In this impassioned episode, Rev. Deborah and Elizabeth discuss their love and exploration of language. They talk about the cultural differences in how they approach language, and the challenges of translation and interpretation.
Transcript
Transcription provided by automated service.
[00:03] Rev. Deborah Duguid-May (DDM): Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
[00:09] Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe (MET): And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
[00:11] DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy and action. So Elizabeth, I thought it would be amazing to do an episode on language. And I’ll tell you why. Because the other day on Facebook, the Aramaic form of the Lord’s Prayer, which is translated by Neil Douglas Klotz, was circulating on Facebook. And some people were reposting and absolutely loved it and found it so helpful, and others in the comment section absolutely hated it.
[01:11] DDM: And 1 of the biggest reasons was because it was not the Lord’s prayer that they knew, and so they felt it was not, and I’m putting in inverted commas, biblical. And I was fascinated by this discussion just happening on this Facebook post that was circulating and it got me thinking, How did an English translation of the Lord’s Prayer that’s not even actually well translated, how did that become the biblical version and the actual Aramaic form that was the language Jesus actually spoke the Lord’s Prayer in, became seen as unbiblical. Like if you think about it, isn’t that crazy?
[01:55] DDM: And so here’s the issue for me. The whole of our Scripture is about language. It’s through language that we learn about God. It’s through language that often we communicate back to God. Language is so central to our relationship with God. But The problem is that the language of the Bible was not English, it wasn’t Spanish, it’s not Latin, it’s not even predominantly Greek. It’s ancient Hebrew, which is not the same as modern Hebrew in the Old Testament, and then it’s Aramaic and an everyday form of Greek in the New Testament. So to understand what the Bible actually says to us we have to rely on scholars of those ancient languages and secondly translators who can then translate them into our language, whether that’s English, Zulu, Russian, whatever.
[02:56] DDM: Now scholarship of ancient languages is always improving because as they discover more scrolls or even secular documents at the same time, they can then correlate these words, see how these words were used in other shapes and forms and contexts. And So in some ways, when we have a Bible, our translation of our Bible should be reflecting the newest scholarship around whatever those particular words or phrases meant. But that’s often not the case. Often we’re using scriptures that actually were from biblical scholars from like decades ago. And then the other problem is that our translations that we have into say English for instance, they are so affected by our own cultural attitudes towards gender, towards race, towards sexuality, towards a hundred thousand things.
[03:59] DDM: And so some of these translations are simply incorrect because of our own biases. So it’s not just that we’re wanting the most accurate translation available, but we also need ones that are really working in some ways very consciously to not shape their translation by our own cultural lenses and viewpoints and trying to keep our translations more in line with actually the biblical worldview.
[04:31] MET: Okay. When you first said you wanted to do an episode on language, I was so pumped. So, if you don’t know about my history at this point, I have 2 degrees in English and 1 in communication. So, language is probably one of the top three things I am thinking about all the time. Like, you can ask my producer, like, it’s probably not healthy. In fact, so when we were talking about this, I got interested in something the other day and I looked up something that speaks to this. Supposedly, you can’t read in dreams. Okay, whatever.
[05:14] MET: But I have read in my dreams many times. Sometimes it’s really challenging or slow and arduous, and I have woken myself up, because I’m struggling with words. But there are times when I have read whole pages or sometimes in really weird dreams subtitles. So I looked this up, why can I read in dreams? And apparently there is a small percentage of people, I mean small, like 1, maybe 2% of the population that can read in their dreams. People like writers and poets, but people who think about language and words a lot. And it isn’t just how they communicate, but it is a part of our lives.
[05:53] MET: People who are immersed in words and our lives revolve around them can sometimes read in dreams. It’s not just a matter of, oh, I read and write a lot. It’s like, because a lot of people read and write a lot. It is a very small part of the population that is intimately engaged with words and language so that it drives us, it shapes us. We think about words and how they work and why. It’s not just choosing the right word at the right time. It’s about crafting your life this way. So I say that because I want you to know that is how intimately connected I am to words and language.
