We cannot help but hear what goes on around us, but that does not mean we are listening to it; we are well practiced at hearing someone’s words but not listening to them. In a general sense, listening is a conscious attempt to connect with the message of another being. In a biblical sense, our listening clarifies our allegiance; by our listening we show either that we hold the white flag of surrender to God’s will or the red flag of rebellion against it.

Now, consider the encounter with Eve and the serpent. What is the primary medium in their engagement? Spoken language, of which the sense of hearing is an integral part. But the one speaking is going against the words of the Creator God—evidence that he has not listened to God’s words; he has only heard them. Eve’s suspicion should have been immediately raised. A subject of the speaking God is questioning God’s words. Satan is holding his red flag. Just look at the reversal in perceived authority between Gen 1:1–2:25 and Gen 3:1–7.^[2]

God → Man → Woman → Animals (Gen 1:1–2:25)

Animals (serpent) → Woman → Man → God (Gen 3:1–7)

The serpent, a mere hearer of God’s words, tried to take the place of the true and eternal speaker. And Adam and Eve went along with it. Eve listened to the serpent’s words to the exclusion of God’s; Adam listened to Eve’s words to the exclusion of God’s. No one listened to the true speaker; every creature, instead, listened to the words of another creature. The fall occurred, in large part, because God’s creatures challenged their ultimate allegiance to His words. And so Satan’s first great assault on God’s listeners proved successful.

The Second Great Assault

Generations later, Satan would make his second great assault. He had attacked and defeated God’s first son, Adam. This time he would attack God’s eternal Son. We read in Matthew’s Gospel of how Satan fought with Christ, using a similar trickery. Look at what he does in Matt 4:

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. ² And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. ³ And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” ⁴ But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” ⁵ Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple ⁶ and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”

⁷ Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” ⁸ Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. ⁹ And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” ¹⁰ Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” ¹¹ Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.

In the first instance, Satan is not quoting Scripture verbatim, but is certainly drawing on a biblical context—God’s giving of manna to the people of Israel during the Exodus. “If God can do it, so can Jesus.” But Jesus has not come to prove himself to be God; he has come as the second Adam, to fulfill Adam’s listening duties and to bring life where Adam brought death. Note Jesus’ response: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” This is the response of a listener. Jesus knows that God is the almighty speaker, and he knows his role in relation to that speaker. Jesus came not to serve himself, but to serve others through suffering—by being obedient to God unto death on a cross, by being a listener of God’s word to the very end, just as Adam should have been. Jesus faithfully raises his white flag in submission to God’s will, and by implication he calls Satan out exactly where he has always been in rebellion.

In the second instance, Satan quotes Scripture from Ps 91:11–12, but this again only shows that he has heard God’s words, not listened to them. In this passage, the psalmist is praising God for His protection from the wicked (91:8). But the only wicked one from whom Jesus needs protection is the devil himself. Christ is not in trouble, but Satan is asking him to make trouble by throwing himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. And why? Just so he can prove to a trickster something he already knows?

Jesus fires back at the devil with Moses’ words in Deut 6:16: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” The devil has heard God’s words and then tried to brandish them before His incarnate Son, but there is no use. Christ has listened to God’s words, and his remembrance of them leads to his victory over the devil. He will not test his Father and suggest that His word is not enough. That would be to make the same mistake that Adam made. That would be to raise the red flag of rebellion.

In the third instance, the devil tempts Jesus to measure the might of his rule, just as he did with David in 1 Chr 21. There the devil suggested David take a census of the whole nation to assess his military strength. David’s listening to the devil’s words was, in essence, his bowing down and worshipping another being—for God’s creatures have an unquestioned allegiance to His words alone. In Matt 4, the devil gets right to the point: “bow down and worship me and all the kingdoms will be yours.” Christ, however, has listened to God’s words in the voice of the psalmist. He knows that God “shall inherit all the nations” (Ps 82:8). What use are the world’s kingdoms when your Father already reigns over them? Jesus needs nothing from the devil. His white flag is flapping in the wind of God’s faithfulness, and once again he sends the devil away, his red flag cloven by a true listener of God’s holy and eternal word.

Who We Are

In Christ, the one who faithfully submitted to the word of his Father, we are a nation of listeners. Conceptually, this means that, in Spurgeon’s words, if “there speaks a God,”^[3] then “there listens a creature.” We need to pray earnestly that God’s Spirit would help us to make listening to God’s word our initial response to temptation. We need to pray that we would always be inclined to raise the white flag in submission to God’s will rather than the red flag in rebellion against it.

