Last week’s post discussed the quest for the Adamic language in the early modern period, understood as a language in which words correspond exactly to the things they represent. This post is Part 3 of a series. See Part 2 here and Part 1 here.
But was there ever a language in which the totality of a thing in its essence was communicated fully in words? James K.A. Smith, a Christian philosopher at Calvin College, says no. In his book The Fall of Interpretation, Smith argues that human beings were never intended to grasp the totality of the world instantaneously and without mediation – that the need to engage the world through thoughts and signs that grasp the world only partially is not a consequence of our fallenness but of our finitude; that God creates us not to know everything in the way that he knows everything but continually to learn, to grow, and to discover in ways that are appropriate to our status as finite creatures.1 [Read more…] about Communication for Communion, Part 3: Babel and Pentecost (Scholar’s Call)