[06:29] MET: So if I get maybe a little bit too excited about this episode. I need you to understand this is a way of life for me. But as we talked about this and as we got ready for this episode, I thought I should indicate, like, I might be part of the problem here when you’re talking about kind of Western versions of language and translation, etc., because my approach to communicating is very Western-centric. I know this, and I tell my students this, and we have to acknowledge this in classrooms. But I wanted to talk about how there are reasons for this.
[07:14] MET: I am specifically Western-centric when I talk about language because I’m a rhetorician, and rhetoric is a 100% Western idea.
[07:24] DDM: That’s so interesting.
[07:25] MET: Yeah, I want to explain that a little bit so you can kind of understand where I’m coming from and then we can talk about like language kind of overall. But I want to give you a little bit of insight into this like specifically Western approach that I come from and then we can broaden out from there. But for example, the first graduate thesis I advised was about the idea of rhetoric in China, and half of the paper was about how this notion of rhetoric as we understand it just doesn’t exist outside of the West. Now, we can argue all day about whether that is because of geography or context or whether rhetoric is just inherently exclusive.
[08:05] MET: And I actually think there are good arguments for all of those. But some of it is just kind of the nature of the beast in terms of its development. And I’m not going to give you a lecture on this weird esoteric subject. I’m just explaining why my perspective is the way it is. But rhetoric was developed about 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece, specifically around Athens. And the particular point I want to make is that rhetoric was developed at the same time in the same place and sometimes by the same people as democracy. I won’t go into the whys and wherefores of it all, but if you know much about either rhetoric or democracy, that actually makes sense because democracy runs on persuasion.
[08:48] MET: Rhetoric is only useful if people are in a position to have a choice to make a decision between options. So, to be persuaded, if you will. So, this thing that I study and talk about all the time, rhetoric and democracy, go hand in hand. They don’t really exist without each other in this kind of Western perspective. So the way this all comes together for me when we talk about language is that we use language to move and shape the world around us. Language isn’t just transactional, right? It creates narratives, it’s constitutive, that just means it creates us, or at least who we are, and it in many ways powers our world, right?
[09:29] MET: You’re talking about that’s how we know God, it’s not just a spiritual thing, right? It has impact in so many ways. There are whole theorists in my field who argue that truth and reality don’t exist without it. We might talk about that later. So to say I’m invested in this is pretty lightly. But as I said, this is a very Western perspective because we’re talking about how language can be used to grow and even heal democracy. And these are pretty lofty ideas. And honestly, they may even be moot at this point. At the same time, 1 of the things that is particularly powerful, rhetorically speaking, is narrative.
[10:10] MET: And I could go on and on about people like Walter Fisher and Kenneth Burke and all these people that there’s no reason for you to have heard of who wrote about the importance of narrative or drama or whatever. And the thing about those is that they transcend cultural boundaries, right? Like narrative is important.
[10:28] DDM: Absolutely.
[10:29] MET: Whoever you are, wherever you go. Now, originally my field was very Greek and very Roman and very organized and very classical.
[10:36] DDM: Hence, Persephone the cat.
[10:39] MET: You should know I have a cat named Persephone and we can talk about why she’s named that, but she’s adorable and everybody should love her.
[10:45] DDM: And I, who had no Greek training, called her “Persa-phone.”
[10:50] MET: Absolutely. But since we’ve moved on from the Greeks and the Romans, things have gotten, I don’t want to say messier, but it has gotten less traditional, less rigid. And as we think about things like narrative and identification, we start to consider not just public speaking, but whether things like folktales or music or any of those other things are rhetorical. So we’ve opened up the field and started to think about just, is this a proper way to build an argument? But this is powerful. How and why? And those are different questions. And that’s a much more apropos question for approaching something like scripture as opposed to just like the State of the Union Address or whatever.
[11:33] MET: So it also gets to some of that slippage that comes from translation issues. For example, you could speak to this way better than I could, but I know throughout the Bible there are many times in the original where it talks about a man and a woman doing something, but when it’s translated to English, the words husband and wife were used. I’m not pointing to specific verses because it happens so often. On the 1 hand, that may not seem like much of a difference. On the other hand, this is a huge difference, because that’s putting some cultural baggage on those verses that weren’t there to begin with.
