Clanging Symbols

Maybe you remember this from 1st Corinthians.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal (1 Cor 13:1).

No, I didn't mispell "cymbal" in the title (although I did misspell "mispell" there -- were you paying attention?) I'm not talking here about speaking in tongues. I'm talking about the symbol of words.

Words, you see, are not real. Words are symbols for things. Words are the tools we use to communicate thoughts and reality. They are symbols of a shared concept that we can use to transmit ideas. Here, let's see if I can explain clearly. If I were to go to, say, a farm in Russia and talk to a farmhand there, we would both be using words, but neither of us would understand the other. You see, words have to have a common concept for them to be significant. The words I used connected with reality in my heads, but not the same reality as his. In order for words to mean something, they have to share the idea in both heads. Conversely, thinking there is a shared reality can be just as confusing. Here, a silly example. Say I don't know what antipasto is. So someone says, "Antipasto?" Now, not knowing the word, I figure I can decipher it from what I know. So, let's see ... "anti" means "against" and "pasto" is apparently a reference to pasta, so I tell him "No" because I'm not against pasta. Of course, he was offering me an Italian dish of meats and vegetables and such. So I thought there was a shared understanding and answered accordingly, but I was wrong. And communication failed ... again.

As it turns out, our world is full of this "failure to communicate". We're full of these "clanging symbols". We're talking at each other and we even think we're getting across what we intend, but we are actually speaking different languages. We speak of "love" as if it has a shared meaning while all along we know that it means one thing regarding food and another regarding a mother and another regarding a spouse and ... well, lots of things. But we use it and assume we're all on the same page. We debate marriage while we mean radically different things by the term, but no one is noticing because, after all, we're using the same symbol.

Next is the evolution of language. "Make love to me" meant something different in 1940 than it did in 1970, but you'll miss that if you're not paying attention. One author assured us that we need to be in a sexual relationship with God. "Where in the world do you come up with that?" the protests came. "Well," she said, "the Bible says we are to love God, and that's sex, isn't it? And surely you agree that we are to know God ... in a biblical sense, right? And even Jonathan Edwards wrote about intercourse with God. So, clearly I'm in the right!" Sigh! Two people separated by a common language. All kinds of evolution of language going on there. "Love", "know", "intercourse" ... it's a mess. (And why is it that so many words and phrases have evolved to mean "sex"?) Not paying attention to how language evolves produces a failure to communicate -- clanging symbols.

Then we lapse into specialized language. We know, for instance, that we are justified by faith. By that we mean that we are declared righteous by God as a result of faith. So, what did Jesus mean when He said, "Wisdom is justified by all her children" (Luke 7:35)? That's a different use of the term -- a more common use. "Justified" means "right", and wisdom is demonstrated to be right by the results. But "justified" is just going to throw us off because of the specialized language I call Christianese. So when Paul says that Abraham was justified by faith apart from works and James says he was not justified by faith, but by works, those who are not paying attention will sit around and scratch their heads. Maybe they'll cry "Foul!" and call it a contradiction. Maybe they'll ignore one ("So, you see, works have nothing to do with it!") or the other ("There, see?! We are saved by works!"). But it takes someone paying attention to language and context to figure out that Paul is talking about coming to a faith that saves and justifies and James is talking about a faith that is demonstrated to be real ("justifies") because it produces works. Same word, different meanings. Clanging symbols.

We here in the late 20th century and early 21st century have decided not to bother with the effort. Here, let's try this! Let's declare that people who believe God's Word about homosexual behavior being a sin are haters! That ought to solve that problem. Not with truth, but with rhetoric. Clanging symbols. Let's say that the ones who believe the historical, longstanding, traditional, biblical definition of marriage are narrow-minded, hateful bigots. That remedies that problem, not because it's true, but because the language will turn people to our position without the truth. Clanging symbols. And we Christians ... we often don't do much better. We'll use handy little catch phrases like "feminazis" and "libtards" and "demokrats" to point out that our opponents aren't merely wrong; they're evil. This may, in fact, be true, but we don't do it with words -- valid, reasoned arguments explaining why and how. We do it with clanging symbols.

I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the inflammatory rhetoric that bypasses all discussion and aims at simply burning the opposition to the ground. I'm tired of the abuse of the language in casual conversation that ends up annihilating key issues like marriage, morality, love, sin, the Gospel. I'm tired of the noise (on both sides) that refuses to address the issues and, sadly, to speak the truth in love. But, I suppose, that's to be expected. Our "clanging symbols" for "truth" and "love" don't mean much anymore, do they? So what would I expect? I would expect that Christians, taught by the Holy Spirit to "all truth" (John 16:13) and led by a God of love (1 John 4:7, 19), would know better. How about you? Are you a fan of clanging symbols?