Practically, this means we need to meditate on God’s words to the point that we can readily bring them to bear on our daily temptations. Satan is lethally injured; his defeat is sure, but a creature is often most dangerous when death is imminent. Satan will do all he can to make you a hearer rather than a listener of God’s words. So arm yourselves daily with Scripture. Take it to heart; be ready to wield it confidently, for “we know the end of the war. The great dragon shall be cast out and for ever destroyed, while Jesus and they who are with Him shall receive the crown. Let us sharpen our swords tonight.”^[4] Yes, and prick our ears.

[1] John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2010), 4.

[2] This insight is also gained from Frame, Doctrine of the Word of God, 56­–57.

[3] C. H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening (Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Heritage, 2009), 399.

[4] Ibid., 699.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet. 

So, what’s in a name, anyway? Why doesn’t Romeo just drop his last name and make this love affair a whole lot simpler? There are reasons he doesn’t, which extend perhaps beyond even Shakespeare’s imagination.

People have sometimes misinterpreted Juliet’s words to mean that names aren’t important. A rose would still retain its scent and color if called by a different name, wouldn’t it? Of course it would; but then it wouldn’t be a rose. It would be something different—a pansy, a peony, or a daffodil—but not a “rose.”

Names are important, and we can’t drop or change them without repercussions. Herman Bavinck sheds light on just how important names are, and perhaps this will help us refute the popular view that names are only superficial.[1]

A Name and Its Bearer

In discussing the biblical names for God, Herman Bavinck writes,

A name is a sign of the person bearing it, a designation referring to some characteristic in which a person reveals himself or herself and becomes knowable. There is a connection between a name and its bearer, and that connection, so far from being arbitrary, is rooted in that bearer. Even among us [moderns], now that names have for the most part become mere sounds without meaning, that connection is still felt. A name is something personal . . . . it stands for our honor, our worth, our person and individuality.[2]

A name is more than just a string of phonemes—even if that’s how we treat names today. Names are tied in a special way to those who hold them. They play a part in identifying the being to which they are attached, and in doing so they alert us as to how we should interact with that being.

Names for God

Bavinck continues with his argument by examining the names of God we find in Scripture—names which are more transparent than those we find in our culture. In the Bible, God’s names point to His being. In Gen 17:1 God identifies Himself as אֵל שַׁדַּי, “God Almighty.” The letters signify who God is: He is incomparably mighty, stronger than any other being. Similarly, יְהֹוָה צְבָאוֹת points us to God’s power as the “Lord of Hosts.” He has every army at His beck and call. When we pronounce that name, we draw attention to God’s commanding presence. God’s names themselves carry meaning that is bound up with God, the bearer.

This is the same for Christ. As the מָשִׁיחַ “Messiah,” Christ is the anointed one. He is the one who will fulfill God’s promise in Gen 3:15, the one who will carry out the climactic event of redemptive history. He has been “anointed” in a way unlike any other person, so it is fitting to call him the anointed one. All others who have been anointed in history pale in comparison.

The Holy Spirit is not left out of this naming convention either. He is called ὁ παράκλητος, “the Helper” or “Comforter.” The letters bring to mind the very nature of what the Spirit does for believers in Christ.

The names of God, then, are tied not just to who He is but how He acts, and thus they reveal how we relate to Him as creatures. When God tells Moses that He is “I AM,” He is referencing His a se nature—His utter independence and self-existence. As a creature hearing that name, Moses learns that he is derivative, dependent on God for his every breath. This revelation—as it should—brings Moses to fear and worship. The name reveals how Moses is to respond to the one who bears it.

Names of Creatures

What Bavinck has stated about the names of God can be applied analogously to God’s creatures. Names identify beings and make them knowable, and they reveal how we are to relate to them.

Throughout Scripture, names tell us something very important about who a person is or will be. This is evident in God’s renaming of certain people in the Bible, such as Abram and Jacob. God says to Abram, “No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations” (Gen 17:5). Abraham’s new name points to who he will become. In Gen 32, Jacob is renamed “Israel,” meaning “he who strives with God,” because he strove with God and with men and prevailed (Gen 32:28). Jacob’s new name, like Abraham’s, reflects who he now is.