[12:09] MET: And it’s creating this narrative of biblical marriage that people have used for generations just to beat down women and the LGBTQIA population until they’re really just a shell of what they could have been. These are translation issues. They’re just small words that really can create whole cultural shifts.
[12:28] DDM: Absolutely. I mean, the words we use matter. And you know, you touched on this a little bit with the husband and wife issue, but you know, it’s, for example, we have instances in scripture where the actual name of a person was feminine, And they would change that in their translation to a masculine name. Because when they read the feminine name, they said to themselves, but hang on, this can’t be because only men were in leadership, so this must be a grammatical error. And so they changed the name to a masculine name.
[13:02] MET: Yeah, of course.
[13:03] DDM: Yeah, you know, but I mean, that’s an incredible. And, you know, again, you know, you said the husband and wife issue, but in the Old Testament, there’s so many places when the text actually is referring to a temple prostitute, to temple prostitution, and when the translators saw that, they changed it to homosexuality instead of temple prostitution.
[13:28] MET: Really?
[13:28] DDM: And so a lot of biblical stances against homosexuality were fueled, of course, by these translations. And then in the New Testament, instead of translating concepts like paedophilia, which is sexual acts with a minor, When these words appear, once again they translated them to homosexuality. So that again fueled that whole comparison of homosexuality and pedophilia that we now have in society. I mean, if we go back to the husband and wife issue, the entire headship argument of men in marriage is based on a mistranslation. The word kephale actually comes from the source of a river. So the scripture was saying just as Christ was the source or the spring of life for the church, so man was the, and generic man, was the source from which Eve emerged, right?
[14:28] DDM: Had nothing to do with power or with authority. It was about this word source. But again, poor translation. We’ve ended up with this authoritarian headship model. And so I think really we need a lot more energy to be invested in developing far better translations of our texts and scriptures for our ordinary everyday common people to have access to.
[14:54] MET: That is fascinating.
[14:55] DDM: Yeah, because I mean your average person sitting in the pew or sitting at home is not going to be studying these, you know, going back to the ancient Hebrew or Greek words. It’s just probably not going to happen. But unfortunately, I also think it’s more complex than that, because you speak about rhetoric being such a Western concept. Well, in the Western world, we value accuracy, right? And so language has become so precise that it’s almost like a science. You know, we search for the right word to describe most accurately what we are trying to say.
[15:31] DDM: And so English has become a precise but also a literal language. And so we read the Bible paying attention to precise words and interpreting them literally. The problem we have when we come to scripture is that Middle Eastern languages were not precise languages. In fact, you might even say Middle Eastern languages still are not precise languages and they never wanted them to be. If English has thousands of words, Middle Eastern languages ironically actually have far less words. But their words instead of going broad and wide in terms of number, their words go deep. Now what do I mean by that?
[16:20] DDM: So Middle Eastern Semitic languages work from what is called roots. So you will have a root three-letter word from Which many other words, almost like a family of words, stem. But they’re all related to that root. So you can use a particular word, but anybody within that cultural framework knows, by its root, how it relates to all these other words. So for instance, the word for salvation comes from the root for wholeness. So what that means is that you cannot therefore understand salvation outside of the concept of wholeness. So words form patterns that relate to 1 another.
[17:06] DDM: No word ever stands on its own. But unless you know the root of that word and therefore know what words it relates to, you wouldn’t know how to translate that word within the body of those other words.
[17:22] MET: Interesting.
[17:23] DDM: Isn’t it? It’s a completely different way to understand language and to understand words. It’s also said that you really don’t understand a Middle Eastern word or phrase unless you’ve discovered at least seven layers of meaning. And so words were almost like throwing a stone into a pond and that word would ripple out into different ripples, each unique but related to the original stone that fell into the pond, right? So if we take, for instance, the Lord’s Prayer, spoken by Jesus in Aramaic. We simply have in the beginning, our father, right? But it’s nothing like that in the Aramaic.
[18:07] DDM: So in the beginning, our father is in heaven. It’s Abwoon d’bwashmaya. Ab refers to all fruit, all germination of seeds and life, everything that comes from this original source of unity. So it’s the very life forms that are emanating or coming from who God is. Ab, from which we will get Abba or Abun, Ab has nothing to do with gender, with mother or father or daddy as people commonly say, right?
