THE POWER OF METAPHOR

'Metaphors are hard.

To discover similarities, to find connections once unseen, comprises some of the holiest work we can do as human beings, for it is a work of reconciliation. But this truth also entails the obverse: making wrong connections can be as dangerous as attaching the wrong cable clamp to the wrong battery terminal.'

Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination: How stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, p.49. 

GOOD LANGUAGE CREATES

'It is the very nature of language to form rather than inform. When language is personal, which it is at its best, it reveals; and revelation is always formative - we don't know more, we become more. Our best users of language, poets and lovers and children and saints, use words to make - make intimacies, make character, make beauty, make goodness, make truth.'

Eugene H Peterson, Eat this Book: a conversation in the art of spiritual reading, p.24.

THE LIMITATIONS OF LANGUAGE WHEN SPEAKING OF GOD

'We have got so beyond those things for which language was initially contrived, that, unless we use extreme caution, we cannot speak, unless we speak exceeding unintelligibly, without literally contradicting ourselves - Coroll. No wonder therefore, that the high and abstract mysteries of the Deity, the prime and most abstract of all beings, imply so many seeming contradictions.' 

Jonathan Edwards in Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.89. 

LANGUAGE & GOD

'Whatever else may be true of human language, it is quite reasonable to suppose that it has the ability to speak truly of God, both because it was given to us by a God who speaks within himself as eternally three speaking persons, and also because our possession of language as made in God's image, is analogous to God's communicative capacity. Our language can be made by God to speak truthfully of him because our language has its origin in him and in some ways is like his own. The fall makes this much more problematic, of course, but sin does not erase humanity as the image of God, and thus does not destroy the capacity of human language to speak truly of God.' 

Timothy Ward, Words of Life: Scripture as the living and active word of God, p.34. 

CHRISTIAN UNITY

'Remember that genuine experience of Christ has generated several different theological languages during the church's history. Because of human limitations and the grandeur of the subject, no single language has been adequate to convey this. Reporters on Christian experience who describe it in a language strange to us may only be viewing the same thing from another perspective. We need to listen with care and sensitivity for the distinctive notes of true Christianity expressed in unfamiliar patterns.' 

Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, p.20.   

MARRIAGE

'Marriage As Process, not a state of wedded bliss (or, less thinkably, a slough of shattered dreams) but a sustained negotiatry association between two creatures who speak, at best, only pidgin versions of each other's language. I'm not referring here to theoretical linguistic differentiation according to gender, race, class, age, and so on; I have in mind the even more profound idiolectical differences that render each of us (except perhaps identical twins) capable of only the roughest sense of what on earth any other, no matter how beloved, is talking about, "I know exactly what you mean," we tend to say, trying through sympathy and good will to deny the slippage along the fault lines between us, the way we drift together and apart but never merge, our radical insular grief. To be honest, at least half the time I, for one, don't know exactly what I mean, much less what you mean. If I tell you I do, you will expect from me something I can never give: an end to never being alone. Better I should tell you I know approximately what you mean. No, not even that. Better I should shut up.'

Nancy Mairs, Ordinary Time, p.114.

USING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

'1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.'

George Orwell, 'Politics and the Englsih Langauage'. Available at: www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

CAUSE & EFFECT

'...an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.'

George Orwell, 'Politics and the English Language'. Available at: www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

LANGUAGE

'If the ministers of England had sinned only in Latin, I would have made shift to admonish them in Latin, or else said nothing to them. But if they will sin in English, they must hear of it English.'

Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, p.38.

LANGUAGE

'Traditionally the hallowed language of religion is designed to mystify, to intimidate, to incriminate, to overwhelm, and to induce a mood of guilt and moral peril. A recognized trait of religions is encouraging a superstitious tendency in their followers to like best what they understand least. That made sincerity in the religious life an elusive commodity.

In his plain use of religious discourse, however, Jesus departed radically from that tradition.'

Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West, p.100.

LANGUAGE

'...language is truthful, not when the meaning attached to the words by the speaker, but when the meaning intended to be produced in the mind of the particular person addressed, is in accordance with the facts.'

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p.112.

WORDS

'It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "the social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognised by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.91.