All this is not to say that our names today are as transparent as those we find in Scripture. In fact, we would be hard-pressed to find a name today that is etymologically tied to the person bearing it. Rather, it is to say that names cannot be separated from their bearers as if names themselves have no meaning. They certainly are not treated this way in Scripture. Even if names do not reveal the actual nature or character of the thing they are attached to, they still allow us to identify a person or thing and interact appropriately.

What Juliet Meant

So, what did Juliet mean by her words about the name of a rose? She didn’t mean that names are arbitrary and that Romeo can simply cast his aside without consequence. Here’s what I think she meant: Juliet, like Shakespeare, would have known, at least intuitively, that names are important and that they are bound up with their bearers. They identify people and things, making them knowable and revealing how we are to interact with them. Because of this, Juliet would be frustrated by pure, detached nominalization. She is a Capulet, and Romeo is a Montague. These titles alone—considered in isolation from their particular bearers—are keeping them from being together. A name in isolation from its bearer is restricting her actions. This, to her, is madness—as it should be. It is not that names themselves are of little value, but that names are vapid when viewed in isolation from the unique creatures who bear them. Names are connected to their bearers and have meaning and status derived from those whom they identify. That is why Jesus’ name is above all other names (Phil 2:9). All that Jesus has done, is doing, and will do, all that He is, places His title above any other name. He reveals Himself in His name, making Himself knowable, and thus showing us how we are to respond to Him. There is a clear connection between Christ and His name—“a connection . . . rooted in that bearer.” 

Conclusion

We can’t say that names are irrelevant; we don’t even act as if they are. We know that a name identifies a unique creature, distinguishing it from others, and that it tells us how we are to interact with the creature who bears it. I will not turn around if someone runs down the street, calling, “Jim! Jim!” That’s not my name. Someone wishing to interact with me must use my name, the name that is bound to me as a particular creature made in God’s image.

So, let us return to Juliet. What’s in a name? A bearer. That’s what’s in a name. A rose called by another name would still smell as sweet, but we would have altered our reference to the bearer, and thus affected how we identify it and how we interact with it. Names are not superficial strings of phonemes. They stamp their bearers with particular identities—identities that cannot be torn from their names without confusion or misguided engagement resulting. As it turns out, it’s better that Romeo didn’t “doff” his name. Had he done so, Juliet would have, quite literally, fallen for someone else.

Twenty-one years. If you or I live to be sixty-five years old, we will have spent nearly one third of our lives staring at screens—computers, televisions, tablets, cell phones, etc.^[1] If you’re gracious enough to read through this post, adding a few more minutes to your life’s tally, I hope you’ll emerge a more critical user of screens and of media in general. This, I admit, is no small task. To be a critical user of media takes constant practice and attention, for to assess what is closest to us—objects and devices felicitous with our routine—seems to run counter to the routine itself: we insult the comfort of ignorant iteration when we cross-examine its effects on other parts of our lives. We are not in the practice of examining an ordinary and familiar action, and that’s what keeps it ordinary and familiar. With screens, as with any medium, we are bound to meet harmful effects of this ignorance unless we turn to Scripture to guide our use and understanding of a particular medium.

Media: Evasive Influences

Before we get to using media critically, we need to understand what a medium is. For our purposes, a medium is anything used to achieve a desired end. What we need to notice is that whenever we use a piece of technology (i.e., a medium)—whether it be a fork, a pencil, a car, clothing, a computer, or a television—it affects (1) our abilities and perceptions, and, because of this, (2) it affects how we engage with the world in which we live.

Now, human bodies are one of God’s most amazing creations. They adapt so efficiently to a medium that we seldom notice what is happening. Before we learned to hold a pencil, our fingers did not “know” how to position themselves to grip and angle a thin, six-inch rod. Now we pick up pencils without a shadow of a thought. We have adapted to the medium, and because we have adapted, our abilities and perceptions have changed.

This is, in part, what media theorists have tried to explain to people: media “act on us” just as much as we act on them. Take the pencil, for example. It appears that we simply write words down on a piece of paper, and that’s it; this is simply all the pencil does. In fact, a pencil allows internal, abstract ideas to be made external and concrete. I can think about how I am awed by seeing a red-tailed hawk perched atop a telephone pole, biding his time and dreaming of field mice, but the pencil, along with the medium of language, allows me to represent that awe outside of my mind so that others can view and respond to it. The pencil combats the mantra that “the mind is a prison”; it provides me with a key, so to speak, with which I can unlock my thoughts and feelings and share them with others. Because a pencil draws out abstract things from our minds and places them outside of us, we may feel frustrated when we cannot manifest these feelings or thoughts within the bounds of the medium. If you have ever felt frustrated by this, welcome to the wonderful world of writing. Shakespeare and John Milton suffered from the same problem, though perhaps they did a better job than you or I at disguising it.