[18:42] MET: I hate that.
[18:43] DDM: Oh my god, I mean it’s like where did we get these, right? Ab has much more to do with this cosmic birthing from that which is good, that which is the source and unity of all that is, right? And the rest of that word, “abwoon,” right, for which we say our father, “abwoon,” if you actually say that word with your mouth, like “woon,” “woon,” right, it refers to the sound that the air makes as we make that word. So it’s the flow of spirit coming from God. It is the flow of blessing of oneness. And then as it goes “wooN,” the “N” is when it’s taking material form.
[19:32] DDM: Like in Christianity, we say when it’s becoming incarnated, when that spirit takes physical form. And for all of that that I’ve just said, we say our father, Right? Can you see how inadequate that translation is? And also how misleading it is? But also how poor it is. Now, let’s be honest. The Our Father means a lot to a lot of people. Because it’s the 1 prayer that children have been taught from the time they’re tiny and it’s probably 1 of the last prayers they’ll say in their lives right? So we know people love the Our Father.
[20:10] DDM: It means so much to them. But is it biblical? Well it’s a very poor translation in our English of a far deeper and richer concept. And what we’ve done is really stripped it down to a gendered, individual, personal name for God. So I don’t know, like, I mean, maybe we’re not making anything easier for anybody, but this is where translation does become so difficult. And that’s also why I think that clergy should be doing a much better job of really studying what the original words and phrases used are and what the best scholars and translators are now saying about these.
[20:58] DDM: Because if we do a better job of teaching, We end up, I think, with much better, richer theology and an understanding of God and our own faith.
[21:11] MET: Okay. That is fascinating, and I’m going to be thinking about it forever. 1 thing I want to, I’m gonna, it’s a Western thing, but I’m gonna, I think I’m gonna bring this home a little bit and show specifically how language affects us as a society in ways that are clear outside of translation as well. Because it’s easy to point to translation issues as example of how words have created slippage, especially cross-culturally. But I wanna point out how even in the context of just the West, we have to understand that words shift and change. Because I think it’s really important to understand how this isn’t just like, oh, kind of this esoteric out there, translation matters, like this matters to us in the local.
[22:10] MET: Those shifts don’t just mean we talk differently, we behave differently. So there’s this philosopher theorist guy who wrote about the history of madness. Now that in and of itself seems kind of macabre, I guess, but it’s actually pretty pertinent to all of this. Now there’s a problem with the word madness to begin with.
[22:30] DDM: Any woman knows this.
[22:33] MET: Problematic word. But what this guy says is that people haven’t changed that much even if the word has. And what I mean by that is madness for all the problematic things implies has changed over the centuries, but the people haven’t. So the people who are afflicted with madness are actually the same throughout history. People have the same problems with the same illnesses and a lot of the same traumas in many different times and places, but what we have called madness has changed drastically. So 100 years ago, somebody with PTSD or postpartum depression syndrome or even extreme ADHD might be labeled as mad and institutionalized.
[23:20] MET: Now we recognize that these are treatable things and we help these people and they are generally okay, right? Like these are functioning members of society. But we think about that word madness. The diseases haven’t changed. The people haven’t changed. But our definition and our relationship to that word has changed. And that has real repercussions for people’s lives. People gain and lose their freedom based on how we define that word. And depending on when and where you live, The definition of that word can be the difference between a life on your own, living at home, or a life of institutionalized torment.
[24:07] MET: Right, 100, 150 years ago, you were mad, and mad people got put away. Now, you are anxious, and you take a pill, and you go to therapy, and you are a productive member of society. Mad means something very different now. That’s a word that is used to discipline us as people. It keeps us in line. And in the past, it was much more disciplinary. And I think this is a telling example because in 1 sense, it is very separate from what Reverend Deborah is talking about, because she’s getting at the way language slips from culture to culture and how we take a very Western approach to translation and language.
