The World Speaks!

Consider the paragraph below by Steve Talbot alongside: John 1:1-3 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. and Psalm 19:1-3: The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.

The intimate relation between the meaning of our words and the meaning we find in the world may be so obvious as to seem almost trivial, yet its implications are so profound as to have mostly escaped the notice of working scientists. If we took the fact of the world’s speech seriously — the world speaks! — there would be none of the usual talk about a mechanistic and deterministic science, about a cold, soulless universe, or about an unavoidable conflict between science and the spirit. Confronting the many voices of nature, we would inquire about their individual qualities and character, we would look for the direction of their expressive striving, and we would struggle to grasp the aesthetic unity of their various utterances — all of which is to say: we would listen for their meanings. The necessity for such inquiry is implicit in a world that speaks and also in the scientist’s employment of speech to translate the world-text. This turning a deaf ear to a resonant world and even to our own speech accounts for many of the limitations and contradictions of the science we have today.

~ Steve Talbot, “The Language of Nature” in The New Atlantis (Winter 2007), 42.

A Call to Delight Ourselves in Language

“We must . . . counter the postmodern despair of language with Christian delight, and the main reason we can delight in language is that we believe language is God-given (and hence reliable), and that we believe there is something beyond language to which our poems, our propositions and our prayers all point: the reality of the Creator and the created order.”

~ Kevin J. Vanhoozer, First Theology (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 33.

On the Meaning of Words and the Existence of God

“Skeptical theorists have observed that the very words truth, justice, freedom, responsibility, and many others cannot be uttered without implying the existence of One who underwrites their meaning. Contending that such a One does not exist, such theorists have insisted that we must put all such words — indeed, all words — in inverted commas. ‘Truth,’ ‘justice,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘responsibility,’ so the argument goes, are empty or, at best, only convenient fictions. They are simply verbal tools that have been used and are still being used in the interests of those in positions of power.”

~ Craig Gay, Dialogue, Catalogue & Monologue (Vancouver, Canada: Regent College Publishing, 2008), 44.

Dialogue & Spirituality

“Language is the medium within which the distinctively human form of life is possible. Our words lift us out of the immediacy of natural, instinctual existence and create space for us to move intelligently and intentionally in a meaningful world. Our words situate us in time and in space, making it possible for us to muse upon our past as well as to project ourselves into the future. Even more basically, the little I, you, and we enable us to become conscious of ourselves as responsible and personal agents. As we address each other in words and speech, owning up to our words before each other, we are enabled to enter into friendship and fellowship. The medium of spirituality, which is to say spirited and ‘responsible’ existence, in short is dialogue. Through dialogue we are enabled to love God, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to care for the world.”

~ Craig M. Gay, Dialogue, Catalogue & Monologue (Vancouver, Canada: Regent College Publishing, 2008), 36.

The Word that Upholds the World

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:1-3).

He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power (Hebrews 1:3). 

“The Scriptures tell us that the stability and reliability of the created order as a whole are not qualities that are somehow built into it as much as they stem from the fact that the creation was freely spoken into existence by a God whose words ’stand fast’ because of his faithfulness; that is, because God has determined to own up to his words.”

~ Craig M. Gay, Dialogue, Catalogue & Monologue (Vancouver, Canada: Regent College Publishing, 2008), 34.