So, the pencil “acts on us” just as all other media do; they change us in the two ways mentioned above: in our abilities and perceptions, and in affecting our engagement with the world around us—our expectations, frustrations, and desires.

The Effects of Screens

We must ask, then, in what ways does the screen medium “act on us”? This question is all the more exigent for Christians because Christian revelation (Scripture) is “disclosed by the word.”^[2] As a medium, language is relational, just as God is relational. In fact, “the Trinitarian character of God is the deepest starting point for understanding language.”^[3] God related to Himself with words even before creation, using what we might think of as an inter-Trinitarian tongue.^[4] As His creatures, our relationships are the fruit of spoken and written words. If language is a medium based in the Trinity, if it was used to create all things (Gen 1) and to restore all things (Christ is the Word of God), then shouldn’t we engage carefully and critically with a medium that tends to marginalize written and spoken words by bringing images to the fore of every communicative act and “screening” us from authentic engagement with people in our immediate environment?^[5] I should hope so.

Here are three ways in which screens “act on us.” First, if we imagine screens as virtual windows, they affect us by allowing us to remove ourselves cognitively from any environment by looking into virtual spaces. We may be physically present in a living room when we are watching ESPN, but our minds are elsewhere. True enough, paintings and pictures have acted as “windows” throughout history, but nothing so enthralling as the light-based screen medium has so easily drawn our minds into virtual spaces. Screens act on us by giving us access to other worlds—times, places, fictions, etc.

Second, screens act on us by encouraging immediacy. There is no sub-medium within screens (television, movies, web browsing) that fosters patience in us. Just think of how frustrated you were the last time you tried to load a webpage and waited more than a few seconds. This immediacy disseminates to other areas of our lives; it becomes ingrained in our pattern of expectation to the point where we expect immediacy from other people and from God. The time and patience fostered by language have in some ways corroded since the introduction of screen technology. While the screen may answer our demand for immediacy, it has potential to downplay our need for language-based communion—both with each other and with God. Screens act on us by fueling an already expansive desire for immediacy and efficiency that has the potential to short-circuit our relationships—relationships formed, sustained, and nurtured by spoken and written words.

Third, screens work on us by allowing us to be detached and isolated and yet at the same time to feel connected. One of the reasons why we feel detached is that when we use screens it becomes impossible to be wholly invested in one environment—either the environment around us or the virtual environment made available by the screen. One author suggests that when we are surrounded by screens, we are easily fragmented, torn between two “spaces” and yet effectively not a part of either one of them. She argues that

the computer screen’s new connective possibilities further a tension between being ‘both here and there’ . . . and being ‘neither here nor there’—being overcome by so many screen-reliant spaces as to be effectively prevented from being consciously present in any of them.^[6]

In our attempt to be in more than one place at the same time, we end up being “neither here nor there.” So, screens act on us by creating a tension between multiple environments, one physical and the other virtual.

Of course, these effects can be mitigated if we are critical users of screen-based media. But what does this look like? How can we be users of screen media in a way that is biblically prescribed? We have to start by keeping spoken and written language primary in our daily activities, both because language is relational and essential to us as creatures and also because we have always needed God’s Word in order to see the world correctly. We must know how to see the world aright before we can redemptively employ a medium that caters to our eyes.

Through the Ears to the Eyes

We’ve always needed revelation to use our eyes properly. Though after the fall, “we grow in understanding reliably only when the Bible has a central role in dissipating the cobwebs of sin,”^[7] even before the fall we needed special revelation to see the world aright. Van Til writes that “even in Paradise man was never meant to study nature by means of observation and experiment without connection with positive supernatural thought communication given him by God.”^[8] He continues, “If even in Paradise man was meant to interpret nature in terms of self, and both in the light of the supernatural communication of God’s thoughts with respect to the course of history as a whole, how much the more should man as sinner seek to understand nature in relation to self and to this self as interpreted in Scripture.”^[9]

We have always needed God’s special revelation because without it we are bound to interpret the world incorrectly. This was the case before the fall, and, to a far greater degree, is the case now, for “man’s eye and ear and all his senses have been greatly weakened through the effects of sin.”^[10] This weakening means that we not only see poorly, but we have become even more confused as to how to use the sense of sight as creatures of God.