[24:47] MET: But what I’m telling you is even if that you stay in 1 language, even if you are just a 100% Western centric, English speaking, an I don’t care about anyone but me kind of person, You have to acknowledge that language affects how you live your life. We are made by the things we say. Well, you know, that’s the concept I’ve devoted my life to anyway. I don’t know.
[25:13] DDM: Absolutely, but it’s so true. Absolutely. I mean, I mean, language definitely shapes how we understand ourselves. You know, how we understand our gender, how we understand our relationships, how we understand our faith, and even how we understand God. I mean, I don’t think any of us can say that there is anything that is not shaped by language. But what that means is that we really need to pay more attention to what we are saying, how we are saying things, what we actually mean, and maybe what those words now mean. But I also think, and when it comes to faith, it means we need to be a lot more humble in what we think the Bible says.
[25:59] DDM: Because unfortunately, in many case, it’s not what it says. And I think being a lot more humble about our faith might be a good place to start.
[26:10] MET: I am going to jump right in with something that just seems so wild, but I’m actually going to take us back in time. I’m going to tell you about some of the first people to really think about how language affects us in kind of a philosophical sense, I guess. There were these people called the Sophists. This is like 2,500 years ago. We’re talking a long time ago. They were some of the first rhetoricians, but they do have some ideas that I think play into this conversation. So I’m not gonna give you a lecture on the Sophists, though I really think you’d enjoy it.
[26:50] MET: They were wild, like crazy hair, crazy clothes, they got thrown out of places a lot, golden statues, like there’s a whole narrative I could give you that is wildly entertaining. But I do want to tell you a little bit about their ideas about truth. The Sophists believed in an idea called Kairos. Now, As we are talking about it now, Kairos doesn’t necessarily translate perfectly, which sort of fits into what we’ve been talking about all this time. But the way I’m asking us to think about it for today is the idea that truth is made in the moment.
[27:35] MET: At that time you had Plato doing his thing and he hated the Sophists. Plato was a capital T truth kind of guy. He believed in transcendent truths that really couldn’t be questioned. They were not contingent on anything on this earth. No real word on what those truths were a lot of the time, but that’s neither here nor there. There was a lot we could say about Plato, to be honest. One, Christianity borrows a lot from Plato, like a lot. Early Christianity is not surprisingly influenced quite a bit by Rome, and Plato is one of the aspects of Rome that they borrow most heavily from.
[28:18] MET: And the reason I bring this up is because if you’re going to talk about translation and cultural issues, you have to acknowledge that our religion is moving around culturally a lot. You know, We have the religion of the Hebrew people, and a branch of that eventually became Christianity. But it was kind of a mishmash of Judaism and Platonic and Greek thinking. So the cultural and philosophical touchstones kind of become hard to pin down sometimes. I’m sure Reverend Deborah could talk extensively about all that. We can make four or five episodes on it one of these days.
[28:55] MET: Plus, when you take Platonic thinking to its natural end, you get things like fascism, which should give you pause when you think about the connections between Rome and Christianity, but that’s another four or five episodes someday. So, Plato thought the Sophists were dangerous because they taught this concept of kairos, which was pretty much the opposite of those big T truth ideas. Truth, according to the Sophists, is the best thing at that moment. So you create truth using the best ideas in that context at that time truth happens. And that’s a pretty powerful position because it means A, truth is contextual and contingent, and B, people are truth makers.
[29:41] MET: And the reason I even bring this up is because for the Sophists, this happens via language. The truth was basically what you convinced people of. So language wasn’t just pretty, it wasn’t just style and poetics, it was the means by which you created the truths that governed your life. I bring all of this up to point out that these notions about language being a powerful force in the world, a force that moves and shapes us, like really changes the world, these ideas are not new. We tend to think of things like language is truth and language is reality as these sort of newfangled postmodern ideas, but this actually goes back thousands of years.
[30:20] DDM: No, absolutely. And you know, if language was how you created the truths that governed your life, I think the biblical worldview was a little different. And when I say the biblical world view, I just want to clarify, because you were speaking a lot about Christianity borrowing from Rome, and that’s when we start to see really the development of the New Testament in Paul’s period, right? So kind of after the Gospels, you start to see a lot more of that integration of Rome and empire and that kind of thought. When I’m speaking about the biblical worldview, I think I’m very much more speaking about the ancient Hebraic worldview.
