LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Is Your Language for God’s Glory or Yours?
A Paper Submitted to
the Faculty of the School of Divinity
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Education in Christian Leadership (Ed. D) Department of Christian Leadership and
Church Ministries
By
Mary Gracias
Lynchburg, Virginia
9/2022
Is Your Language for God’s Glory or Yours?
There are sins and temptations available in the parts of the dictionary that the man on the
street—Tyndale’s plowboy—doesn’t frequent.
One is arrogance. I was that kid, the annoying and pretentious spelling-bee champion
who purposefully read the dictionary to learn words that would make other people feel dumb.
Don’t do that. The tongue is a “world of iniquity,” and linguistic ostentation is a sin of which it’s
well capable.
Another is eloquence, or rather trusting it. Paul addresses this problem in his first letter to
the troubled Corinthian church: “I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to
you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom” (1 Cor. 2:1).
But as many have pointed out, the Bible is full of eloquence, and so are the Pauline
letters. Biblical poetry is deep; biblical narrative art is subtle; there are literary devices galore on
Scripture’s every page. The problem isn’t using literary art but trusting it—and, I’d add, using it
with the wrong audience.
Our words are an offering to others, or at least they’re supposed to be. They’re a service.
We must ask ourselves repeatedly: Will my audience know this word? Will they know this thing?
It might’ve been 10 years since you last asked yourself (or a discerning friend) if your
language is truly suited to your audience. Maybe now’s a good time for a decennial
performance review.
Distinguish Between Words and Things
Also helpful here is distinguishing words from the things they point to. Obviously, tree
(English) and arbol (Spanish) point to the same “thing,” the same concept. There is no
necessary relationship between sign and signified. Each language has different conventions for
relating particular signs to particular things in the real world.
Keeping this distinction in mind will help you suit your words to your audience.
Words
The word “decennial” provides a good example. The thing—the concept—isn’t hard to
understand: it means something that happens every 10 years. Decennial is just a highfalutin
way of saying it. It’s in a higher social register of English; understanding it gives you
membership at a certain level of the “educated” club. If someone doesn’t understand
“decennial,” it’s the word and not the concept that’s causing the difficulty.
Biblical-theological words like propitiation and justification are the same. I don’t think it’s
hard to understand appeasing or satisfying the wrath of a deity, or receiving a not-guilty verdict
from a judge. Just toss a good word picture into your Bible teaching and people will get the
concept. I always think of God’s wrath “abiding” over the wicked (John 3:36) like the dark cloud
above the head of a cartoon character. Every sin increases the size and darkness of the cloud,
and one day it’ll burst. Christ propitiated the Father’s wrath by standing for me in the
courtroom and letting that cloud burst on his own shoulders. The concepts are accessible; it’s
the words that are hard, because they are rare.
Gifted Bible teachers who love the truth and love their neighbors will find ways to
connect people’s knowledge of certain things with their conventional biblical labels.
Things
The word quixotic, by contrast, provides an example of a thing, a concept that isn’t
commonly known among plowboys. Quixotic means “naively idealistic and impractical like Don
Quixote.” But Quixote isn’t well known to the average American. Teachers using the word
“quixotic” will have to explain the thing it points to, or they will fail to edify.
“Mandrakes” is a biblical word. Like “quixotic,” it’s a word that points to a thing your
hearers likely won’t know. Mandrakes show up in the biblical story twice: once during the story
of Rachel and Leah in Genesis 30 and once in the love poetry of Song of Songs (Song 7:13).
American suburbanites will know neither what mandrakes are nor what role they played in the
Ancient Near East.
Some of this can be picked up from context. Mandrakes were clearly considered to be
promoters of fertility. (And Songs of Songs adds that they’re “fragrant.”) But in order to teach
Genesis 30 to others, good Bible teachers will have to illuminate the word by explaining the
thing.
What’s a Sheol? Same problem. In fact, the word Sheol—used in multiple other English
Bible translations—is possibly a bit of a cop-out, indicating that translators themselves aren’t
confident about what the thing called a Sheol is. So they don’t translate—they transliterate (the
Hebrew word is לֹואְׁש [sheol]). Good Bible teachers will pick up on this and explain the thing so
people can be edified by the word.