The initial confusion came in Genesis 3 when Eve attempted to use her sight in isolation from God’s word. Eve’s eyes did not in themselves deceive her; there was not an irresistible optical appeal to the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She was drawn into deceit not by sight but by language—the words of the serpent suggested she could operate outside of God’s instruction.

The most important teaching concerning the medium of human sight in Genesis 3 is that sight involves more than just the eyes. In fact, the proclamation of the psalmist in Ps 19:8 speaks to the heart of the fall: “the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.” God’s commandment, His Word, is what enlightens our eyes, not any act that we can commit in feigned independence from Him. Adam and Eve needed some guidance, some verbal command of God in order to see properly. It is when they exchange this command for the words of the serpent that their vision becomes obstructed; their doubt of God’s words functioned as a wall blocking their peripheral vision. They saw only what was before them (the forbidden fruit, on which they now focused because of their allegiance to the serpent’s words) rather than what was all around them (the rest of God’s provision). If our depraved sense of sight has longed for pictures without reference to God’s Word, our renewed sense of sight in Christ re-sounds the original call for our eyes to be used in subordination to that Word.

Processing this fact in light of screen technology suggests that we must be careful to hold Scripture’s prerogatives ahead of the world’s. When the world demands efficiency—even at the cost of fellowship—God’s Word demands relationship. When the world tries to engage us with shallow, emotional messages, God’s Word teaches patience, coherence, and deep meaning related by the most trustworthy speaker. It is only when God’s Word is viewed as primary in our engagement with a medium that we will use that medium in a way that complements the redemptive work of the gospel.

I leave you with two simple points: (1) we need to be conscious of the effects of the screen medium because some of these affects negatively influence our position as relational creatures of God; (2) we need to go through God’s Word to see anything clearly, for His Word was always meant to be in a governing position over our senses. Given these two imperatives, we need to ask ourselves continually how our abilities and perceptions are being changed by screens and how they are shaping the way in which we engage with the world. For Christians, these questions must be followed by another: are these perceptions of and engagements with the world biblically prescribed? We might ask, more specifically, is God’s chosen medium of language being shouldered out of the way by our fascination with images and virtual spaces?

In short, for Christians, what we see on a screen is not what we get. What we see is a message (often pictorial), delivered by a messenger and delivered through a medium. To focus only on the message is to forget how critical means are to an end and how the character of the messenger has a bearing on the truth of the message. What we see needs to be checked by what we’ve heard through God’s Word. We see through what He has spoken in order to see clearly what He has made. When we trust a screen-mediated message uncritically, we risk making a mistake that is hauntingly similar to that of Eve in Genesis 3.

Works Cited

Notes

[1] Brian Stelter, “8 Hours a Day Spent on Screens, Study Finds,” New York Times, March 26, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/business/media/27adco.html (accessed September 15, 2011).

[2] John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2010), 15; emphasis added.

[3] Verb Sheridan Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 17.

[4] This is inference based on the plural cohortative verb נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה (naʿᵃśeh) in Gen 1:26. Some have argued that this is a “plural of majesty,” but I find this argument unconvincing. Given the canonical teaching that God is relational and triune, it makes perfect sense for God to commune with Himself in making a creature after His own image and likeness.

[5] This is not to say that images do not communicate. This is obviously not true. Think of how efficiently a green light communicates to you as you drive down the street. Kenneth Pike makes a helpful distinction between verbal and non-verbal behavior. Non-verbal behavior (e.g., dancing, the flashing of a traffic light—which is a kind of behavior, given that man has devised it) still communicates a message, but that message must be supplemented by verbal or written explanation. It is this verbal and written part of language that tends to be marginalized by screen technology, which presents images with an immediacy that is not possible with verbal or written language, the latter being linear and coherent, the former being readily received by emotions and ingrained perceptions. See Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, 2^nd rev. ed. (Paris: Mouton, 1967), 26–27.

[6] Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 79.

[7] Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 47.

[8] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, ed. William Edgar, 2^nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007), 126. See also 128 and 132.

[9] Ibid., 151.

[10] Ibid., 163.