[31:04] MET: Absolutely.
[31:05] DDM: And then also the Aramaic, Galilean grassroots people from which Jesus emerges, right? And so I think it was a little different for them, largely because it was such an agrarian society. And so, I mean, we dealt with how words are used very differently in those contexts, But it wasn’t so much words that governed their lives or shaped their lives. It was the seasons. It was the soil. It was the cycles of life and birth and death, not just for humans, but for their livestock. Right? And so in many ways, the biblical world, we underestimate what a physical world it was.
[31:55] DDM: And listen, Elizabeth and I are going to be doing an episode on the body coming up and I think we’ll go more into this, but the biblical world was a very physical world. Truth was that seeds fell and reproduced plants, that small seeds could produce huge trees that would shade birds. Truth was that light was needed, especially in the dark, to be able to see and find what you need. For them, truth was that without a shepherd, the flocks would scatter and be eaten. And I think what we’ve done is we’ve kind of reduced Jesus’ teachings very often to these intellectual concepts of thought.
[32:40] DDM: But actually, Jesus’ teaching was very rooted in the earth and in the truths or realities that emerged from the earth and from the body and from cycles of life and death. And I wonder if we would see scriptures in a different way if we started to really reconnect with the earth, with our own bodies. If we started to listen to the earth and our bodies and other species’ bodies in the same way as we listen to our our minds and our thoughts, and I wonder then maybe what words might emerge.
[33:18] MET: So I think you make some really great points. And especially I think it’s fascinating to think about how Christianity comes to us, right? Because you’re talking about how, the culture of the faith started in this agrarian society, but then we think how it comes to us through a kind of Greco-Roman, like Paul was a word guy and a military guy. And Paul is-
[33:46] DDM: Law, he was trained in the law.
[33:47] MET: Yes. And that’s how Christianity gets filtered down to us. So, like, the topic at hand could not be more essential, right? Okay. So, I’m gonna do something that you may not be very excited about, but I promise I can make it all come together. I’m going to talk philosophy for a second. You had to know this was coming, right? We’re all here, this is who we are now. There are about a jillion theorists and philosophers I could talk about when it comes to the power of language. I could talk about sign, signifier, blah, blah, blah.
[34:24] MET: I could talk about reference, narrative paradigms, but I know good and well, you don’t want any of that. But I am going to do something you may not be expecting, so just bear with me. I’m going to talk about Nietzsche. Okay, we can laugh about that, right? That’s weird. And I know a lot of Christians are really uncomfortable with Nietzsche. Like maybe it’s the whole God is dead thing or there’s no truth, right? That’s problematic. I can see how either one of those positions could make people of faith uncomfortable. But I want to talk about one of his more foundational claims that allowed him to make these kind of big conceptual things.
[35:08] MET: So I want to talk about metaphors. Nietzsche wrote, and this idea was picked up later, that all words are metaphors, which at the most basic level is true. So for example, if you hear the word table or see the letters T-A-B-L-E, You probably think of a platform with legs that you can put things on. But why? Why is that thing a table? What is inherently “tabley” about it? What is “tableness?” Is there such a thing as “table-ocity?” Right? Like, obviously that is ridiculous, right? There’s that thing, and for whatever reason, it is called table. Honestly, there’s no inherent connection between the sounds we make with our mouths, the keystrokes that produce the image, or the thing we are referring to.
[36:05] MET: We have just kind of decided that is a table and so it is. Now, obviously, there’s a whole history to the etymology of words. It is much more complicated than that. But conceptually, the example serves its purpose. There is a sound and an image and a thing, and the only reason they are all the same is because we say they are. That is what is meant by words are metaphors. Words don’t inherently mean much, except for things like onomatopoeias. Words are just symbols for other things. A table is easy. We can point to a table and say, that’s a table.
[36:45] MET: But what if the metaphor is more complicated? What if it’s something like justice or fairness? Truth? We can see how this becomes complicated quickly. And the thing about metaphors is they require interpretation. Metaphors are by their very nature symbolic. So what this means is every time we communicate, every single time, we are involved in interpreting metaphors.
[37:17] DDM: Even when we’re in our own language, we are constantly interpreting.
[37:21] MET: That is what that means.
[37:22] DDM: It’s not just interpreting a foreign language.
[37:24] MET: Every time we’re communicating with somebody, we are interpreting some kind of symbol. Consider that level of complexity. If you want to say something, you have to figure out which tapestry of metaphors most closely approximates your meaning. And if I am to understand you, I have to interpret those metaphors as you have intended them, even though I come from a completely different context.
[37:47] DDM: And isn’t that the problem we’re facing in our society today, Elizabeth? It’s where people are using words, but we’re interpreting them in such radically different ways.
[37:57] MET: That’s what my degree is in! Yeah. So you see how things like interpretation and cultural paradigms make that even more wild, right? If words are metaphors, then you have to think of them as culturally specific metaphors and metaphors that link differently depending on time and place and language. So, even somebody as Western-centric as me can see very quickly that trying to read something from a non-Western culture in English that has probably been through a few linguistic shifts along the way isn’t just picking and choosing words. You are literally recasting metaphors and trying to take the symbol of one culture and change them into the symbol of another.
[38:37] MET: The metaphors of Hebrew and Aramaic aren’t the same as Latin, Greek, or English. So our understanding of the language and honestly the culture literally doesn’t easily translate. So actually that’s how Nietzsche gets to the whole there’s no truth thing because the truth is just how we organize metaphors.
[38:57] DDM: It’s very interesting if I can just add here that Jesus when he deals with it he locates it in relationship where he says I am the truth.
[39:07] MET: Yeah.
[39:07] DDM: You know, the way the truth of life. And I just always think that’s interesting, where it’s not just a heads concept, it’s like come into relationship with me and discover truth together, you know?
[39:17] MET: Okay, So how does all this atheistic philosophy help me understand my faith? Okay. We know I grew up thinking of the Bible as something that was holy, but not just holy, something that really couldn’t be questioned. But as I grew up and I started to understand the world around me, it’s not that I started to question the Bible, it’s that I started to think about it more fully, not as black and white words on a page with no history or context, but as a fully fleshed out text with the same depth and veracity as any text I studied in school.
[39:55] MET: And I started to understand that the Bible is scripture, myth, history, and literature all at once, which is a much richer text than what I was led to believe. And that’s actually how this particular philosophy has helped me with my faith. If I think about a word as a metaphor, then I know that some original author, be they somebody who spoke a story into being or even wrote it on a piece of parchment, had a particular symbol in mind. That symbol had to be understood in their context, and that includes their culture, their time, and their geography.
[40:29] MET: And Even then, it is still a symbol, so it has to be interpreted to be understood. What I have is a translation, which means somebody at some point said, well, this symbol is a close approximation for this other symbol. So good enough. Not only has the meaning changed, it has been lifted out of that context which gave original listeners or readers the ability to interpret that symbol. So for me, to claim that I have some monopoly on scripture is just kind of silly to be honest.
[41:02] DDM: Yeah, yeah. And you know, when you were talking there, it got me thinking about Islam. You know, you can read the Quran in English, but that is not how it’s supposed to be done. If you become Muslim, you learn Arabic and you recite the Quran in Arabic because they don’t want these issues of language translation. But of course, it’s again, what are we signifying? So that was a lot. That was a lot. Where do I start? So truth. There are many things, as you say, that we claim are truths, but I really do love what I was saying a little bit earlier, where Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
[41:46] DDM: Jesus was obviously not a concept and so the understanding in that verse is that we discover truth within relationship. And I think that’s so important. You know, what does it mean to locate any of these things always within the web of relationships in which we live, and obviously specifically within our relationship with Jesus or with God. So, truth, I think, within the Scriptures really should not just be some propositional statement or fact, but something that we discover through our relationship with God, but also, I would say, through our relationships with each other and in creation.
[42:30] DDM: And so, maybe truth is something that actually requires relationship. And if it requires relationship, it requires therefore a specific context, specific people, a specific time period, a specific culture. I’m really myself not sure that truth can ever be found outside of specific lives and context because it’s so enmeshed in the discovery in our own human actual lives. But I’d loved your thinking around metaphor because in many ways that’s precisely what we are speaking of when we spoke of Semitic languages stemming from a root and then spiraling out from there because it is, it’s this rich, dynamic, creative, constantly in a way new way of using language but it doesn’t make translation easy in the least.
[43:23] DDM: But it does raise how hard it is to translate a Middle Eastern gospel when we do not really know, understand, and live within that culture. Just as it would be so hard for a Westerner to understand an African praise song without really knowing the language, culture, symbols, and ways of communicating particular to that group of people within Africa. And that’s why I think we have so much Misunderstanding but also false assumptions about each other and our faith.
[43:54] MET: Oh, yeah for sure Okay, well friends we got a little heady on you. But obviously, this topic is near and dear to our hearts. And if you want to email one of us, we will gladly send you a thesis length discussion on whatever you want to know about language, because I really feel like Reverend Deborah and I could go on forever.
[44:26] DDM: I think Elizabeth will respond to you.
[44:29] MET: Oh my gosh. I mean, it’s just, like, it’s just so important to us.
[44:34] DDM: Well, it’s crucial. I think it’s crucial. It’s really crucial because it’s the, what is that thing they say when it’s the elephant in the room? You know, we’re using words all the time, but we’re actually sometimes doing a really bad job at communicating because we’re not on the same wavelength in terms of how we understand these words or how we understand the words in scripture, you know?
[44:55] MET: Yeah, so, you know, it’s just, it’s so important. And, you know, I hope we didn’t get lost in the weeds for you here, but gosh, it was so exciting for us. So we have a lot of thoughts and some are clear and connecting and some are individual to our own perspectives, but that’s appropriate for a discussion on language because language is an individualized thing. You know, I wanted to make this last comment because I was really fascinated by something Reverend Deborah said about the difference between the way English works with thousands of words and Middle Eastern languages work with fewer words but deeper meaning.
[45:40] MET: And this speaks to the way I use language. I want to give an example of how that difference plays out. My students and family kind of give me a hard time because they’re like, oh, you use such big words. I don’t use big words, I use the right word. And I know, I have an extensive vocabulary, when you read as much as I do, that happens. But for me, it’s not about using an impressive word. It’s about finding the exact right word that I want to use at that moment. And I was thinking about why that is so important to me, and I realized it is because that is my way of asserting my agency.
[46:34] MET: If I can, in that moment, say, this is exactly what I mean, this is precisely what I want to say, like I am exacting control over that situation. I am asserting what I want, who I am. When I can say precisely what I want and like this is exactly what I mean There’s not any question like And that doesn’t mean everybody understands what I mean. There can be interpretive questions. But when I say precisely what I mean, I am asserting control over my environment. And when you were talking about the difference in languages, I was like, That’s exactly what it is right there.
[47:19] MET: Anyway, so that was my final comment, but I want to hear what you have to say about that.
[47:22] DDM: I think that’s so interesting. You may pick this up as Elizabeth and I have these conversations, is that our approach to language is wildly different. Because if that’s Elizabeth’s perspective, me coming from Africa, which is a much more oral culture and a not as precise a culture, when I use words, I’m painting a picture, and I want you to feel. So my wife gets crazy, because she’ll ask me, how many people were there? And I want to communicate there were lots of people. So I’ll say like 300. And then somebody will say, no, there was like actually 246.
[48:00] DDM: And I’m like, are you being serious? You know, because we’re not always using language precisely. It’s like we want to convey the feeling and the emotion, you know? And so it’s a much more evocative way of using language. So if at times on this podcast, I do not use the precise word, the accurate word, please just rather listen to me and paint pictures in the sky with me and feel what I’m saying, rather than necessarily hearing the accuracy.
[48:32] MET: That’s so fascinating. Okay, so I want to leave you with a few questions then. How do you know what other people mean? How do you know what a text means? How do you communicate your ideas clearly? And what does all this mean for your life of faith?
[48:55] DDM: Beautiful.
[48:56] MET: And we’ll leave you with those questions. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
[49:32] DDM: Music by Audionautix.com
