Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

language

A Response to Overnaming

bread and wine photoIn this four-part series, I aim to think about one particular aspect of language: naming. In the introduction, I preliminarily addressed the root of the problem, the Fall. In the second post, I argued the “knowledge of good and evil” we gained at the Fall became the way we separate ourselves from God. We never gained this knowledge as if it was information about good and evil. We instead changed our relationship with naming.

Here I want to begin to think through a general response. In the fourth, we will tackle particular academic responses. [Read more…] about A Response to Overnaming

An Introduction to Naming

Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious . David Dark (InterVarsity Press, 2016).
Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious . David Dark (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016).

Recently the Emerging Scholars Network posted a quote from David Dark’s new book Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016):

When I label people, I no longer have to deal with them thoughtfully. I no longer have to feel overwhelmed by their complexity, the lives they live, the dreams they have. I know exactly where they are inside—or forever outside—my field of care, because they’ve been taken care of. The mystery of their existence has been solved and filed away before I’ve had a chance to be moved by them or even begun to catch a glimpse of who they might be. They’ve been neutralized. There’s hardly any action quite so undemanding, so utterly unimaginative, as the affixing of a label. It’s the costliest of mental shortcuts.

[Read more…] about An Introduction to Naming

Communication for Communion, Part 4 (Scholar’s Call)

Bible Communication for CommunionDavid Parry wraps up his Scholar’s Call series on Communication for Communion. Find Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. 

Part 4: Communication and Communion

It is a mistake to see language as purely instrumental in the sense of being just to convey information or to get things done. Some aspects of verbal communication don’t have any particular conceptual content to them – rather they are there to form or to maintain a connection between persons. For instance, “How are you?” is not primarily a request for information but a means of forging contact with another human being, as is asking about the weather, at least in Britain. Likewise, utterances such as “Mmm … yeah … uh huh” and so on that indicate that one is still listening are a means of maintaining human contact. [Read more…] about Communication for Communion, Part 4 (Scholar’s Call)

Communication for Communion, Part 3: Babel and Pentecost (Scholar’s Call)

C_DayofPentecost-mediumLast 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)