Incarnational language

The most pressing language issue for me in worship today is not that of "inclusive language," but whether we will have any language, language in its root sense, based on that lowly human organ, the tongue. Incarnational language, in the sense that it considers the body -- the sound and mouth-feel of words -- as well as the ideas they convey.

George Orwell, whose coinage of the word "doublespeak" makes him a prophet of 20th-century language, realized that our propensity for disincarnating language is a ubiquitous as our tendency to make idols of anything we value. An excerpt from his essay "Politics and the English Language" might serve as an example of incarnational language and its opposite. He gives us Ecclesiastes 9:11 in the King James Version:

I saw under the sun, that the race is

nor to the swift, nor the battle to

the strong, neither yet bread to the

wise, nor yet riches to men of

understanding, nor yet favor to men

of skill; but time and chance

happeneth to them all.

Orwell then offers a mid-20th century translation:

Objective considerations of

contemporary phenomena compel the

conclusion that success and failure

in competitive activities exhibits no

tendency to be commensurate with

innate capacity, but that a

considerable element of the unpredictable

must invariably be taken into

account.

This is the sort of hot air that is all too familiar to us as the jargon of bu-reaucracies and the professions. I have also encountered it in worship, in a prayer billed as a call to confession which began: "Our communication with Jesus tends to be too infrequent to experience the transformation in our lives You want us to have." It seemed less a prayer than a memo from one professional to another.

At a Presbyterian conference, I attended what was termed a "focus group" on education and worship. Several people lamented that Presbyterian worship is so much "in the head." This was discussed for a time, and I mentioned the value of having people visit other types of worship services. Our leader, a pastor, interrupted the story I was telling to ask sharply, "Do you mean worship resources?" "No," I replied, somewhat startled, "I mean the experience of worship," and she rolled her eyes as if I'd said something foolish. Soon I realized that she was anxious to steer us to our real business: listing recommendations regarding "resources and facilitators," "team building," "identifying early adapters," "religious components" along with "experiential sharing components," and of course, "how to run effective meetings." It was a language I did not know -- resoundingly clerical, not readily identifiable with the things of this world. Which is where, it seems to me, the incarnation of Jesus Christ would have us look for the language we use.

Incarnational language might be defined as ordinary words that resonate with the senses as they aim for the stars. This language goes against the modern tendency toward abstraction. For example, in Isaiah 40:6, the KJV gives us one of the great lines of poetry in English -- "All flesh is grass." This line of verse has spoken volumes both to poets and to illiterate people since the 17th century. Like many other passages from the KJV, it has entered literate and English idiom. Of the modern Bible translations I have consulted, only Oxford retains "all flesh is grass." The rest make a sorry litany:

All men are like grass (New International Version)

All mankind is grass (New American Bible)

All people are grass (New Revised Standard Version)

All humanity is grass (New Jerusalem)

The Good News Bible demotes the metaphor to a simile (and makes an ugly mouthful) with "All mankind is like the grass."

As the Psalms are ancient poetry, which tends toward the concrete and physical rather than the abstract, I suspected that the word being translated here, the "flesh" of the KJV, would correspond most closely to the literal meaning of the Hebrew. When I asked a Hebrew scholar about this, he told me that the word was basar, meaning meat, something one easts. He said that the word in this context also would refer to human beings. This make my point rather well: in the late 20th century, when referring to human beings, we prefer abstraction. But poets now, and poets thousands of years ago, choose the more physical word, the one with broader metaphorical resonance.

None of the translations cited above match the poetic intensity, the mouth-feel and alliterative ear-pleasure of "all flesh is grass." The short-change people who wish in the words of Colossians 3:1" to "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom" (KJV). In other words, incarnational language.

COPYRIGHT 1997 The Christian Century Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning